It’s official. You’re not an otaku nerd anymore if you say Isekai but someone with an extensive vocabulary. Don’t let anyone tell you anything else!
Does that mean isekai is a valid scrabble word?
There are Scrabble dictionaries, but they’re mostly for convenience.
The actual rule is that you can use any word that appears in a standard English dictionary, except for suffixes, prefixes, abbreviations, or anything that requires a hyphen, apostrophe, or capital letter.
Katsu, donburi, okonomiyaki…
Now I’m just hungry. Three of my favorites all in one article.
!isekai@ani.social is open! Now not just for weaboo, but also for people of culture! …we’re still a buncha weebz.
What does it mean though? Serious question, I don’t watch animes
Okay, so Fantasy or sci fi with a real world protagonist so to say. Interesting that happens enough to make a sub genre lol
Japanese and Korean media are wayyy beyond saturated with isekai series. I mean just look at this shit: https://isekai.fandom.com/wiki/Isekai_Series
isekai itself isnt any magical new subgenre, it just that the number skyrockete past 2010 so they more or les made it a big thing. it itself is related to portal fantasy in a western sense.
examples of western portal fantasies include titles like the chronicles of Narnia, Wizard of Oz, and Harry Potter and such.
I noticed they studiously avoided using the phrase “light novel”.
I just tried, and they don’t have a definition for that phrase.
The best match that the OED came up with was “railway novel” defined as:
railway novel, n. A light novel, typically in a cheap edition, suitable for reading on a railway journey.
As the other users have mentioned, its a genre about going to another world, and its real big in Japan right now, but you’re definitely familiar with it in some form.
After all, The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe is technically Isekai.
Its actually really fun to look back and figure out what classic things are.
“Isekai” is “another world”. Everything else is debatable.
Some are rather strict on isekai being a trope: the protagonist of the work is transported or reincarnated into another world. Some however see it as a genre, defined by the presence of the trope and potentially additional factors (such as resemblance to other isekai works).
