In this book, I will try to answer why most modern isekai are trash specifically designed to "deceive" you. By deception, I mean a way to make manga and anime using psychology as a weapon by targeting human "in-built" emotional triggers. "Why is it bad?" someone might ask.
It's bad because it will kill the genre in the end. It's already on the road where this mass-produced trash will be exploited until the last bit of value is extracted. If I give you a cake every time you want to eat one, you'll start hating them.
What is the way of doing this?
I call it the "Template of Successful Isekai."
I will try to describe how the modern anime industry uses these tricks of deception. It's very interesting and insightful. By the way, not only anime uses these techniques. Successful LitRPG writers do it as well. Their template for success is even more straightforward. If we look at this "template" as some sort of cooking recipe, it will be like this:
INGREDIENTS: Protagonist's Must-Have Features
The Setup: The protagonist is typically a high schooler, an orphan, and lives alone, sometimes with a sister (younger sister only) or is pseudo-living alone (parents are overseas or work somewhere for long periods of time). The protagonist is often doing "Arubaito"—a part-time job. A less common variant is living with a stepmother or stepfather.
It's almost a standard setup for a vast majority of manga and anime. What is the goal of such standardization?
Goal 1: Empathy (The First Trap) People sympathize with orphans. Our society considers them unlucky. So we immediately start liking them or at least empathizing with the victims of the life lottery. It's the first trap intentionally created to get you "involved."
Goal 2: Responsibility (The Second Trap) The second trap is that a boy living with a sister must take care of chores, his sister, and so on, as a grown man. Have you ever noticed how grown-ups react when a baby tries to do grown-up tasks? Here is the same psychology. We are deeply touched when a four-year-old girl tries to make dinner and imitates a mom. So we take the next bait.
Part-time jobs serve the same purpose: He must work as an adult and feed his small family.
What about pseudo-living alone? The effect is the same; it's just less profound. Living alone in this regard is not much different. He should take care of all things as well. He is just less sympathetic to us.
The Protagonist's Character
The next feature relates more to the protagonist's character rather than circumstances.
The protagonist should be severely bullied or have bad luck with socializing! This is in addition to his parents' death, of course. It's not necessary, but it will still deepen your empathy. A little extra butter on porridge never hurts!
Some writers are protesting against "good boy" clichés and trying to make a protagonist a delinquent: not a completely evil guy, just a bad boy with foul manners who has grown up in the outskirts or slums. That gives extra bonuses to lure the public, which often complains that the hero or heroine is too kind and is supposedly boring.
Personally, I don't understand that kind of person. Why do they want to read about evil maniacs? Especially if we live in such a dystopian world, full of these evil maniacs ourselves? Hundreds of people are dying at war and suffering at the moment I am writing this. What is that? Some sort of masochism? I want to forget it for a while, not see it in books too. Why on Earth would you want to do that? Go to the therapist if you have such strange impulses.
Sorry, I was carried away. Let's resume our explanations.
After the hooks, we passionately read the next page, expecting that something good will happen to the victim—the high schooler living alone or with his little sister. It will give us some sort of moral orgasm.
to be continued
Zuzuki Sudzuki