Isekai Can Be Considered Garbage, But There's A Reason For That

What is isekai? If you think about it, it's not a genre, but a premise: the thing that kicks the plot off. And under that huge umbrella isekai compiles a plethora of other different genres. Isekai can be a slice of life, a drama, a harem, a comedy — and because of that diversity, it's hard to say that isekai is inherently bad.

There are farming isekai, dungeon building isekai, town building isekai, alternate WW1 isekai, kingdom management isekai, cooking isekai, otaku isekai. There are so many isekai that at some point their isekainess stops being relevant. Sometimes the fact that the protagonist comes from another world becomes unimportant!

Sure, over the years of its existence, isekai has gathered its identifiable traits that allow the viewer to guess what to expect, but the sheer variety of the actual genres that isekai covers makes this guessing useless. Just like with a high school anime: the only thing that you can say for sure is that characters probably would be spending some of their time in classrooms. You still can't say for sure what they're going to do in said classrooms, or what will happen outside, or what exactly is the thing that would be driving the plot. School is just a setting; we have drama, action, fantasy, sci-fi, romance happening at school. And the same goes for isekai.

Some authors are trying to find ways to spice up this premise, to create characters that are different from the regular stencil that includes an overpowered wimp and a flock of girls of various shapes and sizes surrounding him. Some authors are exploiting different genres that can actually win from the inclusion of isekai premise. Most, however, don't.

So don't blame isekai for being garbage. Blame other genres for that. Blame the authors for using a cheap trick of transporting the character into the other world instead of coming up with something original. Blame the rushed scheduling of anime studios and manga magazines. Blame the executives willing to go the safe way and release things that are popular right now instead of taking risks. Blame other viewers and readers who consume things that you don't like and make those titles look more appealing to the studios. Blame the oversaturated market that relies on isekai, spewing title after title with no cooldown.

But most importantly, just wait. Popularity comes and goes, soon isekai will stop being trendy and we will be bitter about some other thing taking up 70% of the upcoming release schedule.