Isekai Oversaturation and the Genre's Future
Fiction is often an exercise in the art of escapism, providing distraction from the routines and difficulties of everyday life. The most extreme form of this escapism is a desire to leave this world altogether in search of a more exciting, fantastic life (pun intended). Therefore, tons of stories over time have revolved around characters living in the real world finding themselves entirely different places. Japan developed its own tradition of portal fantasy called isekai, which roughly translates to «other world», and in modern Japanese culture, it's omnipresent. But that wasn't always the case.
Isekai has roots that go back centuries, and elements of it have been present in anime and manga for several decades. It wasn't until the 1990s, however, that isekai became a significant part of the greater fantasy genre, with series like Inuyasha, Magic Knight Rayearth, and Digimon Adventure being popular examples. It was the 2000s, however, that truly set the stage for isekai's eventual dominance. Part of this was due to the aforementioned series, but in reality there was a much bigger culprit: the internet.
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The increasing ubiquity of the internet in the early aughts set in motion two trends which would build the foundations for isekai as we know it today. The first was the massive spike in popularity of MMORPGs, which inspired series like .hack and the web novel version of Sword Art Online. The second was a single website launched in April of 2004: Shosetsuka ni Naro, or «Let's Become a Novelist», often shortened to «Naro». Naro is undisputed hub of free light novel publication in Japan. Users have written and shared nearly a million free novels on the site since its
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