originally posted on ace-reviews.tumblr.com on january 26, 2018
They pop up from time to time, but not often enough, and it’s probably at least part of the reason people are so goddamn sick of the genre, so here are a bunch of alternate world settings. And just to show you how easy it is, I will put zero thought into these whatsoever, and just list ’em as they occur to me.
- a sci-fi setting
- a horror setting
- a non-european historical setting
- a historical sci-fi setting
- one of the various -punk settings (steam-, clock-, whatever)
- a modern setting where the only difference is that dogs are cat-sized and cats are dog-sized
- a modern setting where the only difference is that ancient people domesticated bears instead of wolves
- an underwater setting
- an underground setting
- a gag anime
And that’s just a few. I know some of these have been used, but the point is that they’re not J-RPG Anime Fantasyland and need to be used more often. I’m sure if I thought about it I could come up with more, and possibly even a few that are original and/or creative, but the point of this exercise was not to think about it.
Which isn’t to imply that any isekai anime set in J-RPG Anime Fantasyland is automatically bad and devoid of creativity. I like Overlord and love Re:Zero (season two when?), but those are exceptions. Most of the entries in the genre are pretty lazy, and them recycling the same setting over and over, rarely putting any new spin on it, is just part of the laziness.
Also, please take two seconds to Google men’s haircuts before designing your hero.
[ko-fi]
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