I once wrote a post speculating on the causes behind the rise of isekai and how the evolution of Japanese anime reflects societal changes in Japanese society beginning from its economic boom of the 1980s, but I’m not sure if it holds up in 2025-2026. Since I’m unfamiliar with otome-type isekai that is targeted to a female audience, I omitted it from my post. Anyway, here’s the main text:
You ever notice how most modern manga/anime releases are isekai or LitRPG slop? That isn’t random, and it isn’t just “bad writing.” It reflects who the audience is and what kind of society they’re living in.
The core consumer base is overwhelmingly struggling, isolated Japanese men in their 20s–30s (and increasingly older), often single, often overworked, often priced out of meaningful adulthood in one of the most expensive urban environments on earth. Many of them peaked socially in high school, before rent, career stagnation, and demographic collapse set in. Their main leisure activity is gaming — especially Western medieval fantasy RPGs — so the fantasy worlds they escape into are already familiar.
That’s why isekai looks the way it does. It isn’t about originality or artistic ambition; it’s about frictionless escapism. These stories let readers imagine themselves transported into a sanitized West European fantasy theme park where their accumulated gaming literacy suddenly becomes power, status, and sexual access. The protagonist can’t really fail, can’t meaningfully struggle, and can’t be morally challenged — because that would defeat the point.
This is also why isekai protagonists are so aggressively generic: They aren’t “protagonists” in the literary sense, as much as the voiceless and character-less player character typical of games like Pokemon Red. The less personality, the easier the self-insert. The less social embeddedness, the easier the exit from real life. These characters aren’t written as humans so much as interfaces.
Are there good isekai? Yes — Digimon, Re:Zero, a handful of others — but they’re exceptions precisely because they violate the unspoken contract of the genre by insisting on consequence, trauma, or actual character development. Most isekai avoids humanity altogether, because humanity introduces risk.
A lot of people blame “shut-in authors with no life experience,” but that’s only half the story. The bigger issue is the ecosystem.
Most isekai originate on web novel platforms that reward speed, familiarity, and recognizability over craft. Editors don’t ask if something is good; they ask if it can be adapted quickly. Readers browse by tags, not prose. Anything that deviates too far from the formula dies before it can accumulate attention.
So you get a self-reinforcing loop:
economic stagnation → exhaustion → demand for escapism → industry doubles down → creative entropy.
This isn’t unique to Japan, but Japan hit this phase earlier and harder.
As for the obsession with the DnD-style or tolkienesque west European medieval fantasy setting typical of the genres, it isn’t just cultural cringe or “worship of the West.” Maybe it is, but it’s actually safer than that.
Fantasy Europe, as used in isekai, is completely hollowed out — no real history, no class struggle, no politics, no ethnicity, no obligations, no icky taboo topics. It’s a neutral container. Japanese settings, by contrast, come with real social hierarchies, shame, memory, and responsibility that only Japanese society can intimately comprehend. Escapism works better when the world is empty enough not to push back. Think of it like how Mark Twain treats the England of the Arthurian Chronicles in his novel “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court” sans the satire and political bite.
This lineage runs straight from Dragon Quest and Zelda through D&D to Tolkien — not Europe as it was, but Europe as an abstracted theme park.
To understand why escapism dominates, you have to understand post-1990s Japan: After the bubble burst, Japan entered decades of stagnation, rising costs, demographic collapse, and near-permanent one-party neoliberal rule. The employment system locked people into work early at the cost of adult freedom. There is no credible mass politics, no labor movement with teeth, no expectation that protest produces change, especially in a society where the work typically relegated to the secret police is outsourced to society at large, creating a social environment that disincentivises dissent in favor of conformism and self-censorship to avoid disrupting societal harmony.
So this isn’t young men “choosing escapism over resistance.” It’s that there is no plausible route to collective agency. When exits are blocked, people fantasize about leaving the world entirely, whether it’s mass-producing escapist slop on an industrial scale or writing fanfic about a different country (looking at you, Chinaboos).
Earlier genres imagined resistance within decay (cyberpunk, mecha). Isekai imagines exit from decay.
The popularity of isekai is thus symptomatic of a country in stasis: a former imperial power that rose from the ashes of WW2 thanks to Uncle Sam’s generous help, only to lose momentum after its economic peak and never found a new social project. Creative output stagnates not entirely because people are stupid or lazy, but because risk is punished and repetition is rewarded.
Think of it like this: In the 1980s, Japan began to experience real wage growth and industrial boom, hence why many of the anime that came out of that era were sci-fi mecha that had more optimism than the original NGE (Neon Genesis Evangelion). But later down the line, as Japan began to siphon it‘s industrial profits into the real estate that was the lead up to the “lost decade”, you begin to see more “deconstructionist” or pessimistic takes on the mecha genre, starting with NGE which was soon followed by various copycats. I can’t omit that the depressive nature of NGE is perhaps influenced not just by the mental state of the staff at Gainax that was behind it, but also by the Tokyo subway sarin attack which occurred less than 9 months before the show was first aired on Japanese TV. The attack would profoundly affect Japanese society not just in terms of public safety discussions, but also in Japanese society’s ability as a collective to shield its individuals from danger. that might explain the heavy focus on the individual and their interpersonal drama in NGE, Voices of a Distant Star, and other such works produced in the 1990s and early 2000s.
But, as time went on, these kind of works eventually led to burnout, and here’s where the explosion of moe and (afterwards) magical school girl shows began in the early 2010s as the focus shifted from interpersonal drama to escapism that wasn’t necessarily isekai, but still provided an escape of sorts in the form of main cast forming an ersatz family and living through their shenanigans, or just cute and inoffensive stuff. But this also provided the breeding ground for the modern isekai genre that has overwhelmed the Japanese animation and comic industries as I elaborated in the previous paragraphs.
Now, where does this lead us? As the population continues to age, I suspect the genre will bifurcate:
•either toward slower, melancholic fantasy aimed at aging otaku (Frieren-style),
•or toward increasingly internationalized, culturally flattened content designed to survive declining domestic markets.
Neither path guarantees artistic renewal.
In short, isekai isn’t just bad writing. It’s a mirror. A mirror of a society that can’t imagine transformation and hence ends up mass-producing fantasies of painless escape — until even that starts to wear thin. Can’t escape into another world to avoid paying your rents and taxes after all, eh.
This might age like milk. Or it might just describe a phase before something uglier or stranger replaces it. The future is unpredictable after all, so anything could happen in our volatile present.