@Harem_Sovereign "superior & chosen", no, some people are just fine with an average run of the mill story and development, when you've began to appreciate the complexity and variety of some other stories, you find the former quite boring.
I don't remember sounding as condescending as you're painting me as, even after reading myself again.
It's a fact that a good part of readers, especially recently because of the new popularity of the genre and the recent new reader base (we all started somewhere), content themselves with some wish-fulfillment seen in some average isekai. It's like everything, once you get more experience in this kind of reading (or reading, overall), you'll start noticing what are the average elements you find again and again and again, thanks to that you'll also notice what makes some stories more interesting than others. Sometimes you can luckily stumble upon a gem, like everyone.
You're not "chosen" and you don't have "superior taste", you just develop some kind of expectations after keeping up piles of stories in the back of your head, especially when the market is absolutely saturated and overflows with more than you could ever read even if you dedicated your life to it.
Does having expectations makes me condescending, superior or chosen in your eyes ? Because the market is flooded with stories with themes that registers a hit to some who usually don't read, new readers are overflowing on the market too, they don't have high expectations and don't expect something good, they just expect some enjoyment out of it and like most form of enjoyment nowadays, it's "take and throw away once you're done with it". I could list a scroll's worth of series I'll always remember but most isekais will never make it there, and I'm sure that if you picked some (average) isekai someone read two months ago, they'll have forgotten most of the details, names, plot lines (if there's anything beside "beating the boss/returning to my world"), etc. Why am I sure of it ? Because that's a daily occurrence you can see on any Discord/reddit/channel/IRL talk/etc, usually it's part of a discussion but just pick a random isekai, ask if someone has read it and ask them details (in real time, of course) about it, things they remember the most about it.
Do you think a
story without any world-building, character development, good story line (often this means a non-linear one) starts off better than something that has all of this ? Don't tick me off by picking that one exception please, we're talking about the flood of average things, not that one or two good gems that managed to make it through one way or another.