Isekaied People Are Undead and Can Be Turned

[beep_repair]

This occurred to me while reading NEW WORLD BUILDERS...

Undead are usually reanimated corpses, i.e. formerly living bodies. They typically exist without souls and sometimes lack even basic sentience. Isekaid people (IPs) seem quite different, in that most are formerly living souls. The soul, spirit, and/or consciousness of an IP has literally died and then gone on to inhabit a new living body in a new world.

But though their bodies are undoubtedly alive, the soul of an IP is quite like a ghost: a formerly living spirit that continues to exist past death in the material world. And ghosts can be "turned" by clerics, priests, paladins and other holy types - at least per D&D rules.

Would be fun to write an isekai about a world in which a flood of isekaid undead "heroes" constantly appear from other worlds (cue truck-kun montage) and must be battled by the god-fearing local residents. A plague of well-intentioned teenage vampires with cheat skills and legendary swords, basically.

 

[Devourer]

cool concept especially making the isekai world battle with heroes instead of the heroes helping them

 

[Angry_Panda]

So, world-native priests vs. almost-samsara. Hummmm. Does this make the Buddha the demon king?

 

[Manko-sensei]

Unless you accept any Japanese non-sense an undead is just an animated body, it's not living nor dead, it has no soul and it's controlled by foul magic (those who wander randomly just lack of a necromancer). They can also be incorporeal, such as ghosts/spirits, or be possessing something/someone. Examples of this can be found in Isekai Ojisan and Rance series. They surely exist already, I simply don't recall the names of the series you're looking for, maybe later. But in contemporary settings, you have for instance Chimidoro Ice-Cream, a yuri ongoing series where the main couple has a zombie in it.
PS: of course, when it comes to spirits depending on the circumstances they can retain their memories/personality and are just waiting to fulfill their unfinishes tasks or be put properly to rest.

 

[Manko-sensei]

I found the one I was looking for, though there are a lot of isekais/fantasy/contemporary fantasy regarding vampires (a special kind of undead), The Best Ending in the World happens to have an undead that's one of the MCs and it has some kind of influence on normal people. But if you're specifically searching for "undead heroes in an isekai", the few I read were so bad I've forgotten them, one of them was about the generic "classroom got teleported" and because the god who did that brought one people that shouldn't have to ended up assigning him a random role and after his reaction cursing into dying or be pursued to be killed in all his reincarnations and capping their skills/magic. The first one is one kind of mutant/undead and gets killed by their former classmates and afterwards he is reincarnated into I think a witch child (or a monstruosity the witch adopted) and this time he's able to avoid dead but goes against the world by himself. As you see my selective memory erased the important part and left the bad taste to never ever give a change to another series akin to this one.