Why is there so much isekai in top 10 on mangadex’s homepage?

[WhaNskY]

me single-handedly supporting the isekai genre:

Do i think this genre is overrated? Yes. Do i still read isekai also? YES so 🤷

 

[Remocracy]

me single-handedly supporting the isekai genre:

on an unrelated note who made that awful media embed? if I hover over it I get "recommended GIFs". Who wants this?

 

[kingantiluck]

on an unrelated note who made that awful media embed? if I hover over it I get "recommended GIFs". Who wants this?

yeah it's the worst :/

unrelated: why's your reaction score in the negatives? like it shows -214 on my side

 

[OisE]

😭

 

[Excelsior]

Try telling domestic publishers and market probably, no smoke without a fire

good luck with that though

 

[kingantiluck]

unrelated: why's your reaction score in the negatives? like it shows -214 on my side

@Remocracy just saw what happened with your reaction score. glad it seems to have been figured out!! sorry that you had to encounter a meanie

 

[Remocracy]

@Remocracy just saw what happened with your reaction score. glad it seems to have been figured out!! sorry that you had to encounter a meanie

Thanks!

 

[lewd]

Isekai is so pathetic as a writing trope, especially when the main character's previous life has nothing to do with the story and it purely exists as a way to "escape". It always comes off to me as encouraging suicide, "Just kill yourself and you can go to a fantasy world where you're the super most powerfulest and everyone loves you!"

 

[Remocracy]

Isekai is so pathetic as a writing trope, especially when the main character's previous life has nothing to do with the story and it purely exists as a way to "escape". It always comes off to me as encouraging suicide, "Just kill yourself and you can go to a fantasy world where you're the super most powerfulest and everyone loves you!"

I mean I don't blame them when you see salarymen, especially the ones who work in black companies and are essentially equivalent to indentured servants

 

[panzerkampfwagyu]

Isekai certainly suffers from the japenese working cultures problems, though I do wonder how many of the bargain bin authors actually care about it and just recycle the tropes in order to make a most marketable story for easy cash.

Well, most literature is garbage no matter the genre, one simply has to accept that and look for the minority of good ones.

 

[Kaarme]

Haha. While I also think that 50% of isekai is pure waste, 40% is garbage, 8% is one man's trash is another man's treasure, and 2% might have some actual small literary value, the truth is that it's no different for any other genre. Isekai has only really proliferated for a decade. Shoujo romance, for example, has existed for many decades, and most of it is also utter trash and completely forgettable. It's no surprise either, because exactly how many high school romance stories could you write without it becoming 100% repetition? At least in isekai, which is just fantasy, you need to come up with some kind of new world and all kinds of inhabitants and systems in it, no matter how lazily you go about it. In shoujo romance you just take a stereotypic setting loosely based on reality and you are good to go.

This shit sells because people know what they want and know what to expect.

 

[Remocracy]

Haha. While I also think that 50% of isekai is pure waste, 40% is garbage, 8% is one man's trash is another man's treasure, and 2% might have some actual small literary value, the truth is that it's no different for any other genre. Isekai has only really proliferated for a decade. Shoujo romance, for example, has existed for many decades, and most of it is also utter trash and completely forgettable. It's no surprise either, because exactly how many high school romance stories could you write without it becoming 100% repetition? At least in isekai, which is just fantasy, you need to come up with some kind of new world and all kinds of inhabitants and systems in it, no matter how lazily you go about it. In shoujo romance you just take a stereotypic setting loosely based on reality and you are good to go.

This shit sells because people know what they want and know what to expect.

See the difference is Highschool romance shoujo mangas aren’t on any popularity charts nor are there like 3-4 of them per anime season.

 

[Kaarme]

See the difference is Highschool romance shoujo mangas aren’t on any popularity charts nor are there like 3-4 of them per anime season.

Yeah, I kind of veered off from the thread topic after reading many posts criticising isekai fantasy. My point was isekai being repetitive trash is nothing special, unique, in the bigger picture, so it's not a factor affecting its popularity at all. The reasons are elsewhere, though some of them have also been mentioned, already, among the criticism.

 

[Oryangatan]

Isekai is flooding the top 10 because there's so much of it being made. Throw enough shit at the wall, and and some of it will stick.

It's like asking why there was so much giant robot anime in the 80s or Shonen battle manga in the 90s and 2000s. One got popular, everyone else copied it with a few details changed up.

The difference is that back then publishers needed to create actual physical media for anything they wanted to sell. Hence the popularity contests the weekly/monthly magazines would have to see what to sell and what to axe. Nowadays they can just throw everything they're not sure of online.

 

[Remocracy]

Isekai is flooding the top 10 because there's so much of it being made. Throw enough shit at the wall, and and some of it will stick.

It's like asking why there was so much giant robot anime in the 80s or Shonen battle manga in the 90s and 2000s. One got popular, everyone else copied it with a few details changed up.

The difference is that back then publishers needed to create actual physical media for anything they wanted to sell. Hence the popularity contests the weekly/monthly magazines would have to see what to sell and what to axe. Nowadays they can just throw everything they're not sure of online.

That explains why it exists but not why it's getting so popular.

 

[Oryangatan]

That explains why it exists but not why it's getting so popular.

"Throw enough shit at the wall, and and some of it will stick."
It exists  because it's popular. It's popular, so there's a lot of it. There's a lot of it and it's popular, so there's a lot in the top 10.

 

[KajurN]

I prefer these isekais over the high school harem romcoms or battle royale trash that used to be everywhere not long ago, it's just disappointing how other genres seem to have lost popularity to a point where you struggle to find anything not isekai/villainess related anymore. Feels like back in 2014ish and earlier there was a lot more variety being made and scanlated, japanese shoujos in particular have nearly disappeared after the flood of korean manhwa started, and while i like these manhwa i miss reading a good shoujo every now and then like Cat street or Dengeki Daisy or Meteor Methuselah, there's been a clear drop in quantity and as a result quality on those other genres. It could be a direct result of the scanlation scene focusing more on online manga over physical manga because of the ease in getting raws though.

 

[doppler]

Just as good a question "Why is something dealing with FOOD or COOKING is #2 popular?

PS, had to add "is" to sentence. Read it and skip "is". Didn't know I typed it, until I re-read the post.

 

[croissant]

One new trend that I started to get sick is when the authors trying to mask the dullness of their isekai story with some cooking porn.