Besides the conspicuous proliferation of isekai works I've also notice there has been less cyberpunk stuff
I wonder if the two trends are related
Like people are becoming anxious of the future and want to escape into an idealized fantasized past.
By past I mean technologically
The world's they go to tend to have lower technological development, almost as if its technology people are trying to get away from.
Am I reading too much into this?
What do you think?
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its just FOTM, and it'll change to something else sooner or later
>FOTM
I use to think that but the isekai fad has clung for so long im not sure we can call it a fad anymore.
its just that isekai can be put onto any existing story. someone even did it with yamcha from dragonball. in most isekai stories the fact that MC is from another world stops being relevant past the very beginning of the story.
I'm not trying to blame anyone or criticize just because I'm also guilty of this, but I think it's pretty obvious that isekai panders to suicidal depression.
Actually, no. Notice how isekai in recent years involved game mechanics, being isekaid into a game world etc.
So does that fox loli thing
theres a lot of different anime that pander to that though, its nothing new. rozen maiden, NHK, evangelion etc.
I wonder if we'd get Infinite Dendrogram-style neural-network content-generation-based MMOs in our lifetime.
>NHK
Was nhk critical of it?
That seems more of a plot device though
I mean wasn't the real world of overlord a dystopian cyberpunk one? The guy seems to have zero interest in returning.
Depression for sure, but isekai is literally about the characters life ending and them getting a new one. It's not just about someone's life getting better or more exciting. The thinking is like "My life is shit, and there's no way to improve it"
Fuck, I understand that feeling.
i don't know about recent years, most shit being adapted has been out for a long time. anime studios and manga/LN publishers are basically hitting a goldmine by adapting popular WNs.
Have much relevance does that have on the story beyond using it as an explanation of how strong the mc is?
Yet you are living during humanity's golden age ,
Maybey what agent Smith said was true.
>humanity's golden age
It's because we're past it that isekai is getting popular.
i don't know if we'll ever know humanity's real golden age until humanity is over, especially with the gigantic leap in technology that happened mid 20th century and is still ongoing.
However, from the current perspective we seem to be doing a splendid job of shooting ourselves in the foot with that technology.
How?
Then what was it?
forming a new generation of socially inept super spergs that cant into basic human interaction and are increasingly jaded and narcissistic.
Rising inequality, destroying environment, omnipresent surveillance, and so on. What's surprising that people no longer look hopefully towards the future?
Just the growing pains of evolution
We've become increasingly atomized as people; the tribe building connections of FB and Twitter have made people put themselves in increasingly smaller boxes. Curation allows people to ignore things they don't like, giving everyone their own personal furfag hugbox. The like/upvote/(You) culture has gamified performative discourse instead of understanding. Everyone is alone together, and our main ways of talking to people exist for advertising purposes.
This says nothing about the looming threat of automation rendering large swathes of the working population even more marginalized.
>no isekai into a cyberpunk future
>no isekai about someone from a cyberpunk future coming to present day japan
it all comes tumbling down doesnt it
this is truly the end times
neither are cyberpunk but death mage gets sent to a future dystopia where he's experimented on until killed, revives, then is killed and sent to a generic fantasy world. another isekai about a black company employee getting isekai'd then sent to the future afterwards to save it, pic related but thats where the story ends so far, no idea if its cyberpunk or not (probably isnt)
Good. I'm tired of interacting with people who trigger me.
>normalfags getting into the internet was probably not a good thing.
It got canned?
why wouldn't it?
>FOTM
not really, stories about someone getting transported into another world have always and will always be there
i still see it as ongoing with 3 volumes. it was licensed so TL group could've dropped it over that.
It's about the concept of having control, not about any of the other stuff you mentioned
Humans are remarkably resilient on a psychological level as long as they believe they have a way to do something on their own, but society has become so massive that you can't and all that resilience disappears once you think you have no control over what happens. It's why a lot of people believe 'shell shock' is actually a modern phenomenon that accompanied industrialized warfare. Whereas before you could always rely on the strength of your arms and speed of reaction, at least in theory, there really is nothing you can do except hope to be lucky if you're crossing no-man's land. There's a difference between living under the knowledge that someone bigger and stronger might come and fuck you up, and living under the shadow of a death that you can't answer and won't even know has arrived when it comes.
It's why a lot of people are scared of plane crashes even though cars are literally thousands of times more dangerous statistically, because a car crash is on some level 'your' fault and something you can avoid, while if the pilot has a stroke and the copilot has a heart attack there's nothing at all you can do.
Notice how the self-insert heroes are always people who see wrongs and can right them through their own power and when they get stuck in a rut they pull themselves out because they're just that good. It's a sense of having control instead of the feeling of slowly losing it.
i just meant its recent explosive popularity in manga and anime.
actually watched a video not too long ago about some guy who visited a female streamer house in china and talked about how china's youth only interact online but struggle to do it in real life. while the camera was on most female streamers were energetic and talking, when it was off they were shy and didn't want to speak with him. most of his time was spent talking to the girls manager/handler. pretty depressing desu. also talked about how guys in china watch these girls since it is their only form of interaction with a female, spend a lot of money just to try and get a female streamers attention. then you realize thats what twitch IRL is.
>also talked about how guys in china watch these girls since it is their only form of interaction with a female, spend a lot of money just to try and get a female streamers attention
Replace 'china' with literally any semi-developed country
I kind of avoid females online for this reason.
has there really not been any good cyberpunk anime recently?
No different from hostess clubs in Japan, the only difference is that the streaming girls don't have to deal with sexual harassment and drunk salarymen puking all over them. I can't see any downsides.
Is this a rec post? It is a rec post. Why don't you ask google?
>actually watched a video not too long ago about some guy who visited a female streamer house in china
link?
Maybe type 'streamer' and 'China' on youtube? Just a thought.
have they no pride or shame?
That just makes that sense of escape that much more tangible. Being a game makes the escape something that could actually happen while accepting the technologically dominant future.
Nice blog where do I subscribe
Who? Their clients? What do you do with your 'pride' and 'shame' when you shitpost on Yea Forums? Really makes me think.
once AI becomes sophisticated enough I could see this as a service people pay for.
>pride
>shame
They're at home, online, in their free time. Why do they need to worry about their pride and shame when they're just enjoying themselves? How is it different from any other shit you do online?
>he says while posting on Yea Forums(nel)
I dont waste money on it.
as lazy as some isekai get, i'm at least grateful they put the fantasy setting back in the spotlight
our future won't be cyberpunk. brown people will make it a zombie future
I don't know man, the video guy talked about how those female streamers in house literally wake up, stream, go to bed. They have no actual interaction with other people other than the manager of the house, and other female streamers. They don't leave the house.
youtube.com
I know idol worship is a big thing in Japan, but are they also into live streaming?
...
i'm honestly finding that a lot of the stuff i'm enjoying is just pure fantasy, no isekai involved (bard loen, broke merc etc). fuck i love that manga you linked so much too.
And these people clearly have the money to burn so who're you to tell them where to put their excess cash?
The video sounds like total bullshit just from what you're on about if it's trying to portray this as a widespread phenomenon instead of some niche thing.
>I know idol worship is a big thing in Japan, but are they also into live streaming?
yes
>Am I reading too much into this?
>What do you think?
I think anime used to be more about raw story telling with escapist elements, because who doesn't enjoy it to some degree. But now it's degenerating quickly into raw escapism that's grounded in a native world to bridge the gap between reality and fantasy. e.g. isekai always starts out in modern japan and then jumps into a fantasy world (occasionally vice versa) because it's important for the escapist fantasy to have some basis for the reader to escape from.
It reeks of a mentally ill society, given, it's a great deal of media across the world. The constant demand for "realism" and the rejection of any preposition and the refusal to suspend disbelief except when it panders directly to your desire for escapism.
The ability to consider an idea or concept as a given, a truth, without accepting it as reality is an important mechanism for learning and exploring new concepts. Youths these days, millennials included, are incapable of doing this. And I don't think it's any coincidence that escapism and radicalism are both on the rise
>POL
Speaking of people using technology to escape reality and live in their own little world. /pol/ actually pretty relevant to this thread.
>>POL
How close are we to being able plug ourselves in like that?
I love how that mangaka emotes.
No Guns Life is getting an anime, but it's Madhouse.
is smartphone the laziest isekai ever made? its so aggresively average/mediocre, even among other isekai series. reminds me of what fairy tail was to shounen, but at least FT had big anime tiddies.
Hopefully very far considering the Overlord world is Brave New World without the eternal happiness part
>widespread phenomenon instead of some niche thing.
bigger problem in china (and worldwide) is just people glued to smartphones. they had a big crackdown on it in th chinese military, caught a lot of soldiers playing mobile games instead of being on duty. called it peacetime disease.
Not cyberpunk but 1984 with corporations instead of a ideological government, smog everywhere and education is just smough so that the 80~90% plebians can do work but not enough to do something about their situation,
Just enough so*
youtube.com
Kinds reminds me of this user
No phones in movies cuz ppl don't want to b e reminded
Well what're you going to do
Such is capitalism and the developed life
hate how busy life is now, even like 10 years ago people didn't expect you to be 'there' 100% of the time, if they texted you maybe they expected a reply within half a day and before that an email meant reply today or the day after. These days literally everything is WTF YOU READ MESSAGE 12 SECONDS AGO Y U NO REPLY
how come there isnt an isekai where the protag from the cyberpunk world brings technology and concepts into the fantasy world?
As another poster pointed out in many isekai the other world frame story stops being relevant early on. A lot of isekai are LitRPGs, and the frame story just provides a convenient excuse for having menus and RPG mechanics in the game. You can do a LitRPG without isekai, but given the sheer level of escapism they both represent they make a natural combination.
Even when you don't have LitRPG mechanics, isekai frame story is still useful for giving an excuse for lazy info-dumping, and to provide the most brainless kind of self-inserting. Isekai isn't a genre per se as much as it is an effort to eliminate as thoroughly as possible any sense of separation between the main character and the viewer. Thus even if the generic dragon quest-ish fantasy setting becomes tiresome, isekai will not go away but will not be replaced until we have something like immersive VR stories to go a step beyond even isekai.
> the video guy talked about how those female streamers in house literally wake up, stream, go to bed
So no different from corporate drones in Japan. Why are you so concerned about streamers? They can quit any time and don't have to worry about work-related accidents. Literally a dream job for you NEETs, expect nobody would want to watch streams of you. Now, think about women in Vietnamese and Chinese sweatshops who work for more than 12h a day for peanuts and get fired when they get sick.
If soldiers couldn't use smartphones for entertainment while on duty, most of them would quit within a year.
You're full of shit and you know it
And most people are spineless faggots who submit to the whims of their "betters" and happily keep themselves tethered to their work even when they should be relaxing. Working yourself to death for the sake of a company who couldn't care any less about you is all people seem to see as acceptable nowadays because their parents did it and look how "great" the end of their lives turned out with all of that retirement money they were guaranteed to get!
People at least in America work their adult lives expecting to have a retirement at the end of it, but even that is a gamble most times with the stock market. Its all fucked (almost always has been), all the way up and all the way down and if you spend your entire life working for someone else, doing something you hate, expect to die that way. The only thing that's a bit certain is government/military service, but even then all it takes is one round in the skull, one IED, or some asshole above you pushing hard for you to get kicked out early and you miss out on retirement because of interpersonal politics. Luckily this isn't the norm, and if you get injured there's a decent chance you'll get money for the rest of your life (If the VA doesn't fuck you which is a toss up at best)
tl;dr: Either do something you enjoy, find a good company or make one. Otherwise you're almost certainly doomed to die having spent your life being miserable with nothing to show for it. Watch Japanese weeb shit and be happy about it because even if you're athletic your body is going to fail you at some point so get out of it what you can while you can but don't let someone tell you that doing what you enjoy is stupid (unless its wasting TONS of money you don't have). Odds are, they're jealous and want to pull you down to validate themselves.
I love stats, menus, data, levels, skills, combining skills, evolution, manipulation of data.
Every time they get stronger mid fight I am in ecstasy.
Nah cyberpunk has been done to death especially in anime there's a few isekai'd into the future stories but none of them ended up popular. It's just that Medieval fantasy settings are more appealing right now with for example people fantasizing about banging fantasy races like elves, beastmen, Magic>Boring technology and so on.
This is the main and the real reason those settings never really took off on narou.
Also no the wave medieval fantasy isekai won't stop until there's something to replace it on narou or publishers themselves stop picking up series from narou, because they found another goldmine.
Technological slavery is a thing, user.
i like knights and magic for magitech mecha, was popular enough to get licensed and anime but dont know how popular it is beyond that (rankings).
>It's just that Medieval fantasy setting
also allows for slavemaster fetish which is in a LOT of isekai.
Knights and Magic had it's popularity cycle for sure which is the reason it got an adaption. Though that was more of a magitech setting yea, with again magic being the main factor when it came to even piloting the mechs.
>also allows for slavemaster fetish which is in a LOT of isekai
To be completely fair they could invent those collars and have more perfect slaves in a futuristic kind of setting so I feel like setting doesn't really matter there. Narou authors/readers would still find a way.
yeah in the past i knew that with my huge peasant muscles i could beat up the black plague if it ever dared to visit my house, i was the lord of my farm, i was in control
How?
It's not a coincidence that the Plague caused tons of social upheaval and essentially shittershattered European society so hard we got kicked onto the path to Renaissance.
fucking plague ruining everything. what is a fat, bald, ugly, feudal lord supposed to do if peasants uprise? unwed serf daughters aren't going to rape themselves.
>current year
>golden age
Nigga you can't just base things on technology. We're living in peak clown world and unless you are high 24/7 that shit is scary. The amount of cultural decline and government mandated denial of reality going on right now doesn't exactly spell out golden age to me.
>Technology surrounds us on all sides, envelops us, and, perhaps, suffocates us. It determines or shapes every course of action that we take in our daily lives - how we live, eat, sleep, get to work, where and how we work, how we entertain ourselves, how we run our government, how we conduct our wars. Technological considerations dictate what we can and cannot do, how we do it, and frequently even why we do it. Technology and its direct effects are in our air, our water, across our landscape, and in our bodies. In the developed nations of the 21st century, for all practical purposes, there is no escape from its pervasive effects.
Honestly, slavery in a lot of these settings hardly make sense. They don't fit the setting, or how slavery was actually practiced in the cultures they're imitating.
It's often some kind of mix between chattel slavery and indentured servitude, without any kind of context for why these institutions exist at all, or why the whole system has just stayed in its current state without progressing to its logical conclusion?
If they have magic slave collars, why isn't there an entire class of slaves holding up all of society, the same way Spartan citizens got to have nearly 100% free time by having slaves do literally all the work? Why is this seemingly easily reproducible technology only being used as fetish fuel and meat shields, when it could be used to accelerate the economy?
The answer: Narou authors are shortsighted and are just copying tropes and ideas off of each other, without actually thinking them through themselves.
Whether or not a culture is in a "Golden Age" is a matter of perspective.
It's true that today, the average person living in a not-shit-hole country has the most freedoms and is safer than in any other point in human history… But in exchange we're also probably one of the most anxious population ever due to the interconnectedness of the world, and the knowledge that at any moment, society can collapse because of a couple egotistical leaders deciding to make use of the most destructive weapons ever created by humans.
>Needless to say, this was not always the case. For the wast majority of our existence, humanity has lived without advanced technology. Every since the genus Homo emerged from the African Savannah some 2 million years ago, humans have survived and thrived with only the crudest tools. We lived as wanderers, typically in groups of 50 people or less, and only occasionally stopping to establish temporary encampments. Of the 2 million years of our existence we had controlled use of fire for perhaps only half that time. Durable, stone-tipped spears appeared only 100,000 years ago, and arrowheads, needles, and harpoons some 25,000 years ago - scarcely 1% of humanity's lifetime. We faced all the challenges and threats of nature with only the spear and the hand axe , wearing only crude furs and simple woven clothing, and, for some, with a campfire to keep warm and cook food. I will not idealize the primitive life, it was hard, brutal, sometimes violent, sometimes cruel. But it was the life humanity came to live.
>Like it or not, our bodies and our minds are adapted by 2 million years of evolution to a primitive, low-tech existence. Yet today we are surrounded by ubiquitous, advanced, inscrutable technology. And therein lies our predicament.
>It's true that today, the average person living in a not-shit-hole country has the most freedoms and is safer than in any other point in human history… But in exchange we're also probably one of the most anxious population ever due to the interconnectedness of the world, and the knowledge that at any moment, society can collapse because of a couple egotistical leaders deciding to make use of the most destructive weapons ever created by humans.
This is going very off topic but the importation of violent low IQ subhumans into formerly white and safe countries has made things very unsafe. There's constant terror attacks, rape gangs and the demographic time bomb that will lead to the total islamification of Europe if things keep going the way they are.
But I suppose if you are a white hating leftist you might think those are good things.
Fuck off pol.
>How can we, creatures of nature, who have spent 99% of our existence using only the simplest tools, thrive and live well in a high-tech world? Rationally, it seems impossible - and it is impossible. There is no good reason to expect that human beings, whose physiology is virtually unchanged since the Stone Age, could adapt well to such a radically altered lifestyle.
People have reasonable concerns about the ways technology affects us but I honestly can't be arsed to give a damn.
a lot of isekai slavery is just a way for japs to romanticize comfort women
By way of illumination, compare the two-million-year lifetime of humanity with a 50-year-old man. Humans have been non-hunter-gatherers, that is, farm-,village- or city-dwellers, for only the past 10,000 years; this so-called civilized portion of history represents a mere 0.5% of our species' lifetime. On a scale of 50 years, then, this "modern" existence corresponds to just three months.
People have been arrested and convicted for making twitter posts critical of Islam. Does that spell freedom for you? Do you honestly think Europe was made safer and better by Africans moving there?
...
You are taking low effort posting to a new level.
Literally the only people that matter are those still alive and these people either lived to see the rise of technology or were fucking born into the era, those people have no idea about hunter gatherer nonsense so that whole spiel is irrelevant to them, what they know is modern technology, those are their tools, not fucking rocks and spears.
You sure did a good job of proving him wrong
it's just a fantasy for people who can't relate to having a personality that other people would voluntarily spend time with. it's not supposed to make sense outside of it's immediate context.
dude, go away
And decades ago cops were hunting down commies and black panthers and literally joining their organizations to incite violence, which would be considered entrapment today which is very illegal. And this was when whites were in power and very literally oppressing minorities. What's your point?
And the cops and politicians doing the arrests today are still almost all white.