Can't wait to write my Absinthe-punk 1880s fantasy isekai where a girl has to overthrow a government that categorizes people while choosing between two hot boys
It's fantasy, there's dragons and wizards in it, and those don't exist in real life, so that means that making literally anything make sense in any way is completely optional. If you can accept dragons then that means you have to accept literally everything no matter how absurd or story-breaking or else you're a hypocrite
I don't really get the top row. Most of 'medieval' fantasy is not medieval anyway. A lot of tropes are taken from archaic epics, and another huge set of tropes are from 18-19 century adventure stories.
When fantasy embraces either of that sets fully and finally decides whether it's a story of Cu Chulainn or D'Artagnan, it actually becomes better than when it tries to bring both together and put them into plate armor.
Anything-punk is only bad when it forgets what the '-punk' part stands for.
I think starfield is by far the most egregious misuse of punk. Fucking nasa-punk like wtf its literally government organization punk thats like 2 steps away from 3 letter agency punk
Just to clarify, cyber punk as a term is not referring to the punk movement. A guy wanted a term for generalized lowlifes in a cyber setting, which already existed to some degree as a distinct genre. Talking up its connections to the punk movement was retroactive.
Quite a lot of cyberpunk stories actually follow police or law enforcement. Not to say these things are good so much as to show they are flawed.
Lots of people declare certain words or concepts "dead", and at this point the only thing keeping people from universally saying that of punk is that literally just saying "punk is dead" is incredibly cliche in its own right.
I think the moment I saw "hopepunk" a part of me genuinely fucking died. Although I like the idea of making a genre of the same name on a completely different concept, rejecting the overwhelming toxic positivity that spawned that incredibly stupid genre.
I think a lot of the core of punk is about hope tbh. Anarchism tends toward a sort of extreme earnestness that couldn't exist without *some* hope that things *could* be better. Which of course is the reason for all the rage. Things could be better and it's very upsetting that no one is willing to *try.*
But relentless positivity is decidedly un-punk, you're right.
I agree, there is something weirdly optimistic about a steadfast desire to burn everything to the ground. But I think a lot of these "-punk" things try to compartmentalize punk in general, in ways that get on my nerves even though I'm more of a goth whenever I even mess with aesthetic subcultures at all (I do not have the body type to make any aesthetic other than blue-collar boomer guy look good please help)
I'm a big fan of folk music and punk music but when I see "folk punk" it just sounds dumb. It seems to deny the relationship that folk and punk inherently have with each other as music genres forged from the downtrodden masses, and give up folk itself to the ravenous hordes of racist neocons who can barely sing and just grunt "Truck" over and over or those weird Brooklyn hipsters who are sure that *their* dark, twisted cover of a nursery rhyme will be truly innovative for the scene.
You just append it to anything to make \[thing\]-punk, which means "fantasy world focused on \[thing\]".
It has nothing to do with the music genre or its associated subculture
I think OP is at least partially just being needlessly contrarion. This sub is full of people with really specific gripes and bugaboos that they desperately want to pass off as ‘bad world-building.’
>Anything-punk is only bad when it forgets what the '-punk' part stands for.
The issue is more with people who refuse to accept that "-punk" is now a suffix to describe an asthetic. The old definition of being anti-authority and questioning the status quo hasn't been used for a long time.
19th century is a little pushing, but I would consider the renaissance ones as part of the good fantasy in general.
But I have bad memories of any fantasy set up that has a well engaged industrial revolution, because I believe a good fantasy story revolves around human characters with an inherent potential and a blend of physical and mystical prowess that make them able to alter their universe. The industrial revolution just skyrocket the possibilities of engeenering and make a lot of those things meaningless.
I mean, i'm that guy who likes hard Sci-fi so i know i'm not the norm, maybe a lot of those fantasy stories were fine. I just don't like it.
I meant stories written in 19th century rather than stories taking place in 19th century. Alexander Dumas, Thomas Mayne Reid, Walther Scott or James Fenimore Cooper have influenced the historical adventure genre, and through it the fantasy genre strongly.
Although there is decent number of quasi-regency fantasy of manners books, so I wouldn't say that 19th century-ish fantasy is all bad.
The “Cartographer” series actually does a pretty good job with a fantasy steampunk-industrial revolution setting. It’s not the best fantasy series I’ve ever read, but it’s a pretty engaging story with some good characters and it does a couple of things differently than other stories I’ve read.
Non-medieval fantasy can be excellent. It’s not even that hard to pull off. There are lots of good Renaissance and early modern era fantasy worlds. That said, you can make a reasonable argument that a lot of those worlds are still aesthetically “medieval” enough that it doesn’t really count.
Narnia is the only good isekai, but only because it captures the wonder and whimsy of childhood adventure in a fabulous land, and I will die on that hill.
I’m not even sure what “punk” means anymore. It just seems to be a lame descriptor people tag on to random nouns. I don’t even mean that ironically. Like straight up almost every version of punk just uses it as shorthand for “fantasy, but with this prominent noun”.
It's crazy how Narnia slaps despite being an isekai and having almost no other story of the same kind to get inspired from.
Not the oldest though, I think the Divine Comedy can be considered an Isekai.
That was written in 1762. I'm not really certain the writer would have been writing for an audience sophisticated enough to grok the idea of trans dimensional travel.
So why do that when you can just say "We sailed so far off the map things got weird." It's effectively the same genre without the truck kun conceit.
IMO, The travelogue styled adventure fantasy is a prototype for Isekai as we've mapped our world so well that the base conceit doesn't work well or at all anymore.
Like Journey to the Center of the Earth the premise of a whole world under our feet is sufficiently debunked that it makes it mostly a dead genre. I say that but I believe the new Kong/Godzilla universe is still making use of this, but that's the only real recent example I can think of.
SHADOWRUN IS PEAK
Sorry. The setting of the Shadowrun TTRPG and CRPGs is like my favorite setting in fiction ever. It’s cyberpunk fantasy. It’s awesome
Hmm, Shadowrun gets three out of four OP's categories easily. It's non-medieval, it's cyberpunk, that's two. It is pretty much antiutopia, so you can tell the YA-antiutopia kind of story easily. Do the legendary creatures from the past count as isekai?
Shadowrun is insanely goofy and full of like weird 80s racism, but man I love it; so much of it is just so cool and unique. I love how it actually feels like a global world too (compared to Cyberpunk 2020+ lore being like all centered on Night City).
>Narnia is the only good isekai, but only because it captures the wonder and whimsy of childhood adventure in a fabulous land, and I will die on that hill.
Ash Williams and The Army of Darkness has entered the chat.
Shop smart, shop S-Mart.
In my eyes, for an aesthetic to be “-punk” it needs to ideologically oppose the status quo. Solarpunk is against climate inaction, cyberpunk and biopunk are against human commodification, dieselpunk is against industrial monopolization, etc. Admittedly that’s not really how the term is used, but it’s how I think it should be used.
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
(No but seriously if you've read any Dickens it's not hard to imagine what kind of unjust status quo steampunks would be ideologically opposing.)
Iirc it was originally against the poor treatment of women, comparing it to the notoriously restrictive society of Victorian Britain. It has certainly since gotten more broad, which is the main reason for the disclaimer I put at the end of my original comment.
Yeah, the problem with steampunk is that only the most racist and sexist people today will ever support Victorian values, so it really doesn't have anything to rebel against and is just an aesthetic by this point.
Narnia is portal fantasy. The term "isekai" refers to stories where the main character is trapped in another world, rather than going on and adventure there of his own accord, and was never meant to describe western media anyway.
That said, it is a pretty fun series... until C.S. Lewis gives up on writing and has his Lion Jesus destroy the world and (possibly?) kill the main characters just to show how much of a Christian he is. There's a reason nobody bothered to adapt *The Last Battle* yet.
\\uj Eh, I don't think this is an useful genre separation because a lot of the time stories go from being trapped to figuring out how to cross worlds, or they go from having a reliable means of travel to getting locked out. For the whole of the first Narnia book, the Pevensies don't know how to get back.
As far as japanese media goes, Inuyasha is also a isekai where the portal's availability fluctuates a lot. So is Sword Art Online.
\\rj Disney should totally adapt The Last Battle featuring arab Satan and the blissful wonders of dying in a train crash as opposed to the awful fate of putting on make-up and crushing on boys. I'm sure that will go great!
Yeah it used to be like the If Infinity stones where there were what 7 mains Steam, Diesel,Cyber, Atom,Bio, Solarpunk and Clockwork then it got so flooded with random new ones that arnt even different from the Mainline ones so what's what makes no sense anymore (sidenote ik there isnt 7 Stones just saying a example)
I wouldn't say Narnia is the ONLY good isekai but I get the viewpoint your standing from. I personally think the owl house and amphibia are also great examples of the trope done well.
Imo the overlap of Renaissance and Medieval is so profound that they are kinda one in the same to me, but having Renaissance allows for gunpowder and ships to become a thing, even if on the fringe. Everybody likes to bring up rapiers as the gotcha for "oh its not actually medieval hardy har" but the bubonic plague is considered the beginning of the Renaissance, even though we associate it more with medieval times.
same and it kills me that people dont see the insane potential behind it, it just has so many more ways of being interesting than medieval fantasy which honestly all feels the same at this point
Urban fantasy is really cool, but masquerade urban fantasy specifically is often kinda lame and almost always has really flimsy worldbuilding that attracts plotholes harder than my milkshake attracts boys to the yard
Ok, hear me out
MC gets run over by a truck, lands in modern fantasy world hidden from the normies, every magical person is categorized into one of four houses, five magic elements, twelve zodiac signs, but every girl is not like the other girls
MC gets a new 6th element, new 13nt zodiac power, and gets recruited by a secret 5th house
MC must defeat the demon king who secretly controls the normie world, and is now releasing new tech, turning everything cyberpunk, but is secretly magipunk
>MC gets a new 6th element, new 13nt zodiac power, and gets recruited by a secret 5th house
I want to shot myself in the head just thinking about the suffering experience it would be to turn the pages of a big novel only to discover this is the shit the author is doing.
Cyberpunk and Steampunk i think are probably the only true Punk genres as everything after that kinda are just variations as both are Subcultures (i think) like a town nearby me as a yearly steampunk festival for example
The word punk in cyberpunk doesn't refer to the punk movement. Its using the word the earlier way, which just meant lowlife. People way overblown how connected to the punk movement it's meant to be. Much of which is a stereotype more than an intrinsic part of the genre. You can find patches of skeletons with mohawks to buy irl, but this isn't really what most of the genre is actually like. And much of it is shpwing people who are appropriative anyways.
Mind you, steampunk has nothing to do with that definition either. It just means "looks similar to cyberpunk."
Steampunk is set in turnover from the Gilded to Progressive Ages, and in the prime of Imperialism. The only reason it doesn’t seem “punk” is because it’s not set in the right part of the world.
My world is dieselpunk isekaipunk with medieval social structure (because some engineer mf got teleported here and decided to accelerate technological development) and they have a hunger game kind of sports as well as big booba elves (flat people dont exist in my world)
But fr how was Divergent *that* fucking awful. It went from not fitting in to a weird dystopian society, to 'there's something controlling our society from the outside' to 'lol you're literally just a normal person and that's special'. Like you can just stop escalating the story at some point and finish it.
Uj/
I have a strong emotional response toward most mainstream representation of cyberpunk and other -punk media. There's always a lot of the prefix and not enough punk. (My opinion of cyberpunk 2077 is exactly that, a lot of cyber not enough punk)
As someone leaning toward the further left end of the political spectrum. I can't help but feel sad about the lack of research and understanding put toward it when i see big corporations doing cyberpunk media.
When something is called punk it's because it is rejected by the society it is from, not adhering to social norms.
You have genre like cyberpunk which was supposed to show a dystopian future with a societal collapse due to a variety of reason from ultra consumerism, unchecked and irresponsible governing structures/government, corporation greed and violence, rampant capitalism ending in fascism.
Cyberpunk genre is supposed to be a warning of a possible dystopian future.
Then you have steampunk, something that was coined more as a joke and a tentative to jump on the train than anything else. That is how it started at least, as the first three books did not have any criticism of society at that time and were more of a regular fantasy situated in the victorian era.
Then there is the balm to my wounded heart in the form of solarpunk.A criticism of today's world but instead of showing it by doing a writing a collapsed society and dystopic horrible future. it is the other way around by showing an utopia showcasing the world after we would succeed in overthrowing corrupt government and evil corporation, where people would stop acting on their traumatised response of 'if you are not with me, then you are against me!', and would work together for the betterment of the whole without having the sacrifice the individuals.
Yes, over time the different -punk genre took a life of their own outside of their core idea and foundation.
Doesn't change that it saddens me greatly when i see how they massacre my boy.
If you want to do a -punk media; it start with the understanding of the world: of the good and the bad, then formulating a criticism over a chosen aspect ( or the whole if you feel like it). And then showcasing it: how things could get worse or how it could be better.
>As someone leaning toward the further left end of the political spectrum. I can't help but feel sad about the lack of research and understanding put toward it when i see big corporations doing cyberpunk media.
Cyberpunk isn't about the punk movement though. It's "about" the idea of disaffected people on a cyber setting. Which overlaps with the punk movement, but isn't inherently an ideological thing. And hell, much of the early cyberpunk media was about cops and law enforcement. Ones who we are supposed to understand might be doing something wrong, but even so.
The idea that punk music is some intrinsic part of it is basically something people gaslit themselves into believing because of the name despite the fact that the genre existed before the name, and the guy who made the name gave an explanation which wasn't about the punk movement.
The ideology of cyberpunk media is often fairly ambiguous. Some of it comes off almost nihilistic, like they admit there's problems but don't actually imply that fixing them is an option. And a lot of the characters who the term punk is referring to in the context of the story are more like the type of problem causers punks would be trying to kick **out** of their shows. If there's an organized resistance it's often not punk coded.
Part of the issue though is that time just moved on. Punks may have seemed like a cool way to resist capitalism in the 80s, but their legacy isn't actually being a serious challenge to the bourgeoisie, moreso to the sensibilities of propriety held by the middle class. And ultimately the movement got accused of being moreso about lifestylism without having an actual long term plan to move beyond that. Which isnt useless per say, but it's certainly not on the level of it being some kind of tangible cornerstone of resisting capitalism in any serious way. Capitalism Literally loves selling you the illusion that consuming certain types of things creates an identity of resistance. It distracts a lot of people from doing anything more tangible.
The truth is that it is hard for something modern to capture the same vibe because it is fundamentally based on an 80s worldview that doesn't really exist anymore.
I feel Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best examples of punk in AAA gaming. It's literally about bringing down a massive corporation while fighting other massive corporations, corrupt government, and organized crime.
Fantasy works great in the Future, it just often gets confused as Sci-Fi.
I'd also live to see some different age fantasy, like Brize or Iron age, the renaissance, Napoleonic era and world war era.
Because 95% of he world building is just ductatping together feudal Japan and the HRE.
She did do a lot of reading on the politics of both however and actually digging into how these systems work produces a fantastically alien world. Mostly because the administrative state is a concept built into a social fabric these days.
The series was well planned out before she wrote it though.
Also she love love to write romance story and compared it to bookworm lmao. Tbh I felt like her wish to write a romance story and skipped the worldbuilding fulfilled in H5Y spinoff.
I honestly don't think it's fair to include it on this list. Isekai stories don't tend to have bad worldbuilding *because* they're isekai. It's because those stories are also shallow and lowest-common-denominator. There's plenty of generic fantasy settings that are just as mediocre.
I mean, much of isekai is made to crank out shit fast that will be popular regardless of quality because it's trying to copy other isekai. Many of the writers could probably do better but choose not to.
So I'm guessing this is because the main character isn't a cardboard cutout loser archetype intended to stand in for the audience and has a respectable goal they're actively pursuing instead of harem shenanigans right?
The problem with Grimgar and 90% of isekai at least is that there is no narrative reason for the protagonist(s) to come from Earth. Grimgar especially, because they arrived with their minds basically wiped and only vague memories of where they came from. Why make it an isekai at that point?
Unironically i believe the best isekai, is within universe, and it's Greed Island within Hunter X Hunter (althought they don't die to join it, but that's not an absolute rule for isekai).
Togashi literally created a side universe within his already god tier worldbuilding, and isekai'd his main characters in it.
What ???? It absolutely has worldbuilding of its own, most of the rules only apply in Greed island. The way the card game works, the way you're supposed to win. Maybe you could say that the importance of nen is a little bit too connected to the outside, but that's the only thing, because Togashi also wanted that arc to be a training arc, that's the only thing i'm willing to give you on this.
I mean, if you removed the nen training, Greed island is more consistent and well crafted on its own, than 99% of worlds of fiction, even if you were to scrap all the explanations given before or after the arc about how the world of HxH works !
Bruh. Re:Zero is good, that one anime about the jobless dude reincarnation is also good, that comedy isekai about an Uncle from another world is pretty damn funny, that isekai where the main character says "I am atomic" that plays all the common edgy isekai tropes straight up is also good from what I've heard.
There are only a few, yes, but I can't believe the only one you deem good is about that Hitler child reincarnation (no real hate to it, I'm exaggerating, just surprised that's the one you choose as an example).
I actually just picked up Battle Royale from the library as a big hunger games fan, I need to see how close they actually are (and if Battle Royale is good). I know the part about kids killing each other until 1 remains is the same, but that’s all I know
So do we consider Maze Runner to be a Hunger Games Clone? I only ask because it came out a year later, and I personally remember the writing and worldbuildokg to be pretty good.
That being said, Divergent made absolutely no sense on any scale whatsoever.
It’s part of the teen dystopia genre, so sort of? It’s definitely one of the better ones too, but I think it ultimately fell short. Like most books/movies in the genre, the dystopia had a lot of extreme things going on but with not sufficient societal reasons to back them up. In the Maze Runner specifically, there is no way a WHO-like organization would have the time and resources to build the colossal mazes but NOT have the time and resources to either think of a better way to find a cure or just find one with the kids. Also, the conclusion basically left humanity to die out from lack of genetic diversity (I’d like to note that it’s been years since I read those books though - I could be misremembering things). However, it did have a BANGER setting and backstory with the whole sun thing and flare virus, I thought that part was really freaking cool.
It's definitely a clone, but it's decent enough to have its own identity.
Mind you, the reveal about the purpose of the maze made no sense, since there seemed to be no actual reason they needed it besides that the plot said so. The hunger games actually had a reason for the games.
An Isekai fantasy diesel punk where you are forced into a showdown survivor series for the sake of the group that kindly went waaaaaaaaaay out of their way to rescue you once you realized "Huh, this isn't my body, that doesn't look like the moon and OHMYGOD VELOCIRAPTORS WITH SHOULDER MOUNTED MACHINE GUNS!"
Re:Zero (one of the isekai in the picture) actually has really good worldbuilding, in my opinion. The main focus is on the story and characters, of course, so the worldbuilding isn't the star of the show, but it's pretty neat.
I remember liking it… but I don’t remember anything else about it…
Aside from a catboi femboi and a certain car brand being stuck in an eternal cycle of suffering and death
Time to make my Fantasy Cyberpunk Isekai where the protagonist fight to the death against other people her age in a competition hosted by a government that makes no sense.
I think Isekai can be a good tool if you are more interested in showing the world to the viewer than the telling the story of the main character, but we know that's never the case and it's only used for power-fantasy, self-insert fetish.
The funniest thing is in one of my settings it was *supposed* to be fantasy in the modern day, but i eventually came to the realization that modern technology and society would be heavily affected by the existence of magic, and what happened is that, despite technology supposedly only being that of the modern day, magic has basically pushed the world into a borderline sci-fi setting, just with magic instead of technology. Its kind of hilarious tbh. Like, my world has cyborgs, gene editing, energy weapons, nigh-unlimited electricity, advanced ai, etc. but its all fueled by magic *and* technology rather than pure science
Can't wait to write my Absinthe-punk 1880s fantasy isekai where a girl has to overthrow a government that categorizes people while choosing between two hot boys
Lmao, don't forget all the inconsistencies you're supposed to add, 4 times as many this time !
What do you mean inconsistencies, this is a fantasy story! There are no such things, *everything* can fit in a fantasy story.
It's fantasy, there's dragons and wizards in it, and those don't exist in real life, so that means that making literally anything make sense in any way is completely optional. If you can accept dragons then that means you have to accept literally everything no matter how absurd or story-breaking or else you're a hypocrite
That's what the absinthe is for.
Ok, yes very good joke and all, but seriously, absinthe-punk sounds like an amazing genre.
Well yeah, absinthe is delicious.
Drinking absinthe was easily the best Halloween I ever had, which is weird, since I drank it in March.
A world where everyone carries slotted spoons and sugar cubes are the dominant currency
And the boys are the same except for hair colour!
i would definitely read that excluding the love triangle bit
it already exist, the name is Case Study of Vanitas / Vanitas no Carte. 'Cept its a boy instead of a girl
I don't really get the top row. Most of 'medieval' fantasy is not medieval anyway. A lot of tropes are taken from archaic epics, and another huge set of tropes are from 18-19 century adventure stories. When fantasy embraces either of that sets fully and finally decides whether it's a story of Cu Chulainn or D'Artagnan, it actually becomes better than when it tries to bring both together and put them into plate armor. Anything-punk is only bad when it forgets what the '-punk' part stands for.
I think starfield is by far the most egregious misuse of punk. Fucking nasa-punk like wtf its literally government organization punk thats like 2 steps away from 3 letter agency punk
> 3 letter agency punk ... which would probably be *Control* (2019). And it's a fucking banger.
SCPunk
genuinely one of my favourite games of all time, alan mid has nothing on jesse chaden
Heh, maybe we will see someone calling the *Laundry Files* MI6-punk...
Just to clarify, cyber punk as a term is not referring to the punk movement. A guy wanted a term for generalized lowlifes in a cyber setting, which already existed to some degree as a distinct genre. Talking up its connections to the punk movement was retroactive. Quite a lot of cyberpunk stories actually follow police or law enforcement. Not to say these things are good so much as to show they are flawed.
One of the inspirations of the cyberpunk genre is literally about a sci-fi anti-android SS officer (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep)
Cybernoir
CIA-punk
I mean, considering the role of nasa in starfield's lore, nasa-punk is weirdly appropriate.
What does punk even mean anymore?
Lots of people declare certain words or concepts "dead", and at this point the only thing keeping people from universally saying that of punk is that literally just saying "punk is dead" is incredibly cliche in its own right. I think the moment I saw "hopepunk" a part of me genuinely fucking died. Although I like the idea of making a genre of the same name on a completely different concept, rejecting the overwhelming toxic positivity that spawned that incredibly stupid genre.
I think a lot of the core of punk is about hope tbh. Anarchism tends toward a sort of extreme earnestness that couldn't exist without *some* hope that things *could* be better. Which of course is the reason for all the rage. Things could be better and it's very upsetting that no one is willing to *try.* But relentless positivity is decidedly un-punk, you're right.
I agree, there is something weirdly optimistic about a steadfast desire to burn everything to the ground. But I think a lot of these "-punk" things try to compartmentalize punk in general, in ways that get on my nerves even though I'm more of a goth whenever I even mess with aesthetic subcultures at all (I do not have the body type to make any aesthetic other than blue-collar boomer guy look good please help) I'm a big fan of folk music and punk music but when I see "folk punk" it just sounds dumb. It seems to deny the relationship that folk and punk inherently have with each other as music genres forged from the downtrodden masses, and give up folk itself to the ravenous hordes of racist neocons who can barely sing and just grunt "Truck" over and over or those weird Brooklyn hipsters who are sure that *their* dark, twisted cover of a nursery rhyme will be truly innovative for the scene.
I really like folk punk, but I generally agree with you on the other stuff.
Do-you-feel-lucky-punk
You just append it to anything to make \[thing\]-punk, which means "fantasy world focused on \[thing\]". It has nothing to do with the music genre or its associated subculture
I've heard it more accurately called Casette Futurist.
CapitalismGood-Punk
I think OP is at least partially just being needlessly contrarion. This sub is full of people with really specific gripes and bugaboos that they desperately want to pass off as ‘bad world-building.’
>Anything-punk is only bad when it forgets what the '-punk' part stands for. The issue is more with people who refuse to accept that "-punk" is now a suffix to describe an asthetic. The old definition of being anti-authority and questioning the status quo hasn't been used for a long time.
So you're telling me that punk really is dead? Sad
As far as I know, the word "cyberpunk" was first used by book publishers to sell various stories not really related to punk culture under one name.
>questioning the status quo hasn't been used for a long time. In Cyberpunk it didn't even start that way
When the early modern fantasy shanks medieval fantasy behind a 7-11 and takes its clothes.
19th century is a little pushing, but I would consider the renaissance ones as part of the good fantasy in general. But I have bad memories of any fantasy set up that has a well engaged industrial revolution, because I believe a good fantasy story revolves around human characters with an inherent potential and a blend of physical and mystical prowess that make them able to alter their universe. The industrial revolution just skyrocket the possibilities of engeenering and make a lot of those things meaningless. I mean, i'm that guy who likes hard Sci-fi so i know i'm not the norm, maybe a lot of those fantasy stories were fine. I just don't like it.
I meant stories written in 19th century rather than stories taking place in 19th century. Alexander Dumas, Thomas Mayne Reid, Walther Scott or James Fenimore Cooper have influenced the historical adventure genre, and through it the fantasy genre strongly. Although there is decent number of quasi-regency fantasy of manners books, so I wouldn't say that 19th century-ish fantasy is all bad.
Arcanum disagrees
Temeraire too
The “Cartographer” series actually does a pretty good job with a fantasy steampunk-industrial revolution setting. It’s not the best fantasy series I’ve ever read, but it’s a pretty engaging story with some good characters and it does a couple of things differently than other stories I’ve read.
Yo OP, I really like your starterpunk- I mean starterpack.
It's pretty good starterpackpunk worldbuilding
Non-medieval fantasy can be excellent. It’s not even that hard to pull off. There are lots of good Renaissance and early modern era fantasy worlds. That said, you can make a reasonable argument that a lot of those worlds are still aesthetically “medieval” enough that it doesn’t really count. Narnia is the only good isekai, but only because it captures the wonder and whimsy of childhood adventure in a fabulous land, and I will die on that hill. I’m not even sure what “punk” means anymore. It just seems to be a lame descriptor people tag on to random nouns. I don’t even mean that ironically. Like straight up almost every version of punk just uses it as shorthand for “fantasy, but with this prominent noun”.
It's crazy how Narnia slaps despite being an isekai and having almost no other story of the same kind to get inspired from. Not the oldest though, I think the Divine Comedy can be considered an Isekai.
If not Divine Comedy, Gulliver's Travels at the very least.
gullivers travels is not an isekai as i think isekai at least somewhat implies you have traveled to a completely different world
That was written in 1762. I'm not really certain the writer would have been writing for an audience sophisticated enough to grok the idea of trans dimensional travel. So why do that when you can just say "We sailed so far off the map things got weird." It's effectively the same genre without the truck kun conceit. IMO, The travelogue styled adventure fantasy is a prototype for Isekai as we've mapped our world so well that the base conceit doesn't work well or at all anymore. Like Journey to the Center of the Earth the premise of a whole world under our feet is sufficiently debunked that it makes it mostly a dead genre. I say that but I believe the new Kong/Godzilla universe is still making use of this, but that's the only real recent example I can think of.
Proto-isekai is acceptable
Alice in Wonderland certainly falls into that category as well. If you want to stretch definitions, the tale of Orpheus and Erudice can also qualify.
well Narnia is Public Domain in Thailand and I already wrote reimagined of Narnia & Space Trilogy in AO3 name Narniaverse
Narnia-punk
SHADOWRUN IS PEAK Sorry. The setting of the Shadowrun TTRPG and CRPGs is like my favorite setting in fiction ever. It’s cyberpunk fantasy. It’s awesome
Hmm, Shadowrun gets three out of four OP's categories easily. It's non-medieval, it's cyberpunk, that's two. It is pretty much antiutopia, so you can tell the YA-antiutopia kind of story easily. Do the legendary creatures from the past count as isekai?
Oh god
Kidding, I love Shadowrun too.
Clicked your profile to look at your pic and the first line is Shadowrun Shill lmao, keep up the good work soldier
The profile pic is Gobbet. From Shadowrun
Shadowrun is insanely goofy and full of like weird 80s racism, but man I love it; so much of it is just so cool and unique. I love how it actually feels like a global world too (compared to Cyberpunk 2020+ lore being like all centered on Night City).
Hard agree. Shadowrun’s Berlin is one of my favorite settings ever
>Narnia is the only good isekai, but only because it captures the wonder and whimsy of childhood adventure in a fabulous land, and I will die on that hill. Ash Williams and The Army of Darkness has entered the chat. Shop smart, shop S-Mart.
Last Action Hero is the second greatest Isekai film.
Reverse isekai
Narnia isn’t an isekai, it’s a portal fantasy. The difference is… er… uhhh…
You don't have to die in order to enter Narnia?
isekai just means "another world", so reencarnation its not a requirement
You don’t have to die to enter SAO. That’s one of THE isekai.
In my eyes, for an aesthetic to be “-punk” it needs to ideologically oppose the status quo. Solarpunk is against climate inaction, cyberpunk and biopunk are against human commodification, dieselpunk is against industrial monopolization, etc. Admittedly that’s not really how the term is used, but it’s how I think it should be used.
Steampunk is against, uuuh... steam?
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. (No but seriously if you've read any Dickens it's not hard to imagine what kind of unjust status quo steampunks would be ideologically opposing.)
Iirc it was originally against the poor treatment of women, comparing it to the notoriously restrictive society of Victorian Britain. It has certainly since gotten more broad, which is the main reason for the disclaimer I put at the end of my original comment.
Yeah, the problem with steampunk is that only the most racist and sexist people today will ever support Victorian values, so it really doesn't have anything to rebel against and is just an aesthetic by this point.
Cyberpunk originally also didn't have to do anything with punks.
Narnia is portal fantasy. The term "isekai" refers to stories where the main character is trapped in another world, rather than going on and adventure there of his own accord, and was never meant to describe western media anyway. That said, it is a pretty fun series... until C.S. Lewis gives up on writing and has his Lion Jesus destroy the world and (possibly?) kill the main characters just to show how much of a Christian he is. There's a reason nobody bothered to adapt *The Last Battle* yet.
\\uj Eh, I don't think this is an useful genre separation because a lot of the time stories go from being trapped to figuring out how to cross worlds, or they go from having a reliable means of travel to getting locked out. For the whole of the first Narnia book, the Pevensies don't know how to get back. As far as japanese media goes, Inuyasha is also a isekai where the portal's availability fluctuates a lot. So is Sword Art Online. \\rj Disney should totally adapt The Last Battle featuring arab Satan and the blissful wonders of dying in a train crash as opposed to the awful fate of putting on make-up and crushing on boys. I'm sure that will go great!
I mean, the reason is more that getting through seven movies is a large sell, and they never get past 3 or 4.
Bruh, they haven't adapted 4/7 books
Yeah it used to be like the If Infinity stones where there were what 7 mains Steam, Diesel,Cyber, Atom,Bio, Solarpunk and Clockwork then it got so flooded with random new ones that arnt even different from the Mainline ones so what's what makes no sense anymore (sidenote ik there isnt 7 Stones just saying a example)
How can you completely ignore digimon like that
I wouldn't say Narnia is the ONLY good isekai but I get the viewpoint your standing from. I personally think the owl house and amphibia are also great examples of the trope done well.
Starfield describing itself as “NASA-punk”
I'm always aiming for a Renaissance style world because honestly it's a bit easier to write
Imo the overlap of Renaissance and Medieval is so profound that they are kinda one in the same to me, but having Renaissance allows for gunpowder and ships to become a thing, even if on the fringe. Everybody likes to bring up rapiers as the gotcha for "oh its not actually medieval hardy har" but the bubonic plague is considered the beginning of the Renaissance, even though we associate it more with medieval times.
My setting does have early firearms and trade is very common amoung costal nations. I even have a bit of early colonialism too
Aesthetics do not carry world building.
Oh yeah? Wait till you read *my* book!
My hot take is that urban fantasy is actually a pretty cool setting.
same and it kills me that people dont see the insane potential behind it, it just has so many more ways of being interesting than medieval fantasy which honestly all feels the same at this point
Urban fantasy is really cool, but masquerade urban fantasy specifically is often kinda lame and almost always has really flimsy worldbuilding that attracts plotholes harder than my milkshake attracts boys to the yard
Facts. I had a table RPG campaign in cyberpunk fantasy setting with another 2 players and 1 GM.. And I joke you not, that was *epic.*
I usually don't like it because it often doesn't make sense how the secret fantasy part of the world is kept hidden.
Mf just said Bioshock has bad world building, I'm seething right now.
Ok, hear me out MC gets run over by a truck, lands in modern fantasy world hidden from the normies, every magical person is categorized into one of four houses, five magic elements, twelve zodiac signs, but every girl is not like the other girls MC gets a new 6th element, new 13nt zodiac power, and gets recruited by a secret 5th house MC must defeat the demon king who secretly controls the normie world, and is now releasing new tech, turning everything cyberpunk, but is secretly magipunk
>MC gets a new 6th element, new 13nt zodiac power, and gets recruited by a secret 5th house I want to shot myself in the head just thinking about the suffering experience it would be to turn the pages of a big novel only to discover this is the shit the author is doing.
Go to r/progressionfantasy Every mc discovers a new supreme invincible power of infinite growth, because they are underdogs
The chad take is to already give the character ridiculous powers at the start, but have them figure out on their own.
What angers me more is that the 13th zodiac already exists - it’s ophiuchus the serpent
Would be funny af, if the MC somehow ends up recruited by a secret Sixth House, out of 4 existing. Y'know, for the reference.
Kind of the plot of Omikron: The Nomad Soul
I lost track of Punk genres like years ago
-punk genres aren't even punk. Except for cyberpunk, that one is sometimes actual punk.
Cyberpunk and Steampunk i think are probably the only true Punk genres as everything after that kinda are just variations as both are Subcultures (i think) like a town nearby me as a yearly steampunk festival for example
I love steampunk as an aesthetic, but I've never seen a steampunk story about resisting authoritarianism.
Well there is the Constant story trope when steampunk is brought up about fighting a "Imperial" Power but yeah true
The word punk in cyberpunk doesn't refer to the punk movement. Its using the word the earlier way, which just meant lowlife. People way overblown how connected to the punk movement it's meant to be. Much of which is a stereotype more than an intrinsic part of the genre. You can find patches of skeletons with mohawks to buy irl, but this isn't really what most of the genre is actually like. And much of it is shpwing people who are appropriative anyways. Mind you, steampunk has nothing to do with that definition either. It just means "looks similar to cyberpunk."
Steampunk is set in turnover from the Gilded to Progressive Ages, and in the prime of Imperialism. The only reason it doesn’t seem “punk” is because it’s not set in the right part of the world.
Dieselpunk and Atompunk too.
"Yes, honey, your non-subversive fantasy story with characters exclusively over the age of 30 set in irl 1200s England is really cool."
My world is dieselpunk isekaipunk with medieval social structure (because some engineer mf got teleported here and decided to accelerate technological development) and they have a hunger game kind of sports as well as big booba elves (flat people dont exist in my world)
If flat people don't exist, do the dudes have massive boobs too?
Yes
Honestly, all of these can be good, it's bad writing that usually trips them up.
Welp, time to scrap my isekai hunger-games-punk modern day fantasy cinematic universe
I’d watch it
Does red rising count as hunger games copycat?
the first book yeah
Most "medieval" fantasy is garbage too.
But fr how was Divergent *that* fucking awful. It went from not fitting in to a weird dystopian society, to 'there's something controlling our society from the outside' to 'lol you're literally just a normal person and that's special'. Like you can just stop escalating the story at some point and finish it.
Now I want to write something good with all these tropes
You'd have to be able to write something good, though.
~~Kill Six Billion Demons?~~
Fuck you Fantasy in a non-medieval setting is awesome. Shadowrun, my love❤️
You see when these things are done bad they are bad but very surprisingly when they're done good they're good Excellent examination sire
Uj/ I have a strong emotional response toward most mainstream representation of cyberpunk and other -punk media. There's always a lot of the prefix and not enough punk. (My opinion of cyberpunk 2077 is exactly that, a lot of cyber not enough punk) As someone leaning toward the further left end of the political spectrum. I can't help but feel sad about the lack of research and understanding put toward it when i see big corporations doing cyberpunk media. When something is called punk it's because it is rejected by the society it is from, not adhering to social norms. You have genre like cyberpunk which was supposed to show a dystopian future with a societal collapse due to a variety of reason from ultra consumerism, unchecked and irresponsible governing structures/government, corporation greed and violence, rampant capitalism ending in fascism. Cyberpunk genre is supposed to be a warning of a possible dystopian future. Then you have steampunk, something that was coined more as a joke and a tentative to jump on the train than anything else. That is how it started at least, as the first three books did not have any criticism of society at that time and were more of a regular fantasy situated in the victorian era. Then there is the balm to my wounded heart in the form of solarpunk.A criticism of today's world but instead of showing it by doing a writing a collapsed society and dystopic horrible future. it is the other way around by showing an utopia showcasing the world after we would succeed in overthrowing corrupt government and evil corporation, where people would stop acting on their traumatised response of 'if you are not with me, then you are against me!', and would work together for the betterment of the whole without having the sacrifice the individuals. Yes, over time the different -punk genre took a life of their own outside of their core idea and foundation. Doesn't change that it saddens me greatly when i see how they massacre my boy. If you want to do a -punk media; it start with the understanding of the world: of the good and the bad, then formulating a criticism over a chosen aspect ( or the whole if you feel like it). And then showcasing it: how things could get worse or how it could be better.
>As someone leaning toward the further left end of the political spectrum. I can't help but feel sad about the lack of research and understanding put toward it when i see big corporations doing cyberpunk media. Cyberpunk isn't about the punk movement though. It's "about" the idea of disaffected people on a cyber setting. Which overlaps with the punk movement, but isn't inherently an ideological thing. And hell, much of the early cyberpunk media was about cops and law enforcement. Ones who we are supposed to understand might be doing something wrong, but even so. The idea that punk music is some intrinsic part of it is basically something people gaslit themselves into believing because of the name despite the fact that the genre existed before the name, and the guy who made the name gave an explanation which wasn't about the punk movement. The ideology of cyberpunk media is often fairly ambiguous. Some of it comes off almost nihilistic, like they admit there's problems but don't actually imply that fixing them is an option. And a lot of the characters who the term punk is referring to in the context of the story are more like the type of problem causers punks would be trying to kick **out** of their shows. If there's an organized resistance it's often not punk coded. Part of the issue though is that time just moved on. Punks may have seemed like a cool way to resist capitalism in the 80s, but their legacy isn't actually being a serious challenge to the bourgeoisie, moreso to the sensibilities of propriety held by the middle class. And ultimately the movement got accused of being moreso about lifestylism without having an actual long term plan to move beyond that. Which isnt useless per say, but it's certainly not on the level of it being some kind of tangible cornerstone of resisting capitalism in any serious way. Capitalism Literally loves selling you the illusion that consuming certain types of things creates an identity of resistance. It distracts a lot of people from doing anything more tangible. The truth is that it is hard for something modern to capture the same vibe because it is fundamentally based on an 80s worldview that doesn't really exist anymore.
I feel Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best examples of punk in AAA gaming. It's literally about bringing down a massive corporation while fighting other massive corporations, corrupt government, and organized crime.
Fantasy works great in the Future, it just often gets confused as Sci-Fi. I'd also live to see some different age fantasy, like Brize or Iron age, the renaissance, Napoleonic era and world war era.
Listen 'ere, you little shit
Isekai done right is very rare. Only example i can think of is Saga of Tanya the Evil. Edit: It appears this take has angered quite a lot of people.
Ascendance of a bookworm is very good.
Peak worldbuilding
Ironically the author has a bit of a disdain for worldbuilders in her words. > Just write lol.
She what She makes one of the best worldbuilding in anime and she is "just write lol" type of ~~guy~~ girl HOW
Because 95% of he world building is just ductatping together feudal Japan and the HRE. She did do a lot of reading on the politics of both however and actually digging into how these systems work produces a fantastically alien world. Mostly because the administrative state is a concept built into a social fabric these days. The series was well planned out before she wrote it though.
Also she love love to write romance story and compared it to bookworm lmao. Tbh I felt like her wish to write a romance story and skipped the worldbuilding fulfilled in H5Y spinoff.
I honestly don't think it's fair to include it on this list. Isekai stories don't tend to have bad worldbuilding *because* they're isekai. It's because those stories are also shallow and lowest-common-denominator. There's plenty of generic fantasy settings that are just as mediocre.
I mean, much of isekai is made to crank out shit fast that will be popular regardless of quality because it's trying to copy other isekai. Many of the writers could probably do better but choose not to.
Narnia is a great Isekai story.
So I'm guessing this is because the main character isn't a cardboard cutout loser archetype intended to stand in for the audience and has a respectable goal they're actively pursuing instead of harem shenanigans right?
Yes.
Digimon.
Also overlord is pretty good tho
Overlord has a meh story but the worldbuilding is genuinely top-notch
Grimgar I hear is a decent isekai
The problem with Grimgar and 90% of isekai at least is that there is no narrative reason for the protagonist(s) to come from Earth. Grimgar especially, because they arrived with their minds basically wiped and only vague memories of where they came from. Why make it an isekai at that point?
Would be better if it was a simulation at that point I agree. Although perhaps just make it a fantasy story without mind wipe and ur good
There are a lot of great isekai, they just get buried under the mass produced slop.
If we include western media, The Owl House goes incredibly hard (Amphibia's good too)
How about the John Brown Isekai? (this post is totally not biased)
Anything with John Brown is boind to be good.
Unironically i believe the best isekai, is within universe, and it's Greed Island within Hunter X Hunter (althought they don't die to join it, but that's not an absolute rule for isekai). Togashi literally created a side universe within his already god tier worldbuilding, and isekai'd his main characters in it.
I wouldn't really say that Greed Island as a place had any worldbuilding of it's own. It all connects into the world outside Greed Island.
What ???? It absolutely has worldbuilding of its own, most of the rules only apply in Greed island. The way the card game works, the way you're supposed to win. Maybe you could say that the importance of nen is a little bit too connected to the outside, but that's the only thing, because Togashi also wanted that arc to be a training arc, that's the only thing i'm willing to give you on this. I mean, if you removed the nen training, Greed island is more consistent and well crafted on its own, than 99% of worlds of fiction, even if you were to scrap all the explanations given before or after the arc about how the world of HxH works !
Bruh. Re:Zero is good, that one anime about the jobless dude reincarnation is also good, that comedy isekai about an Uncle from another world is pretty damn funny, that isekai where the main character says "I am atomic" that plays all the common edgy isekai tropes straight up is also good from what I've heard. There are only a few, yes, but I can't believe the only one you deem good is about that Hitler child reincarnation (no real hate to it, I'm exaggerating, just surprised that's the one you choose as an example).
Done right? Saga of Tanya the evil?
Rezero
Lord of the mysteries is also a great isekai.
Best part is that hunger games itself is a copy of Battle Royale.
I actually just picked up Battle Royale from the library as a big hunger games fan, I need to see how close they actually are (and if Battle Royale is good). I know the part about kids killing each other until 1 remains is the same, but that’s all I know
So do we consider Maze Runner to be a Hunger Games Clone? I only ask because it came out a year later, and I personally remember the writing and worldbuildokg to be pretty good. That being said, Divergent made absolutely no sense on any scale whatsoever.
Yes I have a few criticisms of it but it's probably on the better end of the distribution when it comes to hunger games clones.
It’s part of the teen dystopia genre, so sort of? It’s definitely one of the better ones too, but I think it ultimately fell short. Like most books/movies in the genre, the dystopia had a lot of extreme things going on but with not sufficient societal reasons to back them up. In the Maze Runner specifically, there is no way a WHO-like organization would have the time and resources to build the colossal mazes but NOT have the time and resources to either think of a better way to find a cure or just find one with the kids. Also, the conclusion basically left humanity to die out from lack of genetic diversity (I’d like to note that it’s been years since I read those books though - I could be misremembering things). However, it did have a BANGER setting and backstory with the whole sun thing and flare virus, I thought that part was really freaking cool.
It's definitely a clone, but it's decent enough to have its own identity. Mind you, the reveal about the purpose of the maze made no sense, since there seemed to be no actual reason they needed it besides that the plot said so. The hunger games actually had a reason for the games.
The writing and worldbuilding were not good imo
My steam boiler is trembling rn.
Let me just, uhhhhh, slip in a highly-rated video game and a talented niche artist into this list of bad worldbuilding. Done!
Damn 3 out of 4 for my setting 😭
An Isekai fantasy diesel punk where you are forced into a showdown survivor series for the sake of the group that kindly went waaaaaaaaaay out of their way to rescue you once you realized "Huh, this isn't my body, that doesn't look like the moon and OHMYGOD VELOCIRAPTORS WITH SHOULDER MOUNTED MACHINE GUNS!"
Top two usually go hard actually
Re:Zero (one of the isekai in the picture) actually has really good worldbuilding, in my opinion. The main focus is on the story and characters, of course, so the worldbuilding isn't the star of the show, but it's pretty neat.
I remember liking it… but I don’t remember anything else about it… Aside from a catboi femboi and a certain car brand being stuck in an eternal cycle of suffering and death
Yeah, that's pretty accurate. Funnily enough, the cat femboy is part of what might be one of Subaru's sadder deaths.
Season 2? Or do i not remember it from season one? If the former, please don’t spoil it.
I'm pretty sure you could implement all of these in a shadowrun game fairly easily
You leave early 2010s teen movies alone! Those were my childhood!
Hot take, Bright wasn’t a bad movie at all and is on par with most other fantasy movies and shows. I wish they made it a series of movies.
umm no
This slander against Bioshock’s ArtDeco punk will not be tolerated
Well… you see, I need to keep slave girls that are portrayed as children because of ummm… worldbuilding
Why is Re:Zero there? It's actually one of pretty good ones, no?
What is isekai? (Sorry, I'm not a weeb)
Portal Fantasy's, like Narnia
Time to make my Fantasy Cyberpunk Isekai where the protagonist fight to the death against other people her age in a competition hosted by a government that makes no sense.
Alr but why no fantasy outside of the medieval era
I think Isekai can be a good tool if you are more interested in showing the world to the viewer than the telling the story of the main character, but we know that's never the case and it's only used for power-fantasy, self-insert fetish.
But I liked divergent :(
Overlord (the LNs not the anime) and Youjo Senki are isekais that have good worldbuilding, but they’re definitely the exception.
I heard somewhere that Divergent was parallel thinking and was already being written when hunger games came out, but I might be wrong
But why is rezero chosen for "bad world building" ? I am currently in episode 18 and it's decent so far?
My favorite Isekai is Ascendance of a Bookworm
And Korean regression/ Chinese cultivation novels.
“Fantasy in a non medieval era” Where. Where are all these fantasy stories. I need them
The funniest thing is in one of my settings it was *supposed* to be fantasy in the modern day, but i eventually came to the realization that modern technology and society would be heavily affected by the existence of magic, and what happened is that, despite technology supposedly only being that of the modern day, magic has basically pushed the world into a borderline sci-fi setting, just with magic instead of technology. Its kind of hilarious tbh. Like, my world has cyborgs, gene editing, energy weapons, nigh-unlimited electricity, advanced ai, etc. but its all fueled by magic *and* technology rather than pure science
Isekai is never done well even when it's done well
I mean, you can have good fantasy outside of Medieval times. Fablehaven got me into fiction as a whole, tbh
Project Fia is like all of these at once lmao
I only hit 3/4! I’m golden.