'Does Everyone Hate Real World?': Ghost In The Shell: Arise Director Bemoans The Rise Of Isekai Anime

I mean, yeah. The real world sucks. It's basically one or two steps away from becoming the whack dystopian world in Ghost in the Shell, but without all the cool technology to match.

The original anime didn't seem like a dystopia.

For real though, isekai for me is like an instant pass nowadays. I don't mind fantasy anime, but the "hurr durr I'm a highschool loser that died and woke up in an MMO world" has to be the most creatively bankrupt genre of modern anime/manga and I really don't understand the appeal, especially when 90% of them are just variations of generic Dragon Quest tropes. You can make escapist fiction without having to resort to beating a dead horse that has been dead, buried and decomposed for at least a decade now.

And now that I think about it, do these isekai animes and mangas even sell that well to justify making so many of them? There's no way Japanese audiences aren't also getting sick of them to at least some extent despite how many of these still keep getting made.

He further criticized modern anime for incorporating game-like elements without logical in-universe explanations.
“Recent anime works will show things like a level-up gauge that appears when characters tap the air, even though there’s no in-setting reason for them to have a personal interface like that. I may just be getting old, but it really makes me wonder: ‘What is going on here?’ It just doesn’t work for me.“

I couldn't agree more. It just goes to show how little thought and care is put into the setting and world building of these shows, there's no craft behind most of these, they're just following trends it feels like.

the appeal is that it's the same predictable crap, over and over and over. people like that.
there are studies on this. people who prefer watching the same show over and over tend to be insecure, depression, and anxious types and their habit of never trying anything new reinforces this.
new and complex ideas are difficult and painful for most folks, so they avoid them.

Does everyone hate real world?

Well... gestures broadly

Have you lived in Japan? I want to die and be reincarnated as a slime too

Better to be a slime in Japan...

Yeah, the real world is pretty mid

Unemployed right now, so I'm gonna go ahead and give the real world a solid 4/10. Would not recommend. If you can get reincarnated into a good situation (harem?), would strongly suggest it haha.
the real world is pretty great if you make good choices.
but it's a lot easier to make crappy choices, like watching Isekai and never going outside. living in a escapist fantasy bubble and eating doordash is a fasttrack to being miserable.
- A lot of choices are made for us. People who think it's down to only choices probably ignore all the luck and privileges they experienced. I could have been born in much worse circumstances than I was, and that would not have been due to any choice I made. Children dying in war zones made no choices to get there.

Personally I just like fantasy, and for some reason a metric fuck ton of fantasy anime happens to be isekai.

Helping people self-insert works, unfortunately.
But the success of Frieren and Dungeon Meshi are showing that people are probably getting a little tired of these fantasy worlds having a random person from the real world walking around.

Does everyone hate real world?

I mean... kinda, yeah. Though, to be fair, the feeling seems to be mutual...

“Recent anime works will show things like a level-up gauge that appears when characters tap the air, even though there’s no in-setting reason for them to have a personal interface like that. I may just be getting old, but it really makes me wonder: ‘What is going on here?’ It just doesn’t work for me.“

My idea on what's going on here is, people find it impossible to imagine what is entirely alien to them. Fiction uses various tricks to bridge this gap for its audience; by describing familiar experiences in a fantastical context, it draws you into its imagined reality. But for people who exercise little actual agency in their real lives, don't go outside much, and play a lot of videogames, the traditional material probably isn't stuff they can relate to as well as people in the past could. A fictional world that has the mechanics of a videogame is a natural direction to go because it will be easier for modern people to imagine than a fictional world where nobody uses phones or computers.

What do you mean by traditional material?
I can see your argumentation being followed by misguided production management, but I doubt it's necessary or can positively influence world-building.
All kinds of mechanisms and progression can be presented naturally, intuitively, and embedded within the world. I doubt a noticeable number of people are so far gone they can only understand the world through the interface of video game interfaces.
- What do you mean by traditional material?
  Things that have in the past been used in fiction to evoke familiar experiences to help people relate to it, or to convey something more concisely by building with concepts the audience can be assumed to be familiar with. For instance I'm reading Dracula right now, and while it does a great job of being comprehensible and relatable to a contemporary audience, I imagine it would be experienced somewhat different by someone living in the time it was written, who probably would have had more direct experience with things like the behavior of horses, letter writing, and cultural attitudes towards aristocracy and war pre-WW1. Though the parallels between letters and digital communications probably help a lot, reliance on them and the fear of having those communications restricted or tampered with is definitely relatable.
  I can see your argumentation being followed by misguided production management, but I doubt it’s necessary or can positively influence world-building.
  I don't think it's correct to attribute this phenomenon to cynical marketing efforts, there's a vast amount of amateur fiction in this vein. Personally a large portion of my dreams center around videogame elements, and settings and scenarios that are partly or entirely explicitly artificial constructions are what I tend towards imagining while awake. Art reflects the minds of artists and audiences so it's a natural direction for it to take.

yes

I mean have you seen the state of the world; currently it's rampant with capitalism, explotation of women, degradation of LGBTQTIA+ rights, blatant nazism and extreemists, ecoterrorism and climate change denialism, shinkflation, etc

I mean it's really hard to have hope with the top constantly kicking people down and everyone just trying not to drown just to live an above average life

unless you're born with a silver spoon or got the right connections, things are looking mighty tough to say the least

study some history.
the world is better than it's ever been for a lot of people.
if you think it's bad now, imagine living through the great depression and ww2.

With regard to the MCs having game interfaces:

Maybe he's been working hard in making anime for so long, bless him, that he doesn't empathize with those who grew up playing MMORPGs, which is where that comes from.

Who knows, maybe in a few years we'll have light novels/manga/anime based on mobile gaming tropes to pander to those who grow up playing those.

I mean we have Blue Archive, Touken Ranbu Kan, Mahjong Kan, which are all mobile game adaptations this season already

But those are direct adaptations instead of exploiting some trope that's common in all mobile games, like "My Gacha Lootbox Ability Gives Me SSS Rare Girlfriends Every Time"

On one hand, I understand and agree with some of his points, on the other hand: yes

Hate is such a strong word. But yes. The real world can get really tiring sometimes.

With that out of the way, off to my tangent. There's probably two parts to explaining why there's a lot of isekai works out there.

It is easy to write. It's easy for the writer to basically insert themselves into their works. That way, they would have a far easier time working through the main character's motivations, actions and reactions. Isekai also makes it easier for the writer to worldbuild. They can just do an anything goes setting with a god who specifically made the world in whatever way that's most convenient to the writer. That is, lazy writing. That is not to say this means all isekai is bad, but rather, since it's easy to write, there's bound to be a lot of people who'd give it a go.

It's easy to read. A lot of the isekai works I've read so far has been the type where I can just check out my brain at the entrance and dive in. A lot of this has to do with the kind of isekai I read, but with a setting that's anything goes, and an MC‌ that I can relate to, I can easily snuggle into the work and pretend. Yes, it's escapism, and I don't think the genre as a whole has any pretentions otherwise.

As far as I'm concerned, isekai as a genre is like potato chips. It's unhealthy, even not that interesting culinarily, but it's also something I would love to indulge in from time-to-time. Add to that a tub of vanilla ice cream as a dip (probably a hot take) and I'm set for a relaxing night watching isekai. (Of course, the next morning, I'm back to the real world and all its shit).

I don't think it's about "everyone". It's about production companies picking what's popular, the currently popular theme, and produces shovelware standard-productions in a narrow, uninspired target-audience checkboxing way. They contract producers and creatives, but restrict them and likely invest so little that it ends up with what it is. The industry as a whole, many titles, end up as forgettable, mediocre, similar shovelware.

Much like Hollywood produced an abundance of hero movies until everyone was sick of it. Or how EA produced the same sports game each year. Or Call of Duty. Or Battlefield.

I agree with there being a lot of sub-par and mediocre productions, and the overpowered, harem, and video game elements are big offenders and indicators of what most of the time end up as bad products.

I enjoyed Reincarnated as a vending machine. Simple formula, very forced, but hilariously absurd.

Most overpowered protagonist anime end up between bad and awful. But The Eminence in Shadow makes use of it as poignant satire. And I remember seeing another series where they made it work through enemy hybris, and the punishment/revelation was satisfying enough that it worked, in large part through direction and production quality.

The most "wtf" regarding isekai I recently saw was when the entire series was not about being an isekai, but - not at the begining nor end - they put a random scene in where the protagonist had a vision from modern Japan city and was like "what is this about?" and that was it. Maybe they included it just so it can have the isekai product tag? I have no idea.

Coming back to the original theme and hypothosis, the differentiation of and popularity of fantasy vs isekai escapism is interesting.

Ghost in the Shell is certainly fantastical. Enjoying or viewing or getting invested in fantastical stories is inherently partly escapism too. Isekai specifically puts a - most of the time - normal modern human into a fantastical setting though, materializing escapism as a fact on the protagonist.

I'm not sure there's such a hard line to draw though.