Does this really require a tag, let alone one this absurd? Characters coming to our world from another is a standard trope in most supernatural stories. This is not relevant to Isekai. That's like calling homosexuality "reverse heterosexuality". It makes no sense.

Does this really require a tag, let alone one this absurd? Characters coming to our world from another is a standard trope in most supernatural stories. This is not relevant to Isekai. That's like calling homosexuality "reverse heterosexuality". It makes no sense.

I see the tag and go, oh a fantasy or similar character coming to our modern day world, and it tells me what the story is about. Sure the wording is a bit silly but it tells me what the story about just fine, and it's a fun tag imo

Also I mean hey we have even more niche / unique tags than this, such as "depressing ass fuck" lmao

Characters coming to our world from another is a standard trope in most supernatural stories

what

Characters coming to our world from another is a standard trope in most supernatural stories

what

Also yeah I don't think the majority of stuff tagged with Supernatural on here has characters coming over from another world? Usually they just co-exist with humans, that's how pretty much all of our vampire stories are.

Characters coming to our world from another is a standard trope in most supernatural stories

wha

Also yeah I don't think the majority of stuff tagged with Supernatural on here has characters coming over from another world? Usually they just co-exist with humans, that's how pretty much all of our vampire stories are.

Do I have to mention the obvious examples? For Shounen anime you got Bleach. For sci-fi you got basically half of every single TV show having this plot in at least a couple of episodes. Lots of JRPGs love to have characters or invaders from another world as plot points (the other usual one is "ancient civilisation which may or may not have come from space").

Coming from another/parallel/time slipped world or dimension is a very common trope in fiction. Before the dreaded isekai garbage started to be overused, the concept of a protagonist going to another world was also common and didn't need its own stupid tag anyway. Isekai does appeal to a more specific Japanese fantasy of some generic boring male self-insert jumping to another world to get a harem or become super important and amazing, because power fantasy. Isekai is to other world exploration what fast food is to a 5 star meal.

In that light, I am disgusted by the idea of making a concept as simple as characters visiting from another world be associated with this term.

Characters coming to our world from another is a standard trope in most supernatural stories

wha

Also yeah I don't think the majority of stuff tagged with Supernatural on here has characters coming over from another world? Usually they just co-exist with humans, that's how pretty much all of our vampire stories are.

Do I have to mention the obvious examples? For Shounen anime you got Bleach. For sci-fi you got basically half of every single TV show having this plot in at least a couple of episodes. Lots of JRPGs love to have characters or invaders from another world as plot points (the other usual one is "ancient civilisation which may or may not have come from space").

Coming from another/parallel/time slipped world or dimension is a very common trope in fiction. Before the dreaded isekai garbage started to be overused, the concept of a protagonist going to another world was also common and didn't need its own stupid tag anyway. Isekai does appeal to a more specific Japanese fantasy of some generic boring male self-insert jumping to another world to get a harem or become super important and amazing, because power fantasy. Isekai is to other world exploration what fast food is to a 5 star meal.

In that light, I am disgusted by the idea of making a concept as simple as characters visiting from another world be associated with this term.

I thought you meant works on this website and reasons to use the tag or not here specifically. Also you generalize and hate isekai way more than I do, because there's a lot of isekai that I read and watch that aren't self insert male power fantasies and harems. There's various female led, Yuri, and even some male led isekais, that I genuinely have so much love for. Same with reverse isekai. So I'm not going to fight with someone that genuinely hates isekai and thinks they're disgusting garbage. It's simply not worth my time, especially when isekai is a very broad and general term that covers even Mario going from Earth to the Mushroom Kingdom at the end of the day. Reverse isekai is used for this type of series in general, if you hate the term isekai and this tag so much and want it to be removed I guess you should discuss it with the mods. We have very different views here but I wish you well and a pleasant day regardless.

Characters coming to our world from another is a standard trope in most supernatural stories

wha

Also yeah I don't think the majority of stuff tagged with Supernatural on here has characters coming over from another world? Usually they just co-exist with humans, that's how pretty much all of our vampire stories are.

Do I have to mention the obvious examples? For Shounen anime you got Bleach. For sci-fi you got basically half of every single TV show having this plot in at least a couple of episodes. Lots of JRPGs love to have characters or invaders from another world as plot points (the other usual one is "ancient civilisation which may or may not have come from space").

Coming from another/parallel/time slipped world or dimension is a very common trope in fiction. Before the dreaded isekai garbage started to be overused, the concept of a protagonist going to another world was also common and didn't need its own stupid tag anyway. Isekai does appeal to a more specific Japanese fantasy of some generic boring male self-insert jumping to another world to get a harem or become super important and amazing, because power fantasy. Isekai is to other world exploration what fast food is to a 5 star meal.

In that light, I am disgusted by the idea of making a concept as simple as characters visiting from another world be associated with this term.

This objection doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, if I'm honest. I can't generalize it without confusing myself, to wit: Two women falling in love was also a common trope before the yuri genre got popular. Do we need to delete the yuri tag? A character sweeping away their lover in their arms was a trope long before nerds developed their own word for it, so do we need to delete the princess carry tag? Besides, if you dislike isekai so much, isn't it helpful to have a tag for it so you know what to avoid?

Most of the stories that had travel to or from another world were never called isekai in the past. It was simply not a tag. The tag came about with a very specific theme/type of other world exploration in mind and not a good one. Ultimately whether you like isekai or not, there was no reason to invent the dumb term "reverse isekai" which does not make sense etymologically or historically.

By definition all isekai means is "another world". It doesn't even differentiate which direction it goes. Thus there is no "reverse" isekai, unless you literally speak of stories with no other world involved. Then it would be a reverse isekai, but that's just all standard story-telling in existence.
This is why I made the comparison of heterosexuality vs. homosexuality. One is not the reverse of the other and most people would find it offensive if you did call it that.

last edited at Jun 18, 2025 1:58PM

The purpose of tags is not to make etymological or historical sense. Reverse isekai gives me information about the work that Fantasy by itself doesn't. I don't see what's so terrible about that.

The purpose of tags is not to make etymological or historical sense. Reverse isekai gives me information about the work that Fantasy by itself doesn't. I don't see what's so terrible about that.

If you want it so bad, any story tagged "reverse isekai" is just an isekai story. Use the already well spread tag instead of making up another that doesn't even make sense the longer you think about it?
This site is already critisized for over tagging works and this is a very obvious example of that. I can understand gag tags to a degree, but this is too much. Do you tag any school story with "school"? Do you need a tag for whether a story takes place in the 80s or 2010s? Do you tag it "America" if it takes place in the USA?

I think I listed all the reasons why this tag is a bad idea. I've got nothing more to add.

last edited at Jun 18, 2025 2:07PM

The purpose of tags is not to make etymological or historical sense. Reverse isekai gives me information about the work that Fantasy by itself doesn't. I don't see what's so terrible about that.

I do find it fun that in hindsight I can call Marvel's Thor 1 a reverse-isekai now lmao

Since isekai typically is about a character from our Earth engaging with a world that they are out of context in, such as Alice going to Wonderland. With reverse isekai Thor is going from Asgard to Earth, and a lot of the movie's story focuses on how he's an out of context element that engages with our world in a unique way due to being from another realm. Regardless of whatever pop culture origins isekai as a term started as it's evolved into a very broad term and genre used to describe many different series and scenarios.

Genuinely all of the tags you're mentioning have at least the potential to be helpful. When there's a lot of stories updating at once, or when I'm trying to find a specific story that I don't remember the title of, more tags are actually better, they help make series more distinctive in my brain. I've found myself more likely to enjoy manga where a protagonist comes from a fantasy setting to Japan than the reverse, so tags recognizing the difference helps me find what I like! How... awful? I guess?

The purpose of tags is not to make etymological or historical sense. Reverse isekai gives me information about the work that Fantasy by itself doesn't. I don't see what's so terrible about that.

I do find it fun that in hindsight I can call Marvel's Thor 1 a reverse-isekai now lmao

Since isekai typically is about a character from our Earth engaging with a world that they are out of context in, such as Alice going to Wonderland. With reverse isekai Thor is going from Asgard to Earth, and a lot of the movie's story focuses on how he's an out of context element that engages with our world in a unique way due to being from another realm. Regardless of whatever pop culture origins isekai as a term started as it's evolved into a very broad term and genre used to describe many different series and scenarios.

This makes even less sense. Thor is not from another world in the sense of Isekai. He is an alien from another planet in the same universe. That is not isekai.

Do people who dont even seem to understand what an isekai story actually is really make the best judges of whether a "reverse isekai" tag makes sense...?

Genuinely all of the tags you're mentioning have at least the potential to be helpful. When there's a lot of stories updating at once, or when I'm trying to find a specific story that I don't remember the title of, more tags are actually better, they help make series more distinctive in my brain. I've found myself more likely to enjoy manga where a protagonist comes from a fantasy setting to Japan than the reverse, so tags recognizing the difference helps me find what I like! How... awful? I guess?

This could be remedied by improving the search function to search through the synopsis. You must comprehend why giving a story hundreds of tags is inane...

Genuinely all of the tags you're mentioning have at least the potential to be helpful. When there's a lot of stories updating at once, or when I'm trying to find a specific story that I don't remember the title of, more tags are actually better, they help make series more distinctive in my brain. I've found myself more likely to enjoy manga where a protagonist comes from a fantasy setting to Japan than the reverse, so tags recognizing the difference helps me find what I like! How... awful? I guess?

This could be remedied by improving the search function to search through the synopsis. You must comprehend why giving a story hundreds of tags is inane...

Can you find me a story on here with hundreds of tags?

The purpose of tags is not to make etymological or historical sense. Reverse isekai gives me information about the work that Fantasy by itself doesn't. I don't see what's so terrible about that.

I do find it fun that in hindsight I can call Marvel's Thor 1 a reverse-isekai now lmao

Since isekai typically is about a character from our Earth engaging with a world that they are out of context in, such as Alice going to Wonderland. With reverse isekai Thor is going from Asgard to Earth, and a lot of the movie's story focuses on how he's an out of context element that engages with our world in a unique way due to being from another realm. Regardless of whatever pop culture origins isekai as a term started as it's evolved into a very broad term and genre used to describe many different series and scenarios.

This makes even less sense. Thor is not from another world in the sense of Isekai. He is an alien from another planet in the same universe. That is not isekai.

Do people who dont even seem to understand what an isekai story actually is really make the best judges of whether a "reverse isekai" tag makes sense...?

This could be remedied by improving the search function to search through the synopsis. You must comprehend why giving a story hundreds of tags is inane...

Can you find me a story on here with hundreds of tags?

What a terrible deflection... Please stop being intellectually dishonest. You said that adding a bunch of superfluous tags like the ones I mockingly mentioned would be helpful, so I confronted you with the end result of such overzealous tagging. Are there any stories with the 80s or America tag? No? It is almost as if we had been talking about hypotheticals.

last edited at Jun 18, 2025 2:36PM

Genuinely all of the tags you're mentioning have at least the potential to be helpful. When there's a lot of stories updating at once, or when I'm trying to find a specific story that I don't remember the title of, more tags are actually better, they help make series more distinctive in my brain. I've found myself more likely to enjoy manga where a protagonist comes from a fantasy setting to Japan than the reverse, so tags recognizing the difference helps me find what I like! How... awful? I guess?

Yeah I think more tags on Dynasty would genuinely be helpful. I love websites that use 20+ tags on something, and all the little nuances of tagging, how I can combine tags together to get very specific things, black list tags and combinations to remove specific things and so fourth. I love more tags, tagging is a genuinely fun element. I often argue that Dynasty needs a pubic hair tag because I'd love to able to easily find works with pubic hair.

This could be remedied by improving the search function to search through the synopsis. You must comprehend why giving a story hundreds of tags is inane...

Can you find me a story on here with hundreds of tags?

What a terrible deflection... Please stop being intellectually dishonest. You said that adding a bunch of superfluous tags like the ones I mockingly mentioned would be helpful, so I confronted you with the end result of such overzealous tagging. Are there any stories with the 80s or America tag? No? It is almost as if we had been talking about hypotheticals.

We already have:
Old school
School life
Language gap
Social gap

and of course
FREEDOM
which should be enough to cover pretty much everything in your post above. The reader remains largely functional in spite of this. I don't know why you feel the need to accuse me of "intellectual dishonesty," I'm just explaining how I use the website.

Sigh... there are database sites like Visual Novel database that are enitrely made for the purpose of tagging every aspect of a visual novel. But unsurprisingly on actual storefronts the same VNs do not have the same dozens of tags, because this is an unnecessary distraction, not to mention very easy to spoil content or overinflate perception with irrelevancies. There is a single page with a blonde girl? Add the "blonde side character" tag! The protag is secretly a bad guy? Add the "evil protagonist" tag!

I give up...

@Mr. Jones
Most of those garbage tags are not used. That's why they dont interefere with anything. They are clearly vistigil or gag tags that dont actually get used wherever they (could) apply.
I accused you of inteelectual dishonesty because you replied to my post about hypotheticals and hyperbole with "but where are stories with 100 tags???" as if you were playing dumb. Sigh...

last edited at Jun 18, 2025 2:52PM

Now that you mention it Mr Jones, I want to see the FREEDOM tag used more. That's a hilarious tag to have lmao

Wasn't there anything objectionable in the recent image batch so now we need something else instead?

@Licentious Lantern Your point is a huge nothinbgurger and any and all claims of intellectual dishonesty must stem from projection.

Perhaps it's the literalism part that shows wanton ignorance to both usage and historic context. Science-Fiction is usually neither empiric nor peer-reviewed. Most lovecraftian authors actually aren't called Lovecraft. And the vast majority of fairy tales doesn't even include fairies. Some might even argue that some of the manga on this Lily-site aren't even about gardening!

It should be fairly obvious that the contemporary use of "isekai" focuses on reincarnation and/or summoning setting, as opposed to the many, many other flavours of "person gets displaced and needs to build a new life in a fantastic world". John Carter-esque planetary romance isn't isekai, nor is copium-fuelled popadantsy, nor is Alice in Wonderland. I assure you the term is usually understood (Ex. 1, Ex. 2, Ex. 3, Ex. 4 )as such and your insistence to the contrary makes me doubt you're arguing in good faith.

Next up is your motivation to remove this tag because ... errr ... you got bitten by a marketing director and now you need to throw users a curve ball once in a while to feel validated? I don't see you complain about System Administrator, strangely enough. (Nothing under that tag even touches on shell scripting by the way.) This site has tags like Onions for crying out loud, and the ever-confusing Idiot couple tag. This thing in slapped on literally 4 different works (3 series and a one-shot, before you go off gloating that there are actually "more"). What is there really to lose by keeping this tag?

EDIT: I did not refresh the thread whilst writing this. Seriously, folks, you could have all done something productive with your time, like checking your smoke detectors or something.

last edited at Jun 18, 2025 2:55PM

Sigh... there are database sites like Visual Novel database that are enitrely made for the purpose of tagging every aspect of a visual novel. But unsurprisingly on actual storefronts the same VNs do not have the same dozens of tags, because this is an unnecessary distraction, not to mention very easy to spoil content or overinflate perception with irrelevancies. There is a single page with a blonde girl? Add the "blonde side character" tag! The protag is secretly a bad guy? Add the "evil protagonist" tag!

I give up...

Just loaded up the "Recently Added" page - the average number of tags per upload, at this very moment and excusing anything that might be on my very short blacklist, is 7.8

@Zesc
You didnt understand my points and are poisoning the well wherever you can. Not to mention your penchant for projection of my intentions. You are not worth engaging with. I just wanted you to know that your approach is very unfortunate.

Just loaded up the "Recently Added" page - the average number of tags per upload, at this very moment and excusing anything that might be on my very short blacklist, is 7.8

I genuinely don't understand what you are even trying to say with this. Perhaps this conversation has run its course. I leave the rest to the mods.