@tehwatever
Yeah, and buying into and promoting the narrative that they oversaturate the market is buying into just that - an illusion.
When people begin biting into a false narrative en masse, there’s a problem. That’s not a good thing. It’s outright misinformation significantly altering the discourse on something. No need to tolerate bullshit.
Also, most Isekai aren’t aggressively marketed or heavily memed or any shit like that. Not in any notable way for anime adaptations relative to their scale. Of course something like Shield Hero got marketed a bunch. It was supposed to be a killer app, but how many Isekai get that level of marketing? And did anybody - outside of Anitube - give a shit about Death March or Isekai Smartphone?
Speaking of - you know what constantly sheds them spotlight, at least for the international audience? Fucking Anitube. A lot of anitubers constantly shit out Isekai vids and promote ideas like they’re everywhere and unavoidable and all of that, all in the most hyperbolic and polemic-laden ways they can possibly communicate these ideas. Making shitty SAO vids has turned into making shitty Isekai vids. So if you interact with anime on YouTube at all, you’ll fucking run into it since it’s the view meta. And then a lot of casuals will trust these Anitubers to be a source of info for them and spread that misinformation the Anituber promoted to increase view count.
And they did the same thing years ago with Magic High Schools. It’s not about how prominent something actually is - it’s about whether or not it’s prominent enough for anitubers to be able to claim that its the latest trend catering to disgusting virgin otaku with no lives and that it’s killing anime and overrunning the market and blah blah blah.
That’s what nets views.
That’s the fucking end goal.
Just bleh. More than anything I think it’s a display of how people with a platform can manipulate the perception of something, even if they’re being dishonest in doing so. This is a case where it’s pretty obviously dishonest when you look at it, yet look at how many people actually question the idea that it oversaturate the market. Worse yet, when you pretty much kill that idea dead in the water with fucking numbers and other objectively quantifiable things, people won’t hear it. That narrative is so prominent people reach for stupid justifications to cling onto it, because the amount of people who also bite into the bullshit is enough to
make them doubt reality and try to come up with a bunch of weak-ass explanations to fill in the gap. After all, that many people can’t be wrong, can’t they? Even if the entire discourse is predicated on lies, and even if they heard that idea from someone else, be it directly from the source at YT or secondhand in a thread like this one. There’s just no way. When so few are challenging the idea and so many people are espousing it, yet the side with the overwhelmingly better information and evidence
is the minority, it’s still not easy to convince most people that the majority is wrong.
From there, shitty rhetoric spreads outwards because of people adopting that as the take, and people who don’t interact with Anitube at all bite into that narrative that was born there, because they hear it from someone else. Nasty little cycle of lying, intentionally or unintentionally withstanding.
Question. Question question question. While it’s never been at the extent that it reached with isekai, this narrative of (x) non-traditional genre oversaturating the market has been a constant thing in the anime fandom for the last 15 years. It started with Moe and CGDCT. Then they came after my type, ecchi. Then magic schools. Then Isekai. Any time people start talking about a genre oversaturating the market,
doubt them. Or at least fucking question it.