Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari Episode 1 Discussion

Eanki said:
The isekai concept is fundamentally just the farmboy/child/country bumpkin MC of fantasy taken to the extreme.

Both serve the same purpose: the escalation curve. Earth and some quiet fantasy starting town generally aren't the most whimsical place in a story. They serve to establish something familiar and grounds the story before the crazy fantastical. That character becomes your POV into introducing the wonders of your world in a way that allows the viewers to experience the world just as the characters are. You establish the setting with a character who is unfamiliar with it, allowing for more leeway in introducing said world.

The munchkins in The Lord of the Rings started at the same starting line as the munchkins in Narnia. So I don't really prefer one over the other.

Eanki said:
Log Horizon is an anime with a worldbuilding prowess that had impressed me, and I'm weaned on the best of Western fantasy literature. If you know Brandon Sanderson's Three Laws of Magic, then all you have to know is that it understands and embraces that fully. It's Chekhov's Gun the Anime.

MMORPG-based isekai series have a distinct advantage over other isekai types: MMORPG mechanics allow for a pretty strong backbone in constructing a hard magic system. In fact, it’s one of the easiest ways of establishing a hard magic system, really.

Hard magic systems, as opposed to soft magic systems, have clearly defined rules so that the reader can understand and predict them, in accordance with Brandon Sanderson’s first of three laws of magic: “An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.”

Log Horizon understands this, more than any other of the recent wave of isekai stories. And this is what enables the core strength of the series: interconnection. The author has a solid established system that he then gets to mix and match. He has established ingredients and then how he uses them determines his dish. And by god, he's making a lauriat. As per Sanderson's Third Law of Magic: "Expand on what you have already, before you add something new."



And that is where the series shines the most. It's about payoffs to amazing little buildups that snowballed hard into importance. It's a series that continually expands on what it builds up and it doesn't end in just one payoff.

It's also an ever evolving world. It's not static, where discoveries are forgotten and the world is continually and forcefully stuck into one dynamic. No. Unique interaction of the game rules becoming reality slowly in multiple aspects, as well as character actions, shape and continually reshape the rules of the world.

And it's not done yet.

Eanki said:
The best of the isekai anime are the ones that play to the strengths of the concept in question. I've said this before already and I'll say it again. Isekai by design is the ultimate expression of one of the basic tenets of world-building: the learning curve. You start with someone who's literally not from this world and he/she becomes your POV into introducing the wonders of your world in a way that allows the viewers to experience the world just as the character is. You establish the setting with a character who is unfamiliar with it, allowing for more leeway in introducing said world. The imagination is basically the limit.

Half of the strength and half of the allure of fantasy fictions lies in its setting. If we subscribe to the Furniture Rule, then fantasy fiction is an exploration of the human condition dressed in fantastical garments. Part of what makes a good isekai is the setting, or rather how setting plays with the other aspects of the show. The setting should be integrated so fully into the show that it cannot be discussed and analyzed without going into detail about the show itself and the setting's constant implication for the show's story.

The problem with most isekai is that the setting is basically just the stage where the story occurs. They are in such a rush to get to the "good parts" of the plot that they neglect the build-up. And the setting plays a huge part in the build-up.

Consider Log Horizon. The reveal of Shiroe's Overskill is one of greatest moments of fantasy fiction in anime. I'd argue it to be perhaps even the greatest. It's the product of so many build-ups, so many ideas coming together into one. Everything from how Log Horizon establishes the rules of video-games to limit the story in one breath and then use it to expand the world even more on the next, to the mythos itself of Log Horizon's natives, the Psyche-Anima Theory, came together to create a scene we should have seen coming. It's one of those moments where everything makes so much sense in hindsight and yet it amazes you still to witness because the clues were there yet you never saw it coming. And it's one of those things I hate spoiling and it's one of those things where the build-up matter so much because it would be downright lame otherwise, so I'm just going to use episode 1 to expound some more of the show's merit.

The first episode of Log Horizon sets a good precedent of what the series can offer. When Shiroe trips on a rock, we are told by his conversation with Naotsugu that he is taller than he was in real life because he made his game avatar taller. This sets up not only one facet of the world but also the introduction of Akatsuki in the next scene. Akatsuki is a relatively short college girl, only she’s stuck in a tall, gangly male avatar. It’s a much more extreme situation than Shiroe is in. Luckily, Shiroe has an appearance-changing potion from a one-time event. But it is here that the series presents the first appearance of its defining characteristic: an escalation curve. An apt description of Log Horizon would be “Chekhov’s Gun: The Anime”. It is a series that revels in the minute details that snowballs into consequence over and over again. Here, it establishes Shiroe’s minor alteration before introducing a major one. And as the series progressed, we encounter another character in the same dilemma and several hints of a much bigger plotline for the occurrence of such players. It could, for example, tackle the topics of gender and sexual identity in the context of nature vs nurture as now you have male players in female bodies, and vice versa. You now have essentially a male psyche in a female body (and female hormones), and a female psyche in a male body (and male hormones). You can even explore the idea of having a mismatch between say a male brain and a female "gut brain" (google it) which are now in one body and have to define not only that body's sexual identity but also its behavior as influenced by hormones and other chemicals.

Indeed, it can be said that the setting itself and the adherence and exhaustive introduction to general video game rules and MMO sensibilities before twisting and turning said rules is another manifestation of the escalation curve. The world is introduced as the world of the game and to illustrate that further, the show had the trio set out to attempt a PvE fight with low level monsters in the course of their investigation. The fight starts off with our protagonists trying to fight the mobs in front of them with the clunky, counter-intuitive method of clicking their abilities in the holographic menu screen. Because that’s how they played the game in their PC: mouse and keyboard. When it grew dire for them, Akatsuki reflexively defended her master and in doing so triggered one of her skills without using her controls, an impossibility if this was just a game. The seeds of the idea that the possibilities extend beyond video game constraints are then planted. The video game rules and logic that should have tightly constrained the setting instead became the plot points that expand it.

There's a quote from Paul Auster that I think sums it up:

"In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so - which amounts to the same thing. The world of the book comes to life, seething with possibilities, with secrets and contradictions. Since everything seen or said, even the slightest, most trivial thing, can bear a connection to the outcome of the story, nothing must be overlooked. Everything becomes essence; the center of the book shifts with each event that propels it forward. The center, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book has come to its end."