Isekai and Mecha

PerfectAzul said:

@deg It’s funny you mention Escaflowne because I was thinking the same thing. Sadly, however, that was not a title I enjoyed.

deg said:
you did not like the ending in particular? because i can agree with that lol

VanishingKira said:
This alone tell me you don't watch enough mecha anime. Most mecha fans are not solely super robots fans (a subgenre of the mecha genre). When you narrow down mecha anime to the it just "robot fighting" you're doing a disservice to the genre.

deg said:


you did not like the ending in particular? because i can agree with that lol

NextUniverse said:
do you miss giant robots shooting things

Theo1899 said:
Not at the moment. There's a mecha anime airing this season that's quite good actually.

NextUniverse said:
really? only result i got for this season was Tomica Kizuna Gattai: Earth Granner, in recent times though, only good mecha I can think of is Promare.

Hughsie said:
I slightly prefer isekai to mecha I think. I don't really care about trends in anime too much though, there's plenty of anime out there for me to watch so I'm not too bothered if there's a trend towards one genre for a while, trends pass and I'm not forced to watch any show I don't want to anyway.

Theo1899 said:
I'm talking about this one: https://myanimelist.net/anime/40942/Gundam_Build_Divers_Re_Rise_2nd_Season
The first season was pretty average but still a huge improvement over the original divers. The second season (the one that's currently airing) is a very enjoyable show that's competently written.

Pullman said:
I don't really get the connection here. Mecha was in decline long before the very recent isekai trend started popping off. Also it's not like they're exclusive, you can easily have an isekai setting with mechas - it's been done before.

So yeah, it feels pretty random to draw a direct line from mecha, which had its peak 3-5 decades ago and isekai which started becoming super popular 2 or 3 years ago. Basically the entire history of long-running battle shounen fits in between those two time periods :>.

Theo1899 said:

I don't know if it's his fault but it seems that a lot of kawamori shows suffer in the second half.

SecretWeeb3019 said:
Isekai has so much potential yet authors are using the same world, plots, and characters over and over. Most modern isekais you see are this or even all. Isekai just means another world and yet we always keep using the same other world. There is only so much you can pump out of the same setting. Isekai them into a unique world. Maybe a post apocalyptic world. Maybe a generic world that slowly fall apart into hell no matter how much the MC tries.

NextUniverse said:
It's no news that the Mecha genre has pasted its glory days years ago with Isekai pretty much taking its place in mainstream anime. From someone whose only Mecha anime watched before Isekai blew up, being Code Geass. The change isn't something I find good or bad.

Though with Isekai titles pretty much coming every season since 2018 (maybe even earlier), bringing about generic anime like: Infinite Dendrogram, My Next Life as a Villainess, The Misfit of Demon King Academy, it starts to leave a bad reputation for itself.

Anyways what are your opinions on the matter, do you miss giant robots shooting things, or are you ok with neets transporting to a random world.

NextUniverse said:
I see, fair enough, haven't watched Gundam so I wouldn't know about if it was as good as the originals


I may be wrong here but shounen has always stood high since things like Dragon Ball Z, maybe even earlier, up to the present day. I wouldn't call it random to connect Mecha and Isekai since the after the decline in Mecha, the rise of Isekai has happened since SAO got an anime adaption, whilst long-running shounen does fit in place between these two events, I am just comparing the rise and fall of a particular theme/genre that has happened.

Pullman said:
Sigh. My whole point was that mecha started declining much earlier than you think and isekai became a trend not in 2013 but in 2018 or so, at least in anime. I went back through every season since SAO (which btw is not even isekai) aired once and there's less than one isekai per season in most years after that, right up intil 2018/19 where it started to explode. People have called it a trend for ears before that, but they had no basis for that. Post-SAO anime still had few isekai and a lot of them were very different from each other and only recently did it get to the point where they pump out multiple generic isekai every single season. That's what I call a trend, not 2-3 per year which largely set themselves apart from each other. There's been a bunch of other trends that were more popular (at least in terms of quantity of shows) than isekai was during that time.

And mecha (as I already said) peaked in the 80s and started declining as sooon as the early 00s, which you can probably link to the change in business model around that time. So depending on where you draw the line there's 15-30 years that passed between mecha being the dominant trend in anime and isekai becoming the dominant trend, which is a lot of time to just gloss over, a lot of other trends happening in the meantime.

Also you could argue that trends are defined by being short-lived, usually just a couple of years of dominance before being replaced by the next thing. Mecha was more than that, it lasted decades and still has a cult following.

Between ecchi/harems, battle harems, fujo pandering sports anime, cgdct and idols - to name just a few trends that happened between the decline of mecha and the rise of isekai - I still don't get why you focused on these two, as if they were directly related.