If there's one genre of anime out there that went from zero to thirty in no time, it's the isekai genre. Isekai features the protagonist (usually from our world or a close approximation of it) being summoned/reincarnated into a fantasy world where more often than not they're tasked with saving this new world from the threat of a tyrant (usually a demon king).

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The genre has seemingly resonated with fans, which caused a huge influx of new isekai anime that still marches on today. While it's not a "one size fits all" sort of thing, a lot of isekai are similar to each other and play out tropes that run wild throughout this genre. Though after so many have come out, there are a few things about isekai that don't always make a lot of sense.

10 THE MAJORITY OF ISEKAI PROTAGONISTS ARE MALE

Being an isekai hero isn't restricted to just guys, there've been quite a few female protagonists across the genre too. However, if you compared the amount of male to female isekai protagonists, you'll start to notice that the majority of them end up being male.

Even one of the most notable female lead isekai anime, The Saga of Tanya the Evil, has a male protagonist in the body of a small girl, which sort of creates this grey-area. There's really no reason in-universe why the gods, goddesses, or just the isekai powers that be would even have a sort of gender-bias when choosing heroes.

9 THE MYSTICAL WORLD OF...[REDACTED]

Imagine being transported to a completely new world, with no prior knowledge of it. The first question most would have would be "where am I?", now imagine that outside of a few kingdoms and countries, this world doesn't even have a name. That seems to be a recurring theme with some isekai.

The map of some of these worlds seems to have a name for most of their locations, except for the world as a whole. Even popular isekai anime do this and while some like Konosuba do it possibly as part of spoofing the genre, more serious toned ones like Re:Zero ends up never naming its world at all, it's just "a fantasy world".

8 THE HERO ISN'T CONCERNED ABOUT THE LIFE THEY LEFT BEHIND

Some heroes end up being suddenly and forcibly summoned from their world to this new one and are tasked with saving it. Most of the time, their focus then becomes fulfilling that role and strangely having little concern for the life they just left behind.

RELATED: 10 Non-Anime TV Shows You Didn't Realize Were Actually Isekai

While there are isekai protagonists end up being shut-ins who didn't have a lot going on for them anyway, they could still have at least had a family back there who's probably really worried that they suddenly vanished. Yet a lot of them don't seem to think about that and just roll with the adventure.

7 WHY ARE THERE SO MANY HAREMS?

An image from Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody.

At this point, most anime fans aware of the isekai genre know the story. The chosen hero gets sent to another world where he meets, rescues, or impresses some girls from this world with their amazing skills and those girls fall in love with the hero and join his party. In short, isekai anime has a habit of playing out the harem trope.

The ladies in question are usually just impressed by how awesome (overpowered) "protagonist-kun" is, but personality-wise things are only skin deep for a lot of cases. Outside of it just being kind of a power-fantasy, there really ought to be a little more reason to like the hero, outside of "because he's the hero".

6 A LOT OF THESE WORLDS LOOK THE SAME

Isekai World Building

Most isekai anime takes place in a mystical, medieval fantasy world full of knights, mages, monsters, and wonders. With the sheer number of them out there and how many of them portray this fantasy world, it gets a little hard to tell them apart.

RELATED: 5 Isekai Anime That Will Be Around For The Next Decade (& 5 That Will Disappear Completely)

A lot of the most popular isekai are in the exact same kind of European-style fantasy world, there's rarely any that take place in a completely different kind of fantasy world. They're practically identical which makes it really hard to differentiate them, especially when some of them don't have names.

5 REINCARNATION IS WEIRD

While some heroes are summoned, others have to leave the mortal coil before their adventure can truly begin. Whether it be a tragic accident or self-sacrifice, isekai heroes that start off the story dead get to be reincarnated into a new body to live out the adventure, though the parameters can be allover the place.

Sometimes the hero is revived exactly as they were before their death, sometimes they start life anew as a child, and sometimes their new body might not even be human at all. The many ways the hero can be revived or reincarnated are all kind of weird and out there that some of them just seem random and without reason, sometimes even unfair.

4 "WOW, THIS FANTASY WORLD IS A LOT LIKE A VIDEOGAME!"

A lot of isekai tend to have videogame elements to them, some actually take place in videogames themselves. It's easy to see why as the fantasy elements to lend themselves to being interpreted like an RPG. Still, it's kind of weird that in these worlds of magic and monsters, that are definitely not videogames, have things like "HP" or "Level Ups" which can all be seen in a menu screen.

Usually, these get written off as being a form of magic, but it's treated as a totally normal aspect to life in this world by the people who inhabit it. A lot of the time, the hero turns out to be a gamer too, so this all ends up being oddly convenient.

3 OVERPOWERED HEROES

In many works of fiction, the protagonist must learn and grow to hone their skills so that they'll be strong enough to face any threat. By watching the hero develop like this, their achievements feel greater because of how hard they worked for it. Or the hero can just start off pretty much invincible, which a lot of isekai are guilty of.

Now some protagonists, like Ains of Overlord, were originally game characters that had a high level and a lot of high stats, but for those who don't have that benefit of the doubt, they tend to show up in this new world already overpowered for some reason. This trope, if not handled well, can make tension pretty much nonexistent since the hero is basically always guaranteed to win from the start.

2 OUR HERO=USUALLY SOME TEEN/YOUNG ADULT FROM JAPAN

Seiya, Cautious Hero

There seems to be a bit of bias for choosing the hero of an isekai story, namely it's almost always some teenager or young adult, a lot of the time a gamer or shut-in otaku, who gets chosen to go on this epic quest. This tends to be a pretty good choice in the long-run, but why?

More often than not, there's nothing that makes this particular "chosen one" special other than that they were the ones that got summoned. Along with them getting to be overpowered out of nowhere, it makes a lot of the villains and other warriors in this new world (who probably trained their whole lives) seem cheap when they're outdone by somebody who's been at this for maybe a few weeks at most.

1 THIS WORLD OF WARRIORS AND MAGIC CAN'T SAVE ITSELF

The hero is always summoned to this new world and tasked with saving it from the evil that ravages the land, but why is nobody from this world worthy of being the hero themselves? Only an outsider who's unaccustomed this fantasy world can bale them out because apparently nobody in this other world counts as "hero-material".

Isekai worlds can be filled with many powerful individuals that the hero will eventually meet on their journey, and sometimes those characters get to join the hero's party, but none of them could possibly be the hero, but there's no reason why they couldn't. This begs the question of if the hero eventually goes home, how well off will this world be without them?

NEXT: 10 Manga Series That Prove Isekai Has Gotten Out of Hand