Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: part 4

IV. Open publishing

How are isekai works produced? My first experience with them was as anime (as I imagine is most common in America) and I vaguely imagined a staff of professionals, dissatisfied by having to work on them instead of some auteur project, set to writing, drawing, and directing them full time much as American TV is produced.

The truth is much stranger. A large majority of isekai (other than a few precursors) started out as amateur web series or "web novels" published on the Japanese site Shōsetsuka ni Narō ("Let's Become A Novelist"). (Of the well-known series I spot checked, one, _Sword Art Online_, started as a web series published on the writer's own site.) Shōsetsuka ni Narō started in 2004 and lets users post written works, read them for free, and upvote them if they like them. By the late 2000s, isekai became so popular on the site that they were called Narō novels: the term isekai itself was coined around 2012.

As a result, isekai is a genre of fanfic without a canonical fictional universe (at least, without one that is copyrighted). One of the early popular isekai on Shōsetsuka ni Narō was _The Familiar of Zero_, and it became popular to write other isekai on the site that were fanfic of that work. However, the new genre quickly took as its setting the generalized world of computer RPGs, a setting which can not be copyrighted. In every respect the writers and writing style are fanfic. Fanfic was once defined as being commercially unpublishable because of copyright: now it fuels an entire popular genre.

Studios and publishers go through the site and pick out the highest voted works, then buy rights to them and start them out in some other branch of mass media. Isekai usually starts as web novels, then become light novels (serial written text with occasional illustrations), then become manga and/or anime, gain other spinoffs like a gag manga, and then with even higher popularity may become a movie, live action film, or computer game. The result is that a publisher risks nothing in the way of initial advances or ongoing payments to keep professional writers writing, the writers are pleased to be published (many seem to write as a sideline to their "real job"), and the work produced is perfectly suited to its audience because that audience is generally the same as the people voting on the site. (1)

This seems to me to be the future of how these kinds of works are produced. One can see something similar with the popular (non-isekai) South Korean Webtoon platform, whose most popular series have started to be published as anime and live action TV series in their own right. It only takes one more historical accident or technology transfer to get science fiction, for example, writing thousands of vaguely Star Trek or Star Wars like (but not copywritable) fanfics on some site and that becoming a main source of English-language SF. In this respect isekai had a boost because its setting, the computer RPG, was familiar to an entire generation yet generic and closed.

This is not to say that a backlash has not already occured. In the last part of this series I'll get into the reception of isekai and try to tie some of these threads together.

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Endnotes

1) I have no idea whether the voting on the site is fair. There may be the usual problems with using a botnet to mass upvote, payola, having insider connections etc. My sense is that the methods for getting works to medium popularity may be unfair but that the number of legitimate voting users is high enough so that it would be difficult to cheat from there to the top.

2) Images: Shōsetsuka ni Narō site logo, chibi versions of popular isekai characters, a scene from the popular early Webtoon _Noblesse_.

Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: part 3

III. closed Eco system

Umberto Eco was one of the primary 20th century literary critics writing about open vs closed works. His 1962 book _The Open Work_ described open works as having a large number of possible meanings, using ambiguity and sometimes a degree of formal input by a performer or reader (in terms of rearranging of adding to the text) to allow the reader to create meaning that was not necessarily intended by the author. (In order to keep this lowbrow, I've shown as an example below an early TTRPG module that had blank spaces for some encounters that the DM was supposed to fill in.) Closed works, by design or function, restrict interpretation as much as possible. (1)

This analysis becomes much more complicated by 1979's book _The Role of the Reader_, after Eco took up semiotics. Here it is taken for granted that some degree of reader interpretation is needed to create meaning for any text. The author foresees a model of the possible reader (which Eco calls the Model Reader), and can in some ways guide the creation of this Model Reader via the text, if only by making them look things up or by discouraging other types of readers from reading it. Readers, on the other hand, create as a kind of hypothesis guided by the text a Model Author, and so decide how to read the text. (2)

As examples of closed works, Eco turns to Superman comics and Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. "They apparently aim at pulling the reader along a predetermined path, carefully displaying their effects so as to arouse pity or fear, excitement or depression at the due place and at the right moment. [...] They seem to be structured according to an inflexible project. Unfortunately, the only one not to have been 'inflexibly' planned is the reader." (Introduction, pg 8). (3) So the next question: why do people read these texts? Why not just always read more open texts and enjoy the readerly creation of meaning via interpretation? (Adam Roberts asks the same kind of thing in his piece on the Wheel of Time books.) Eco offers one of the best if rather obvious answers to this that I've read.

Eco starts his chapter / essay "The Myth of Superman" in The Role of the Reader by giving a very good description of the disintegration of temporality in these comics, done so that Superman can not really accumulate a past that changes him as an archetypal character. Then he goes through "the repertoire of topoi, of recurrent stock situations" that animate popular mystery series. Then: "The attraction of the book, the sense of repose, of psychological extension which it is capable of conferring, lies in the fact that, plopped in an easy chair or in the seat of a train compartment, the reader continually recovers, point by point, what he already knows, what he wants to know again: that is why he has purchased the book." Later: "Is it not also natural that the cultured person who in moments of intellectual tension seeks a stimulus in an action painting or in a piece of serial music should in moments of relaxation and escape (healthy and indispensable) tend towards triumphant infantile laziness and turn to the consumer product for pacification in an orgy of redundance?" We should "show more indulgence towards escape entertainments [...] reproving ourselves for having exercised an acid moralism on what is innocuous and perhaps even beneficial" as long as this does not "[become] the norm of every imaginative activity."

Eco takes pains with "plopped in an easy chair", "infantile", etc. and his general stance of indulgence to signal that he is a respectable intellectual after all. Reading more of his essays, it becomes apparent that he really likes comics, mysteries, all of these closed forms. His extremely popular first book, _The Name of the Rose_, features a medieval monk who functions as a detective a la Sherlock Holmes, and let's check off the list of libidinal forms listed in the last part of this series for isekai and apply them to Sherlock Holmes. Overt sexuality is unsuitable for the period in which it was written, but power as super-competence, leavened by outsider status and therefore not presenting him as a policeman / bully? Yes. Popularity? Holmes becomes well known to the public over the course of the series, and his close friendship with Dr. Watson is legendary. Creativity? The violin, the experiments in scientific methods of detection. Eco wrote his book with expert worldbuilding, using what he had learned as a scholar of medieval writing, but at its core the same operations occur as in any other closed work of this type. Superhero comics more or less add the overt sexuality back to the other tropes.

In later essays, as I dimly remember, Eco was less defensive about closed works. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the particular essay that I remember reading. I remember that he credited someone else with the idea of the "tired mind", the mind that having exhausted itself with intellectual work now needed to read a genre of closed texts where each presented some kind of variation around a core set of expectations, and which therefore could not truly surprise the reader or offer a wholly new experience that would only further deplete the reader's mental energy. This, I believe, is what underlies most SF and fantasy, mysteries, superhero comics, and a host of other popular forms.

Why would Japan have developed such a pure genre of the tired-mind type when the genre is, after all, intended for adolescents? Various cultural factors are at play, but I think it's significant that Japanese middle-to-high school students are famously under stress at school, called on for a peak educational performance that may determine their social-economic possibilities for the rest of their lives. Of course they are, after school, tired minds.

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Endnotes

1. Eco uses examples from all sorts of media – text, films, music, paintings – but I became interested in _The Open Work_ when I started writing poetry. The degree of ambiguity is critical to the success of a 20th century poem since it must have enough meaning to connect with the reader's own experience yet not so much that one might as well be writing prose. The core problem I've seen in new writers of poetry is that they have emotional connections to the phrases they've used that make them think that readers will have the same connections, but their writing isn't sufficient to suggest a similar response in someone else.

2. Sometime after 1979 it became commonplace to say that communities of readers create their own communal methods of interpretation. I wouldn't ascribe these kinds of preferred-interpretation-guidance powers to a single author in the vast majority of cases.

3. Eco here offers the kind of reversal that academics do when they return to a topic more than a decade later, after adopting a new disciplinary approach: closed works are now open to any interpretation because they assume only one kind of reader, open works are so complex that they guide all readers who engage with them to a single interpretation. Either this is a too-clever ridiculousness or I've misunderstood it or probably both. In any case what I'd call the Model Publisher of closed works really does not care whether someone reads Superman comics with a different interpretation decades later: their immediate sales are based on whether they are reaching their target readers.

Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: part 2

II. A libidinal genre

Isekai appears as an experiment in how to pack as much libidinal drive as possible into works that also require at least a bare minimum of plot and characterization. Formally, the genre is defined around a character or characters being transported to and living in another world: isekai translates as "different world" or "otherworld". But a core part of any isekai work is Freudian eros – sexuality, power, popularity, creativity. The main characters of isekai therefore sometimes resemble Mary Sues / Gary Stus, but without an authorial self-insertion element: instead the reader or viewer is encouraged to identify with the character.

In terms of medium, isekai can be a novel, a manga, an anime, a video game, or other specialized variants such as light novels. This multi-media nature is a core part of how isekai transforms from fanfic into mass entertainment, a process that I'll describe later on. Isekai are almost always serial in form.

What are the core moves of isekai, in a libidinal sense?

* Sexuality: the main character must attract the attention of sexually attractive people who want to sleep with them, often for no immediately apparent reason. In the majority of isekai, these are women or girls attracted to a man or boy, but they can be of any gender, as can the main character. Because isekai is in theory made for adolescents, this continual sexual appeal often occurs without any actual sex going on – one of the most unbelievable aspects of the genre, given that the main characters are most often older teenagers.

* Power: the main character has some potentially world-changing ability and becomes one of the important people in their new world. This can be magical combat strength, contemporary knowledge or technology in a pseudo-medieval setting, unusual capacity for development, fated heroism, super-competence at some activity that is not magical or technological per se, or a wide range of other devices. Crucially, the character almost always starts out as weak in perception or reality, because an always super-powerful character would be perceived as a bully and not invite reader / viewer identification. (1) This weakness is referred to throughout the isekai but is quickly subverted, often right at the beginning of the series.

* Popularity: everyone comes to admire the character, or if they hate the character this is an initial weakness as above. They are not merely individually powerful but are seen to be powerful in society and within forms understandable by that society. Similarly, even if they were previously an isolated, alienated individual they quickly make fast friends and enjoy close companionship.

* Creativity: killing is part of most isekai, but it is rarely the main expression of enjoyment of power for the main character. The main focus is usually creative: figuring out how to improve a society, discovering magic and researching spells, starting businesses, setting up trade, constructing buildings, cooking.

Within these requirements there are multitude of formal variations. The transition of a character to another world is either done through direct transfer of some kind (commonly, the character is somehow transported into the world of an RPG video game through a malfunction in the game's virtual reality system) or through reincarnation. Any case one can think of within these limits has been attempted: reverse isekai where fantasy characters are transported to our world, the main character as putative villain in the new setting, the main character as super-skilled before reincarnation instead of ordinary, the reincarnation fulfilling some unmet goal in the character's past life or as a manipulation for some sinister purpose. There are often comic elements, including those that play off of the tropes of the genre.

But within this formal variation there is a strange consistency of setting. Most often, the other world is a pseudo-medieval fantasy world that is immediately recognizable as the generic form of a Dungeons & Dragons descended RPG, complete with attack magic, monsters, character classes, and levels. The themes of reincarnation and demiurgy (2) are quite visible: reincarnation is the most common way of transferring a character to another world in isekai, while the most common method used in older stories or other genres (the Urashima Tarō Japanese folk tale, Narnia, some Lovecraft stories) is a door between worlds. Demiurgy is present in that the gods involved in this reincarnation or the creation of the other world almost never have a sense of the numinous: they are played for laughs, for erotic appeal, are fairy-tale guardian spirits, or are relatively friendly antagonists.

This initial recognition of the influence of RPGs is followed by a sense (for someone whose main experience is with TTRPGs) that something is off, that something else has intervened. What has intervened is the role-playing video game form.

Character abilities are not just numericized, they are viewable (via a "status scan" or similar) to the character or others within a world, as they are within most computer games of this type, and as they are not within almost all TTRPGs. Almost all isekai with this setting have an "adventurer's guild" that the characters join which provides posted jobs that the characters can do and offers measured ranks. This is not a common element of TTRPGs, but early video game RPGs had a building like this as a typical form of design because it was a convenient hub for players to progress through the game with some element of choice about which part they did next.

Why would isekai have descended from computer game RPGs instead of TTRPGs directly? I don't know enough to answer this question: I imagine that it has something to do with how by the time RPGs reached mass popularity in Japan they had mostly migrated to computer form. But they evidently have, and the difference is important because it is a difference between an open and a closed form. (I mean these mostly in a sense derived from Umberto Eco, which I'll get into later.) In a TTRPG, in theory you can do anything, because the entity creating the game world is a person. In a computer game one, you can't: your options are limited by the programming of the game. Even in an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online RPG) like World of Warcraft with 20+ million players, players can talk to each other and even act as communities, but their options are fundamentally set and can not be quickly changed.

A multitude of minor variations within a formally closed and libidinal system: this is the basic design of many popular genres that isekai takes to a limit. In the next part I'll write briefly about Umberto Eco, open vs closed works, and why people enjoy closed works.

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Endnotes

1) The process of giving a character with amazing abilities or drive a weakness so they don't appear to be a superhuman might be called "Vorkosiganation" after a character of Lois McMaster Bujold's. That popular SF series neatly pairs its main character's birth to wealth and power with his birth defects that make people regard him as a despised mutant: each book pairs his successful efforts with another serious medical injury.

2) Of course reincarnation is a belief of Buddhist and Shinto religion, and what I refer to as demiurgy might be better expressed through the Shinto idea of kami: spirits that do not have omnipresence, omniscience, or omnipotence. These ideas are not necessarily transmitted to this genre along with the overt RPG baggage: they are part of Japanese culture. There is also a classical line of descent of the idea that is European: for instance in Plato's Republic Book X, Chapter III there is the question of what kind of life you would best choose if reincarnated and the story of how Odysseus wisely chooses to be reborn as a common person. But the element of conscious choice and the retention of knowledge from a previous life also occur in Tibetan Buddhism.

3) Images above: a statue of Eros from Freud's collection, a scene from the isekai _My Life As a Villainess_, an unknown scene that I downloaded and promptly lost the reference to, a scene from the isekai _Restaurant To Another World_, a scene depicting a typical RPG Adventurer's Guild complete with job posting board.

Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: part 1

(a meditation on RPGs, isekai, fanfic, and some ideas of Umberto Eco)

I. Introduction: religious rites

If you are an older person, as I am – or perhaps a younger person in a particular subculture – you may have played what is now called a Table-Top Role Playing Game or TTRPG. At once the terminology betrays that this is already an old phrase. These games used to simply be known as RPGs before home computers made widespread computer gaming possible and they had to be distinguished from role-playing video games. The core and representative example of this kind of game is Dungeons & Dragons, but there are now some people who have played this as a computer game and have never played a tabletop version at all. At any rate, if you've never played one, they are basically what the kids play in _Stranger Things_.

Really, anyone bothering to read this probably knows what a TTRPG is, or at least can glance at the wiki page. But it's important to distinguish them from other forms of RPGs for reasons that I'll get into later in the series: table-top RPGs are formally open, while computerized forms are more or less closed.

A few years after I started to play what were later called TTRPGs, I realized that these games involve an ersatz form of religious practice. This has nothing to do with the religion(s) *in* the game, which usually involve an invented pantheon that is nevertheless flavored by popular ideas about medieval Christianity. Nor do they have anything to do with the recurring moral panics in the US about the game encouraging Satanism or belief in magic. They have to do with reincarnation and demiurgy.

First, reincarnation. Play a TTRPG for a while, and eventually your character will die, usually from mischance. What you do then is grieve, and then you roll up a new character – you use the game's creation method to start again with a different persona. Or perhaps the Game Master does not run the kind of game where player characters commonly die, or you don't play a single campaign for that long. In that case whenever you start a new campaign or try a new system, there the character creation step is again. It becomes apparent that this is a kind of play-practice for a form of reincarnation: you yourself perform the part of a soul that sequentially animates a number of imagined bodies. This doesn't mean that TTRPG players end up believing in reincarnation, but it is a form of repeated practice, connected with emotion, that reinforces it as a vague folk idea.

Next, demiurgy. The Game Master or Dungeon Master in one of these games creates the world, both its original form and as a description of what you sense and what happens in response to everything that you do. This person clearly occupies the place of God for the invented world – not one of the gods within the world-setting, who you can sometimes fight and defeat, but the real creator and animator of everything. At the same time, you are aware that this is an ordinary person, one of your acquaintances or friends, who may be called on to DM for the group because they are somewhat better at it than the rest of you but is not superhuman. Therefore, they are a demiurge, the artisan-creator of a world who is not the real, ultimate creator. Gnosticism, the religious tendency most associated with the idea of a demiurge, usually views the demiurge as either ignorant or misguided: to quote wiki "his act of creation occurs in an unconscious semblance of the divine model, and thus is fundamentally flawed, or else is formed with the malevolent intention of entrapping aspects of the divine in materiality."

These two religious ideas are transmitted in latent form through every descendent of the table-top RPG, including the descendent genre known as isekai. In this process they travel from a small-scale communal medium to a mass media product that notably starts out as fanfic, a form of fanfic that is publishable because it has escaped copyrighted characters in favor of an uncopyrighted setting. Isekai reveals something about how a set of creative problems in mass culture have been solved, beginning with the RPG in the mid-1970s.

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End notes:

1) I've written some scattered text about the general case of demiurgy as it applies to fiction, especially science fiction or fantasy where the writer creates the world as well as the characters that inhabit it. Most of this was written more than 20 years ago and hardly seems worth recovering. In general, the creation of a fictional world is referred to in one of three ways depending on whether it's given positive, neutral, or negative valence: subcreation, worldbuilding, or demiurgy. (Subcreation is Tolkien's word, which makes it very well studied: worldbuilding is what people teach when you take an SF writing course.)

2) I was unsure where to start with this set of ideas but decided that RPGs made the best starting point. It is not chronologically the earliest form out of the set (RPGs, isekai, fanfic): isekai might be considered to have started earlier if you include texts like C.S. Lewis' _Narnia_ books or Michael Moorcock's _Eternal Champion_ (I don't: I think the genre as such is Japanese) and fanfic has been in existence for as long as published fiction and notably took on its contemporary meaning with _Star Trek_ fanfic in the late 1960s.

3) The illustration I've chosen for the demiurge is a character actually named Demiurge from the popular isekai _Overlord_: it's probably fan art but I got it from google image search and I'm not sure how to credit it. Crediting fan work is one of the important problems that the makers of isekai managed to address.