Some formats get abused when people don’t recognize them as formats. “Demotivational posters” were the done thing for a while. Then advice animals. Then rage comics. The people doing it genuinely don’t understand they can just not do it, because they’ve never thought about it for one second. They view this as the baseline.
This can happen across entire commercial mediums. Giant robots started as a specific narrative power fantasy and became the setting where animes happen. Same deal for magical high schools, rigid-but-shallow dystopian societies, and isekais. Holy shit, do isekais make the issue crystal clear. The instant utility of shoving a like-you-but protagonist into a different world is shamelessly direct. But it keeps showing up in stories where there’s no reason the main character has to be from somewhere else. These authors think that getting Wizard Of Oz’d is just the paper you write the story on.
Some formats get abused when people don’t recognize them as formats. “Demotivational posters” were the done thing for a while. Then advice animals. Then rage comics. The people doing it genuinely don’t understand they can just not do it, because they’ve never thought about it for one second. They view this as the baseline.
This can happen across entire commercial mediums. Giant robots started as a specific narrative power fantasy and became the setting where animes happen. Same deal for magical high schools, rigid-but-shallow dystopian societies, and isekais. Holy shit, do isekais make the issue crystal clear. The instant utility of shoving a like-you-but protagonist into a different world is shamelessly direct. But it keeps showing up in stories where there’s no reason the main character has to be from somewhere else. These authors think that getting Wizard Of Oz’d is just the paper you write the story on.