You wake up to the chirping of birds and sounds of a brisk winter morning. Slowly easing yourself out of bed and into your slippers, you check the clock. To your relief, it’s finally Sunday. Which, for the weebs of the world, means you get to forget about being a functional member of society for a day. In other words, Attack on Titan airs. At this point the obsession of the community has gone beyond what it should and watching each new episode live has become as essential as eating. 

So with a spring in your step, you sit down in your desk chair, knowing very well that you probably won’t be moving from this spot between now and next November. After turning on the computer, you pull up Crunchyroll (or Funimation if you're feeling spicy) and log in. It greets you with a little animation and then gives you your recommendations. To your ever-loving surprise, what do you find? Isekai. Isekai everywhere. No matter how many times you dislike it and remove it from your recommendations list, it somehow wiggles its way back into your feed. 

What is Isekai, one may ask? Isekai is an ever-expanding genre of anime that everyone seems to have a love-hate relationship with. It consists of the protagonist suddenly getting transported to a different fantasy world, usually involving magic and cute anime girls. Sometimes the protagonists are transported by death, in a reincarnation-with-all-memories-intact kind of play; while other times they don’t even bother explaining why or how they got there. 

This most likely began In 2012 with the Sword Art Online boom and has been eating away at everyone's life force since. The problem with Isekai is that it's the same thing. Every. Single. Time. And that’s not even the worst part. When you're trying to get someone into anime, you normally just throw them an Isekai because they are trivially easy to get sucked into. So the majority of new viewers watch solely isekai. Sadly for us, all the main studios have capitalized on this and now produce way too much Isekai. It used to be a subgenre for fantasy or shonen, but no, it has turned into the ultimate brain rot. 

The only good thing that has come out of this is Isekai has allowed the extension of our community, allowing many people who never would have gotten into anime to experience the ultimate brain rot. I’d like to think that the growing hatred for the genre has brought the community together through the loathing of the immaculate web the studios have created. But it truly is a shame that the funding is going towards those dumpster fires instead of being funneled towards something worthwhile.