Discussion
I don't watch a lot of isekai. Not a lot of anime in general; watching TV in languages I don't speak takes a lot of spoons these days, between reading the subtitles, watching the action, trying to catch the subtleties of an unfamiliar culture in the voices and animation...
...and isekai specifically is built on a formula that's Kinda Not for Me. But the genre has existed for long enough that I occasionally catch wind of shows that play with that formula.
@3geek14 Portal fantasy is older than writing. I think isekai is a more specific genre.
Also Perseus was a magical girl if we don't actually care about gender. Actually normalizing women as divinely empowered protagonists is much more recent, but still older than Isekai As Distinct From Other Kinds of Portal Fantasy.
And @Canageek has found me one that's actually giving me a sense of what I want from fantasy anime.
1. Light on game mechanics. I'm given to understand that RPG crunch is a fundamental part of Japanese high fantasy, and I'm put off by how it constrains what kind of stories can be told and what they can focus on.
2. A protagonist who isn't the Chosen Hero, whose story overlaps with theirs.
3. Queer.
Anyway, here's Isekai Office Worker: The Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter.
Our hero is a salaryman. That's it. Well, not really. He's stubbornly ethical: he gets isekaied trying to protect a teenage girl he met on the way home from work, and in his new life as an accountant in the Generic Germanic Bureaucracy, he gets his entire department to stop rubber-stamping military budget requests that are skimming from the magical disaster relief fund.
He's impressed the guard commander with the cute purple eyes, (complete with little white flower petal particle effects!) and pissed off the officers that were overdrawing the budget. Also, because he's a relatively ordinary workaholic salaryman, he gets addicted to stamina potions. Episode 1 ends with him finally crashing, and Purple Eyes finding him as he collapses.
The title sequence is extremely romance-coded for Salaryman and Purple Eyes. I was bracing myself for a season of will-they-won't-they, but apparently they fuck in episode 2, so I have that to look forward to.
...And then probably a season of waiting for them to get over themselves enough to admit they want to make a relationship out of it, but it's still a step in the right direction.
@WizardOfDocs yeah helllllll yeah
@WizardOfDocs This sounds like a fun one
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@WizardOfDocs some friends on Discord were recently talking about "which is older: magical girl or isekai", and my takeaway from reading that conversation was "it's hard to know which stories are older when they come from a time of oral tradition rather than being written down". This group maybe has loser genre definitions than the norm, but they did point to an isekai in Gilgamesh.