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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8234 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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You might know it by the word "isekai". AKA that thing in fiction where people from our world go into a different world, usually unexpectedly and sometimes after death.

I've seen at least one Anglophone author use "portal fantasy" as the Western equivalent of the term "isekai". I haven't seen any use "permanent transmigration".

In my experience of n=1 reading Chinese cultivation novels, the term has been "transmigration".

"Portal fantasy" sounds misleading to me. Like it's about a world where rifts open in random places and monsters come out to be slain for loot.

No, "portal fantasy" is an older term (dating back at least to 1997) and describes works like Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and The Chronicles of Narnia where a kid gets transported to a fantasy land to have adventures and save the day before returning home to their ordinary lives (xkcd boils down the genre to a nutshell in "Children's Fantasy"). It's also different from the modern isekai genre, which usually involves older teenagers or outright adults dying and being reincarnated into a fantasy world, often with great powers.

There's a handful of weird intermediate works: Spellsinger has a loser adult who doesn't die, but never returns and gets great powers; Magic Kingdom For Sale SOLD has a successful adult who could return but doesn't want to do so and is flakier on powers, Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure has a teenager with great powers who eventually has to force his way back into the alternate world, the main Barsroom stories have an adult getting superpowers in mere irreversible transportation but a couple characters eventually end up getting Truck-Kun'd into space.

But normally, yeah, there's a pretty clear division, and that's ossified a lot in the last two decades.

It's also different from the modern isekai genre, which usually involves older teenagers or outright adults dying and being reincarnated into a fantasy world, often with great powers.

As seen, for example, in Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom series.

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