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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1426 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 26, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Thanks for your response, although I'll admit it didn't help me very much. For one, I didn't list "trash" as a reason, and the closest analog was "not enjoyable." I don't understand art criticism, so if art critics (or other taste gatekeepers) give vague criticism, I just phrase it descriptively as "they did not enjoy it." Should I just note that as your position?

"Not justifying major plot points" is interesting. Is a premise the same as a major plot point? In lots of fantasy there are magic systems that do not have any justification. I'm assuming that this is not a case where there are repetitive, periodic deus ex machina or a systemic problem with bad writing? If the premise is this unrealistic thing, like who cares? Is It's A Wonderful Life trash? Is the issue that Isekai tries to steal valor by having a dumb premise and doesn't even bother to do something interesting (="enjoyable") with it?

You’re right that plenty of good works rely on unexplained premises/plot (e.g. any involving magic, Bojack Horseman why animals are antropomorphized). So I take back my first theory.

Second theory: “trash” can be substituted for anything and the general point holds: when the work is clearly Isekai, people have predefined expectations, people who like / dislike the genre like / dislike those expectations respectively.

Why this applies to Isekai more than other genres…because Isekai tends to be predictable, so the expectations are stronger.

You can "not justify" something in the sense that we don't know a justification for why gravity exists and works the way it does, and you can "not justify" something in the sense that despite everything we've been told about gravity, an apple falls up instead of down.

Shouldn’t it be enough to be able to suspend your disbelief when it comes to literature? It’s not at all like hard sciences.

Once you’ve come the postulate of necessity in philosophical terms, you’ve reached the end of the explaining that you can do. At some point these are just bottom level features of reality. Reality only has one level or organization, and that’s the lowest level; despite the separate cognitive elements that keep track of the different levels of organization.

Naturally, I suspend disbelief when reading most literature. However, suspending disbelief for increasingly formulaic and lazy disbelief-inducers gets boring.

If apples are constantly falling up even though we're always told they fall down, it would seem to be a systemic, periodic problem and not just a silly premise.

So it sounds like: the initial Isekai premise is just the first instance of the inevitable general tendency to Make Shit Up (commonly called 'bad writing'?)

If an apple fell up once so conveniently that the entire plot happened (and it was never explained), I'd consider that bad writing unless, I suppose, the irony of this one unexplained anomaly is the entire premise.

If there are apples falling up periodically yet it's never recognized or addressed in-universe even though it drives the entire plot, again, bad writing.

If an apple fell up once so conveniently that the entire plot happened, I'd consider that bad writing unless, I suppose, the irony of this one unexplained anomaly is the entire premise.

This seems obviously correct to me, except that empirically it's just wrong. Off the top of my head I can't actually think of any other examples in which it's wrong, though; is there some meta-irony here about how there's this one unexplained anomaly in the category of narrative quality of anomalies?

It's hard to explain in unimpeachable terms why Groundhog Day doesn't count as timeloopslop. I suppose one aspect is that it was literally the first, or among the first examples. The trope hadn't yet become a boring device for gaining power and waifus and actually had themes to explore. It's also a work where the anomaly encompasses the entire work, rather than being a vehicle for other plot points. It's not a deus ex machina if a deity suddenly interfering is what kickstarts the plot rather than solving crucial parts of it.

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