Renowned anime director Kazuchika Kise, known for directing Ghost in the Shell: Arise, voiced his concerns over the growing prevalence of isekai themes in
Things that have in the past been used in fiction to evoke familiar experiences to help people relate to it, or to convey something more concisely by building with concepts the audience can be assumed to be familiar with. For instance I’m reading Dracula right now, and while it does a great job of being comprehensible and relatable to a contemporary audience, I imagine it would be experienced somewhat different by someone living in the time it was written, who probably would have had more direct experience with things like the behavior of horses, letter writing, and cultural attitudes towards aristocracy and war pre-WW1. Though the parallels between letters and digital communications probably help a lot, reliance on them and the fear of having those communications restricted or tampered with is definitely relatable.
I can see your argumentation being followed by misguided production management, but I doubt it’s necessary or can positively influence world-building.
I don’t think it’s correct to attribute this phenomenon to cynical marketing efforts, there’s a vast amount of amateur fiction in this vein. Personally a large portion of my dreams center around videogame elements, and settings and scenarios that are partly or entirely explicitly artificial constructions are what I tend towards imagining while awake. Art reflects the minds of artists and audiences so it’s a natural direction for it to take.
Things that have in the past been used in fiction to evoke familiar experiences to help people relate to it, or to convey something more concisely by building with concepts the audience can be assumed to be familiar with. For instance I’m reading Dracula right now, and while it does a great job of being comprehensible and relatable to a contemporary audience, I imagine it would be experienced somewhat different by someone living in the time it was written, who probably would have had more direct experience with things like the behavior of horses, letter writing, and cultural attitudes towards aristocracy and war pre-WW1. Though the parallels between letters and digital communications probably help a lot, reliance on them and the fear of having those communications restricted or tampered with is definitely relatable.
I don’t think it’s correct to attribute this phenomenon to cynical marketing efforts, there’s a vast amount of amateur fiction in this vein. Personally a large portion of my dreams center around videogame elements, and settings and scenarios that are partly or entirely explicitly artificial constructions are what I tend towards imagining while awake. Art reflects the minds of artists and audiences so it’s a natural direction for it to take.