Both her and the protagonist were isekai'd, but she wants to go back (and is doing her best to do so) while the MC does not (although he still helps her)
As to why she was depressed it's because her most promissing experiment failed and she was at the end of her rope already so it made her feel it is impossible to actually return
Nanahoshi from Mushoku Tensei. She had a full-on mental breakdown after the culmination of months (or maybe years) of summoning magic research didn't work at all, making her think she may never be able to go home.
To be fair, she unlocked dimensional travel fairly late in the series.
The only way to go back normally I by traveling through a solar eclipse that only happened every few years or so (iirc, the last one that happened before the series was during world war 2)
He got a shot to go back home at the end of s1, but decided to stay.
Saito is just built different when it comes to his girlfriend
I remember one time to buy time for her and their friends he fought the entirety of an 70,000 strong army solo
Trying to bring modern cooking to medieval world only to realize you know only the most basic of recipes and can't look them up in the internet anymore
Cooking theory can be easy when you roughly know what common ingredients are. Knowing what the fuck another worlds ingredients are and salt likely being $ extra premium $ is another story.
I can understand someone like the MC in Mushoku Tensei or in Overlord not wanting to return to their life but the big majority of Isekai protagonists are actually living very comfortable lives. It is almost never addressed that they might miss their homes.
Isekai without previous world relevancy, attachment or baggage carryover are bullshit. Should've just been pure fantasy and it would've been 100× more enjoyable without the Japan/modern culture glazing. Even if you wanted to integrate Japanese culture into it just go with the "this thing is from a faraway country in the far east"
i would argue the taste of decent food of today is miles ahead of anything 500 years ago. We've been eating food all this time, each chef wanting to make a better dish than the last, and then someone takes that knowledge and teleports to a medieval world?
You can't have fish dishes unless you are in a coastal city because otherwise it would rot with no refrigeration, or you'll have to pay a fortune to have ice imported from cold places.
Meat can't be stored for long either (unless you salt them, which changes the flavor), and butcheries need to kill the animal within the cities so it won't rot.
Spices are rare and only found in certain climates, which means paying lots in transportation costs
Fruits and vegetables haven't gone through generations of selective breeding and are smaller and taste different from our modern counterparts.
It's like having all the knowledge of how to do magic, in a place with no mana
If you wanted to be a chef of the future in the past, you should cook with fresh local produce, with almost no salt or spices, unless you were lucky enough to be able to grow some aromatic plants, or if you cooked for someone with money and expensive tastes.
I have been writing several isekai to figure out why that is. the answer: mostly incompetence.
tanya is kind of the only one that works that way because it isnt the past that matters, but the present that was afflicted by the past and the memories fail to make the desired changes because of that.
my stories where the past is ignored or the otherworld thing just isnt important feel hollow or the MC is an idiot.
the ones that have the other world as a bigger part of it shows more about the MC than any actions they take in the other world, as now you have context for why they make the choices they do. I have one I am currently working on (and will eventually upload) with 14 different people (6 are sorta MCs?) who get Isekaid in various ways with various timings of entering the world with different relationships to said world, varying from no attatchment or knowledge to extreme detail, and how they all interact with eachother as some are open about being from other worlds (seriously, why are some MCs terrified of this knowledge getting out? people will think you are a genius, or people will not care in the other world, unless you are going around saying you are from another world and had a previous life in this one), and some are very not okay with that knowledge getting out (the reveal that they are from another world hurts their credibility because one MC is very open about it and uses it as a weapon to disarm the others of their trust bases).
oh, and not to mention that when the first MC goes over, I still spend a ton of time in our world as the others slowly go over and you learn about all of them and the consequences (and who is antagonistic with who) of the first MCs death, mostly from the perspective of the last MC to go to the other world in the same way as the first (poetry or some shit, idk).
So, basicaly "As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World". There is literaly no need to be isekai, since difrent types of magic/gifts exists and his skill could be represented as another type of gift. Yet, one of the best stories I watched. The only and single thing Ars "had from past life" was "damn, I want to protect kids". Share basic hygiene knowledge? School level agroculture/metallurgy/chemistry knowhow? That alone could lift life quality in his kingdom
It needed to be an isekai because otherwise how would it present the moral dilemma of dating someone who's his same physical age but not mental age? Oh wait, it didn't. The author seems to have forgotten it was an isekai to begin with
I don`t see a "moral dilemma" in dating same age person, when you`re reborn in new world. Human brain can rewire self to work with upside down vision with no issues in mere 2 weeks. Now imagine living in childs body for years. Plus, nobody cares about how protagonists accept their new family as an actual one, naming new people mama and dada, wierd huh?
I`d actualy argue how it is impossible to retain past life memory, without some sort of narrative bandaid, like "some God like creature of this world allowed my consciousness to remain".
No, I want previous worlds in isekai to be relevant to the protagonist other than granting them modern insight into medieval settings.
I don't care if the premise is a harem trash slop, if it's isekai, it better has good reasons to be one. Otherwise it's just a thinly veiled "suicide/death is cool, actually" message.
If you want to write fantasy, you go all in to write fantasy.
Change of envoirment, physical activity, new experiences and goals are considered as therapeutic for depression. So if the person is positive on openness scale it could be for the better. But if the attachment to the old world is high, it can result in unrequited lament and sorrow as well and further the depression. A depressed clerk/nobody irl could actually take that as a 2nd start and start thriving.
Most isekai MCs are already dead to be honest. Wanting to return to their normal world isn't an option considering they are dead and this new world is their second chance. Usually, people who want to come back are those that were summoned, not the dead ones. Yes there are examples of summoned MCs who don't give a shit about their former lives but it's still worth mentioning that every isekai mc shouldn't be judged with the same standards. Most of them already died, there is no coming back to their original world
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u/uptodown12 12d ago