Another (very brief) discussion with Hero Tenki

Hero Tennki (ヘロー天気)

Joe: After the first discussion, I got in touch with Hero Tenki again, mainly to ask him a few relatively minor questions largely unrelated to his work, but a bit more about the general culture of online isekai writing before 2010s.

All edits will be spelling or grammar-related. Any content edits will be mentioned.

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This may be a strange question, but do you think Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz are isekai?

Honestly, I haven’t read those two, so I don’t know the specifics. Based on the synopsis, I think it’s reasonable to categorize them as isekai.

Gotcha. Another strange one – do you think Sword Art Online is isekai?

Since Sword Art Online is set in a “digital world” (trans note: he uses “dennou sekai”, 電脳世界, somewhat akin to cyberspace or cyber world), it can’t be said to be isekai, roughly speaking.

Even if the content and setting is fantasy, if the actual world is in space or in the present, or it’s in the past or the future, stories that bear sort of space where science and technology as central, they’re probably closer to science fiction.

Look at it this way,

If magic is the core element, it’s fantasy. If science is the core element, it’s science fiction. If there are stories with both science and magic, complex technical explanations, and theoretical constructions with a clear paradigm, it’s science fiction. If science and magic have RPG quirks, but the world is ambiguous, then it’s narou fantasy.

At least, that’s the way that makes sense to me.

I see, that’s pretty interesting. Over here in the West, many folks consider SAO to be isekai. What’s the first or earliest “isekai” story you remember? And did you expect the genre to become so big when were writing World Customize Creator?

I think isekai as a genre has been around for a long time, look at Alice in Wonderland. Gulliver’s Travels is said to be a sort of isekai story.

Though, part of the reason we’ve got ‘isekai’ as a clearly distinguished element now is because it’s a lot more popular and we’ve got a clearer idea of the people writing online.

By the time I was writing World Customize Creator, it was already well-known. Even in 2008, when I was writing The Otherworld Magician, there were already quite a few novels published on individual websites. The common tropes for summoning and deployment were already a thing.

Some might say that this was to be expected, that isekai would be this popular, but at the same time this wasn’t really in the minds of some folks.

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Hero Tenki (Hello Weather? It's a play on words) is the author of World Customize Creator and The Otherworld Magician. He's been writing isekai since 2008.