The Originals
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I thought it would be fun to list the original light novels for various themes. Such as summoned/reincarnated isekai, villainess is the protagonist, unrealistic daily life, isekai harem, hero vs demon, super powers, sci fi, etc.
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As in, the first work introducing each theme?
I suspect that you might need to settle for the first several, given the question of who first thought of it and who first started posting their WN.
And you would need to go back to the web fiction in a number of cases, given that the first instance of a theme in online fiction may never actually get published professionally.There'd also be the question of those themes that have also shown up outside of the Light Novel environment prior to appearing inside of it.
When you consider the pulp SF from the early to mid 1900s in the US, a number of those showed up there considerably before Light Novels were a concept. And even there, a bunch of the ideas were taken from still earlier works... -
@Weasalopes - yep, John Carter of Mars is an isekai dating back to 1911, and you could say Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) is also one just as much as The Master of Ragnarok.
It would be an interesting project to map out a family tree of LNs, though even if you did comb through thousands of WNs you'd have the problem of parallel inspiration.
It's a familiar event in Hollywood to have multiple movies or TV shows in development at the same time based on the same ideas. Two killer volcano movies released closely together, Armageddon and Deep Impact, all the "evil mind control bluetooth headset" movies and TV show episodes.
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@HarmlessDave If we intend going as far back as we can, then the earliest still existing works that might be considered an isekai might possibly be an Egyptian myth about someone navigating the duat, or possibly a Sumerian story to a similar effect. Basically, I'm very confident that the earliest, still existing, isekai story, would be the story of a person navigating the land of the dead or the land of the gods.
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@Weasalopes - yep, John Carter of Mars is an isekai dating back to 1911, and you could say Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) is also one just as much as The Master of Ragnarok.
It doesn’t technically involve going to another world, but given similarities in other respects to isekai stories I’ve long considered Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King (1888) to be at least “isekai adjacent.”
Edit: The “isekai cheats,” if I remember correctly, are possession of firearms and (I kid you not) knowledge of freemasonry rituals.
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@HarmlessDave I meant limiting it to Japanese light novels. The first Japanese light novel to use the theme.
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@Weasalopes said in The Originals:
As in, the first work introducing each theme?
I suspect that you might need to settle for the first several, given the question of who first thought of it and who first started posting their WN.
And you would need to go back to the web fiction in a number of cases, given that the first instance of a theme in online fiction may never actually get published professionally.There'd also be the question of those themes that have also shown up outside of the Light Novel environment prior to appearing inside of it.
When you consider the pulp SF from the early to mid 1900s in the US, a number of those showed up there considerably before Light Novels were a concept. And even there, a bunch of the ideas were taken from still earlier works...Just about every time travel romance as well. Super popular in the 90s and they were a dime a dozen. Outlander pretty much has time highways but at least those have their consequences. Some authors treat it like a doorway.
Being in an actual video game too like Sword Art Online: User Unfriendly published in the 80s. (Can't remember which author wrote it I haven't read it in more than 20 years.
