@Serah said in Are Axed Novels/Manga Worth Licensing?:
Also a story unable to do the world building good when not an isekai is more an issue of the writing style than that being or not being an isekai.
Yes. This is really the point that I'm trying to make. The writing is king. And this goes both ways. A boring isekai is just as much an issue of the writing style. There's nothing inherently wrong with isekai (or harems, or cheat-powered protags, etc.).
I, too, am tired of boring stories filled with poorly executed tropes - and many of the same ones you listed (e.g. there's nothing wrong with mayonnaise, but let's not pretend that the locals are going to start celebrating an annual Mayonnaise Day festival, or something - it's just eggs and vinegar).
The last thing I'll say on this is that 90% of whatever gets published is garbage. I would be cautious of overgeneralizations focused on the average case. One example I can think of would be music. As a teenager in the 90s we always complained about the music played on the radio, comparing it unfavorably to the classics of yesteryear (The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, etc). But the mistake we made was comparing the very best music from the preceding three decades with the average music from the ~6 years we spent in middle and high school. Objectively, the 90s was a pretty great time to be a teenager, musically (Nirvana, Green Day, Alice In Chains, Rage Against the Machine, etc).
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