@kilocron said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Annoys the hell outta me... you don't see other things do that like having an american characters say "I need to eat a hot dog and fire a gun because I'm an American!"... Well, not often anyways.
Interesting observation, because it might speak more to the way people living in each country see themselves :)
"Going to another world" is believed to be so popular with Japanese web novels and LNs/manga/anime because their work (and maybe some living?) conditions there are so restrictive and exploitative that this kind of escape sounds appealing. This can also be seen in the suicide rates in Japan; whatever the reason may be behind those higher rates compared to the rest of the world, it could be construed as people feeling as though they can't live in this one. However, the other appealing part of the isekai subgenre is that they tend to star characters who are easy to self-insert, to pretend can be you. So there's more focus on stuff they do like about life in Japan.
This is going to be a lot less visible in Western fiction simply because there's a lot less of people from Earth going to other worlds. YA fantasy and sci-fi fiction tends to revolve around either completely new realities that the protagonist is born in, or fantastical worlds that are adjacent to ours. Harry Potter and The Magicians, for example, just use a hidden dimension, essentially, where people are able to go back to their "normal" lives whenever they wish.
But still, while it may not be as noticeable since it's not called out so explicitly the way you see in isekai stories, western casts still tend to go out for coffee, burgers & fries, and pizza quite a lot, whenever they do eat something. Or take Iron Man (2008) for example; the first thing Tony Stark does when he gets back from imprisonment is find a Burger King. Yes, this is probably just product placement, but you see the same thing in Into the Spider-Verse as well, and even the Arrowverse shows (Arrow, Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, etc.) with Big Belly Burger and Jitters (a coffee shop) being frequent props and in-universe locations for characters to gather. It's just so infrequent for western characters to be deprived of the foods they want to eat that it doesn't become a big deal the way an isekai'd character might not have access to food they love.