I figured out what I like about isekai and portal fiction—and why some of it feels so bad.

The portal fiction I love most plays with the hero’s journey. It is, at its core, about characters traveling into the unknown and experiencing growth through trials and tribulations. It’s the same pattern that so much adventure fiction I love adheres to.

The hero’s journey puts a big emphasis on coming home to confront the ways one has grown (in the image above, the Act Three segment saying “Master of Two Worlds” & “Incorporation”). But it’s confronting that growth which is the important part; what home you’re coming home to doesn’t particularly matter, as long as the recognition, confrontation, and resolution with past-self happens. The hero could literally return to their home world, or recognize any space within their new world as sufficiently home-like to be their new home—as long as they have that final confrontation and resolution.

And that’s the thought I had when everything clicked.

The parallels between the hero’s journey and lots of portal fiction start off pretty simple. Leaving home and the call to adventure maps neatly to passing through the story’s relevant portal: that could be a doorway to another world, it could be reincarnation, it could be logging into a video game… there are plenty of options. That’s pretty straightforward.

The return home is often more complicated for portal fiction, as I mentioned above; the protagonist might be stuck in the new world. When they’re stuck, however, the protagonists usually come to identify with some portion of the new world as home-like. They find a new normal or try to make one for themselves.

The trick is, for a good hero’s journey they still need to grow and change—and to recognize that growth and change.

There’s a lot of isekai anime that emphasizes protagonists gaining skill, leveling up, or figuring out new ways to empower themselves by abusing the systems of a new world… without paying attention to the protagonists’ personal or emotional growth.

This is the isekai that feels bad to me.

In these stories—the ones without attention paid to growth—the hero collects new friends (often a harem of potential love interests) but misses a core of emotional transformation. If the hero comes to care about their new world, there’s rarely much depth shown. They’re more comfortable and more confident in this new world, they like feeling like they’re the protagonist, but there’s little self-reflection.

These stories show off the increase in a hero’s capability, usually critical to a hero’s journey, but have none of the heart. They are empowerment fantasies and wish fulfillment without any greater substance. Sometimes, depending on the intended audience, they’re deeply uncomfortable.

Watching this kind of anime is like eating the blandest popcorn. There’s texture, and I know I’m eating, but I feel like I’m just going through the motions. If I do end up full, I’ll feel precious little satisfaction. I might even feel sick to my stomach.

This lack of heart, this lack of emotional and personal growth, is what I find so frustrating about so much isekai.

I’m not saying anime shouldn’t have its own popcorn literature—I love and appreciate popcorn lit. Nor is this a failing unique to isekai anime. There are plenty of adventure genre stories that run into the same problem, and I’ve read a lot of them! I’m picking on isekai right now because I keep running into shows like this, and sometimes I just want emotional growth and personal transformation in my hero’s journey.

Okay, more than sometimes. More like nearly always.

But with this understanding of what I’ve been looking for, I can better see why I’ve bounced off so much isekai. It often isn’t possible to tell whether there will be much personal growth or change until a number of episodes in. This meshes neatly with how I’ve watched halfway through a number of shows before finally giving up; it took me that long to lose hope that character growth might be forthcoming.

I’ll keep looking, of course. And I’ll keep finding more bad anime, because of course I will. But with any luck, I’ll find some good stories to share with you too.