A short supplement, GURPS Fantasy: Portal Realms, covers this topic in detail.Though as it turns out, it was actually the copy of Leonardo's Sixth Codex in his backpack that his summoners needed. The frame story of Castle Falkenstein involves computer game artist Tom Olam being magically summoned into the Victorian-fantasy world of the game.If the protagonist is lucky, it comes with a New Life in Another World Bonus. For the reincarnation flavor of this plot, see Reincarnate in Another World or if the new world was fictional in universe Media Transmigration. For generic types of other dimensions, see Another Dimension. Contrast with Constructed World, which doesn't involve present-day Earth at all. (When returning home proves to be relentlessly mundane and you wish you'd stayed in the magic world, it's So What Do We Do Now?.) The inverse of Alien Among Us.Ĭompare with Kidnapped by the Call. Often overlaps with Down the Rabbit Hole, Fish out of Water, and You Can't Go Home Again.
Super-Trope to Portal Book, Portal Picture, Summon Everyman Hero, Fourth Wall Shut-In Story and Trapped in TV Land.
The inversion of this, where a person from the other world comes to ours, often inverts the premise along with it: Whereas an Earth hero usually gets called over to where the action is, the Otherworldly hero is usually transported where the action isn't, or becomes the action when they get there. If it's the hero's job to bring back a trapped person, it can become an Orphean Rescue while if someone else turns up to bring back the hero, it's Weirdness Search and Rescue.
This plot device is also extremely popular in Crossover events, as it's a good way of bringing together disparate settings in a semi-logical manner. In Literature, this is often referred to as a "Portal Fantasy". During the 2010s, these types of stories became so popular thanks to Japanese publishing companies like Alphapolis and Media Factory that, by the end of the decade, it had become an Undead Horse Trope: being parodied, subverted and even ridiculed to hell and back, while straight-forward examples still remain very much present.
note From Shosetsuka ni Narou, a popular online fiction website A lot of these are also Harem Series, to the extent that a party of sexy heroines (or heroes) who are attracted to the protagonist has become part of the standard formula.
Though it's been around in many forms of media long before the term was coined, the majority of isekai stories as we know it are derived from Web Serial Novels or old stories reworked into Light Novels, with their premises and writing style even being noted as a subgenre: Narou Isekai. In Japanese media, this is known as "Isekai", note Literally "Another World" with such protagonists typically being their local demographic's flavor of hero, note Stock Light Novel Heroes are common, though their Shonen and Shoujo counterparts are just as prominent and usually involves said character gaining RPG-like powers on arrival (or at the very least, is set in a Role-Playing Game Verse).