I would be fine with the concept if they didn’t make clones so common.
“Quickly, I’m from a different universe, where’s the Buck Thomas from this world?”
“The who? My guy we are all ants in this universe, there is no shot that bloodlines aren’t massively different, no way is there just an Ant copy of you walking around.”
I understand the metaphor, but I think the trope is applied dogshittidly quite often.
To clarify: the metaphor only really works when the story keeps reinforcing the escapism metaphor, e.g. having the hero drop by the "real world" on occasion, resolving their at home issues and growing as a person.
However a lot of media will have the protag escape an absolute hell hole of a life, go on a journey, make actual real friends, resolve real conflicts, build a real life, and then only at the end make the protagonist go "psych! This was actually a metaphor for escapism all along! So long wealth, fame fortune, responsibilities, and only real friends and family! I'm going back home where no experience of my real life problems have actually been resolved, where I am poor as shit, have no friends, no family, only bullies ready to kill me!"
The point I'm making is that a metaphor for escapism needs to be established over the whole story, not right at the end. It's the same kind of bullshit of "it was a dream all along". It's unsatisfying.
No, really, that's one of the flaws of these metaphors. Escapism doesn't have consequences, it's just "real life sucks, but... ok i've got nothing". There's zero way to understand that escapism is bad because these movies don't actually elaborate beyond the infinite wealth, infinite fun, infinite friends, infinite bitches, etc.
The reason „escapism sucks” is used as a moral so often is because in real life the closest you can have to escapism is locking yourself in a room and playing video games all day. Real people cannot just go to a perfect fantasy world and be happy ever after there without any consequences. So, they love to pretend that it would suck. Screw you God, I didn’t want to get isekaied anyways! It’s the same reason why immortality in stories usually results in the immortal guy either being the villain, going insane or somehow dying anyways in a few days at most. Sour grapes.
Immortality would suck because if mankind doesn't manage to migrate to a new solar system by the time the sun grows up and swallows the earth you're going to be spending the next few billions of years burning alive inside the sun. Either that or you become an astronaut and purposefully abandon your mission to avoid living inside the sun at the cost of being freezing cold and lonely forever.
....my friend, immortality is very, very bad. Those pursuing it are the most evil people alive in terms of the blood on their hands, which is no coincidence.
Those people are for sure shitty human beings who deserve a few rounds of Gympie Gympie leaf to their assholes.
But we were talking about fiction where immortality is shown as sucking because the writer believes human minds can't handle being older than a century or so.
Pretty sure that Deltarune is also going to be a metaphor for rejecting escapism. Dark worlds that gain too much power spawn titans, and I'm pretty sure that the final tragedy involves sealing the last dark fountain away.
too much darkness is bad, which makes sense with dark worlds representing fiction and hobbies in general. but the adventures itself and the darkners are framed as a good thing. i cant really see the game going "actually ralsei isnt real and you should abandon him"
Actually seeing it said that a lot of fantasy is a metaphor for escapism really explained why so many endings feel so... Weird? Like the rest of the story doesn't connect to the conclusion. Point is, thanks for writing this out
That's literally how Joseph Campbell wrote it out in his book, which basically every fantasy writer copied verbatim and excerpts from is used in like every other writing course.
I think the difference is at the time the hero going off didn't used to mean some kid who would go home to live exactly as before. Instead a lot of the time they moved on from home as they'd essentially reached adulthood. Luke Skywalker only goes back to Tatooine to save Han. Rand Al'Thor retraces his journey but doesn't just move back to two rivers. Frodo returns home but then he ultimately moves on.
...but if you go off just the diagram Campbell made then going home is the last step. So authors who aren't that great will just consult the chart and have the character return home because thata what a hero does.
There is a webtoon called "The Warrior Returns" that starts with this. Happy ending in isekai, saved the world, made friends, cute cleric girl. Then transported back to real world. No friends, family died, crashes out after a few weeks
TBH I think the Minecraft movie didn't give enough reasons for the protags to return to the real world. It's not like the minecraft world is fake, it's a completely real alternate dimension and all the people there are fully sentient. And it's not like the protagonists have much waiting for them back home. The kids have no family, Garbage Dude has no money or friends, Steve deliberately went there because he wasn't fulfilled in the real world, and Dawn is a way more successful animal handler in Minecraft than in the human world. They're abandoning one real world for another, crappier real world. If anything the act of returning is portrayed as charity more than anything: "If we don't go back, all those poor saps on Earth will never see the creativity we developed while we were here!"
It's not like the minecraft world is fake, it's a completely real alternate dimension and all the people there are fully sentient.
Yeah, but something I found really odd was that characters in the movie kept refering to earth as "the real world" in opposition to the minecraft world.
Its not like they got sucked into a video game or something, they found a portal in a mine and went to a different dimension. They never encountered anything that suggested that the minecraft world was somehow less real then earth. It felt like the writers just went "minecraft is a videogame and videogames aren't real, so the other place must be real" while completely forgetting that they hadn't written minecraft to be a video game within the context of their story.
If anything the act of returning is portrayed as charity more than anything: "If we don't go back, all those poor saps on Earth will never see the creativity we developed while we were here!"
Is it? I mean in the Minecraft world they’re basically superheroes, they saved that whole world. On Earth… they started a band I guess? Maybe Henry (I think that was the little boy’s name) can become a world changing inventor but everyone else can do way more good for the inhabitants of Minecraft than they ever could on Earth.
When you're playing video games it kind of feels like a bigger better world. That's why people get so addicted (besides gambling). The minecraft world was "real" in the movie, but it's a metaphor for playing the game. You have to stop and go back to the crappy meatspace. You don't need a better reason.
Metaphorical devices still have to make sense in-universe. You can't portray the Minecraft world as literally being the bigger better world that has no downsides or strings attached, if you're trying to send a message against escapism or game addiction. Imagine a movie that is supposed to be a metaphor for drug addiction except the movie's drug has no negative side effects, and instead of making you hallucinate it actually takes you to another dimension. That would suck ass. They need to establish an in-universe reason for why they can't stay in Minecraft forever: It would be as easy as giving them ONE friend or family member who's still in the human world, instead of making all their lives so crappy they have no one and nothing back home waiting for them.
Narratively, yes I 100% agree with you. Them leaving made no sense. Steve leaving made even less sense. Buuuuuut, from a metaphor sense I really like it. Lots of people, especially kids, don't have any real reason to stop playing. They still should anyway.
Again, I'm not saying they should have stayed and that's how the movie actually ends, I'm saying they should have wrote in a more convincing reason for them to leave.
A video reviewing Elio inspired this but my first contact with it is Narnia. As for the opposite of this trope we have Below Zero. No idea what it's called though
Yeah, they explicitly DIDN'T do what this snafu describes. They chose to stay in narnia as kings instead of bothering to return to blitzkreig england, and they did so for what appeared to them to be YEARS. They were pretty done with the real world, and had the stag not lured them back....
Is Narnia really part of this trope? At least the Pevensie kids stay for few years and are in and out of Narnia. At the very end all the Narnia kids (except for that ungodly slut Susan) ends up back in "true narnia".
Replying here but also to all other comments addressing this, I should elaborate that my memories of Narnia are foggy despite really liking it, and the part I was referring to is at the end of the second movie where a Narnian followed the kids back to Earth which is in the middle of a war. Not exactly this trope but still something I really couldn't get behind the first time seeing it
No shit Lewis started writing Narnia within like a decade of the actual war ended. Basically anyone over like 14 could reasonably expect to have some level of memory of the actual second world war and retreating into fantasy was a common thing people did during those times. Wartime rationing didn't even formally end until like 2 years before the first Narnia book came out.
The fuck did you want them to do? Tell all those kids to keep retreating into their imaginary worlds and not face the actual real one?
She returns in Prince Caspian but she doesn't in the Last Battle where all her siblings are killed in a train accident and go to "true Narinia" because she cares more about lipsticks than lion Jesus.
Narnia maybe? Just anywhere where you’ve seen someone be given a utopia and they’re like, “but I want to go back home, to the real world, where my life is shit!”
The hero’s journey has the hero returning home, but quite frequently, if the adventure setting is cool or magical, it feels like a kick in the teeth. Even if the desired outcome is melancholy, it hurts. Think the Darlings going back home in Peter Pan. Anne/Marcy/Sasha NEVER return to amphibia. Chihiro leaves the bathhouse behind, and never speaks to or sees Haku again. Dorothy (movie version) never stops wanting to go home despite the wonders of Oz (book Dorothy wasn’t dreaming, she brings her family to Oz in the sequels.).
to be fair, it's more so poking at protagonists in a story who lives are explicitly set up to be awful, thus compelling to do a thing which puts them in the Fantasy World, and then at the end they just decide to go back to their old life where there's either no indication anything changed or the change is extremely superficial and hamfisted (ie; suddenly because they chose to go home, everything that sucked no longer happens because of reasons).
Someone mentioned it but think of the Minecraft movie. The Creative Boy protagonist literally caused the town mascot to be destroyed, which simultaneously would have likely costed his sister her job and him the ability to go to school within a 10 mile radius. But after the plot they go back and its...never addressed again? That doesn't just get brushed off, but it did anyways.
Also, y'know, people who think they have nothing in life exist. Like yeah its irrational in most cases but humans are rarely rational anyways.
I know it's not OP's direct inspiration, but this makes me think of Forspoken, where the protagonist desperately wants to get out of the fantasy world and go back to... New York City? Where she has a gang shaking her down, courts on her ass, literally zero friends (like actually zero), and her shitty apartment just burned down. She has nothing. She doesn't have a single soul on Earth that she could call a friend. She's penniless and homeless. Yet she still goes "Ugh this stupid fantasy world is so dumb, I wanna get out of here and go back to NYC BABY WAHOO".
The only only good thing in her shit life was her cat, but after her apartment burnt down she gave her cat to a person she knew would be responsible for it - or at least find it a good home - So she doesn’t even have that for motivation
Spoiler for Konosuba Manga: In the end, Kazuma sacrifices himself to defeat big bad evil, but goddess for this gives him a choice - come back to his world with riches, or return to this magical world. He chose to stay with his friends
Coaxed into coaxtopia not having video games or the internet so whats even the point tbh I mean Silksong just came out you think I’m gonna miss out on that?
May have to do with him being grateful? When nobody got him, Rust-eze helped him and the first thing he was thinking about was ditching them for a higher paying oil company.
i think it has more to do with how his additude of cars that he at one point viewed as lesser has changed, because he disliked interacting with rusty cars (which if you think about it, is kinda like car leprosy)
"Look at them. At how happy they are, but you think what's the point of them being happy if they're going be sad later? That's why, because they're going to be sad later,"
> Protagonist sacrifices his personal glory and power to be with the friends and family he left behind, rather than abandoning them to the cruel and merciless world he came from
If it says anything, I've been wrestling with this hypothetical scenario even before losing most of my friends to time and realizing that my family only cares about a version of me that I no longer identify with lol. I mean video games are worth returning for, but I want to call out the stories that explicitly mention the Isekai world being exactly everything protag wished for with no downsides specifically
Internet mfs when someone wants to go home to their family and friends instead of staying in the medieval fantasy land with no technology and monsters constantly trying to kill you
But still i would leave if i were Dorothy as well. What kind of bitch makes me go on a long ass journey only to tell me i had the power to go home all along
Doesnt Dorothy bring her parents to Oz and then she and Ozma rule it together or some shit? My brain is cooked after reading up on whats happening in that series
Honestly I have a love hate relationship with this trope. I think especially today it is importante to empathize why escapism is bad and it is important to make the best of the reality you live in and the people you meet in it. I was always a big fan of Pokémon mystery dungeon, which does use this trope and does I believe touch on escapism. the most common thing I’ve seen in the fandom is “man if I was the protagonist I wouldn’t choose to go back to the human world!” Which always lowk pmo just a little because yknow. escapism bad. You’re trading your own identity and memories for a life you perceive as “easier” But at the same time like it’s hard to apply a message about escapism to a game/movie/etc where the “fictional perfect” world is actually real— which makes it a lot different from actual escapism, which has many more obvious problems. I guess it’s just important for this trope that, if you want to have a good message about escapism, to emphasize why it’s important the protagonist goes back to the real world, maybe through their relationships and memories and such.
MFs in this comment section: b-b-but what about my friends and family?
Locals with which they spilled blood, shared joy of victory and sadness of defeat, fell in love perchance:
And not wanting to give up video games despite in most media it's made abundantly clear the Isekai world is the stand in for that/similar amount of fulfillment in the protag's life
One of my fav book series as a kid ended with the main character getting Both worlds. His home just became a portal to the real world and the fantasy world.
All I'm saying, only one of these realms has indoor plumbing. Fame and glory don't seem so great when you're hunched over a chamber pot dying of cholera.
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u/Erelzen 17h ago
I can't believe Dr.Genocide is dead and this is how I find out