Comment on Madougushi Dahlia wa Utsumukanai - Episode 1 discussion
baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 3 months agoAt least it wasn’t mayo or soy sauce.
Someday I hope to see an isekai that acts to humble the audience instead of cheerleading Earth culture. Imagine a Japanese high schooler MC waking up, ready to wow the world with Japanese cuisine, smartphone technology, and knowledge of modern medicine… only to realize:
- Most people are vegan and think MC is a monster for wanting to enslave and eat people (e.g. industrial farm cattle)
- Earth technology is inefficient and wasteful.
- 21st century medicine is their equivalent of bloodletting
I am sure it would not sit well with test audiences since no one likes being told their culture is bad, but even Earth cultures are incompatible across sufficient geographic distances and spans of history.
lvxferre@ani.social 3 months ago
Damn. Now I want a solarpunk isekai.
I have a personal example confirming that:
When I started cooking Japanese dishes at home, some of my folks here found the Japanese savoury dishes too sweet, and they liked them better when I subbed ginger for black+red pepper. To make it less exotic, more similar to what they typically eat.
And yet they live in the same world and the time period as people who live with those dishes, whom mirin (the sweet ingredient) is part of a holy trinity!
Is Japanese food bad? Fuck no! (At least for me. I cook it for a reason.) But for people in isekai, Japanese dishes wouldn’t be just “exotic”, they’re alien. Getting everyone to say “omaaaae! oishiiiiii!” because the MC prepared something from Japan feels silly.
baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
Recommendation: I just finished The Terraformers (2023) which basically has all the bullet points. It opens with a rich kid being executed by a forest ranger for LARPing a carbon negative campsite on a private planet to eat some skewed rabbit. Wealth inequality is still an issue, but technology is crazy; people figured out Earth animals were people the whole time, and baseline Homo sapiens are treated as animals if commercial interests are not restrained by government. I would be a miserable monster living in that arguably better future simply because of my upbringing: I love me a good burger and feel squeamish about people being born from bioprinters. It really humbled me, making me realize the current status quo must change if we want to improve society for everyone.
lvxferre@ani.social 3 months ago
That sounds really cool, I’m going to give it a check. Thank you for the rec!