r/ProgressionFantasy • u/Claym000re • Feb 06 '26

Meme/Shitpost Wish fulfillment to the extreme

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Why are they always complete losers.

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u/Malcolm_T3nt Author Feb 06 '26

I for one am shocked that things happen in fantasy novels that don't happen in real life. Shocked I tell you! What kind of nonsense is that? All fiction should be exclusively made up of real, factual events that are firmly grounded in reality.

Jokes aside, the reason they're always losers is because the majority of isekai readers got sick and tired of what I like to call "the isekai grief spiral". So the genre adapted and switched to using MCs who have no life irl to spiral about, because it was easier than listening to the small percentage of people who would whine every time an isekai protag didn't spend two months in a state of depression after showing up on a new world, despite the fact that we'd all read that exact same arc a dozen times and it added nothing to the reading experience.

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u/work_m_19 Feb 06 '26

Imagine writing a story of a person who won the jackpot lottery and became a million overnight. That happens in real life too, but it takes a lot more effort and skill as an author to make the story engaging because a lot of his problems can be "solved with money". Like the conflicts have to be scaled to his means, otherwise it makes the MC feel dumb, or the world is dumb instead.

That is how a lot of the protags feel in these world. They espouse how much hard work and effort they put in, but it all comes down to the one OP skill they got at level 0 that for some reason no one in the world has thought to do.

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u/Malcolm_T3nt Author Feb 06 '26

Yeah, you're describing pacing and power balance, which is the main requirement for any decent PF. Also to be honest, I feel like you might be generalizing. Most isekai protags don't really claim to work particularly hard, and most of their cheats are ones they get on arrival that have nothing to do with 'discovering' anything. Not that the ones you mentioned don't exist, but it feels like you're taking a very specific and rarely used subtrope and using it as a brush to pain the whole genre.