>I suspect for the Japanese women who are putting in perspective the extreme conservatism on gender roles prevalent in their country, most Japanese fiction shouts at them about real life too.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-19674306

The 15th of each month is a big day for 36-year-old Yoshihiro Nozawa: it is the day he gets paid.

But every month, he hands over his entire salary to his wife Masami.

She controls the household budget and gives him a monthly pocket money of 30,000 yen ($381; £243). Despite being the breadwinner, that is all the money he can spend on himself over the next 30 days.

"The last five days from the 10th of each month are usually the toughest," says Yoshihiro.

[...]

47-year-old Taisaku Kubo has been getting 50,000 yen a month from his wife Yuriko for the past 15 years.

He has tried to negotiate a pay rise each year but his wife makes a presentation to explain why it cannot be done.

"She draws a pie chart of our household budget to explain why I cannot get more pocket money," says Taisaku.

[...]

So why don't men start controlling the household budgets themselves?

"I don't think many men hand over their entire salaries happily," says career consultant Takao Maekawa of FeelWorks.

"But they feel it's their obligation to earn money for the family even if it means they have to suffer themselves."

Imagine a world where literature was preoccupied with height. A character is always slotted in who's explicitly the token short character, and the storyline is always, subtly or not, written to highlight how the world is biased against short people. Authors are very cautious about depicting a short person with any negative trait; when they do, a direct line is drawn between the social circumstances they encountered and their future actions.

This would be exhausting, and people would rightly start to roll their eyes at it. And it would be fine for readers to object to it, even as short people are a component of reality. It wouldn't mean the complainant finds short people objectionable in themselves, but simply that they don't think height is a defining part of reality that all of literature is obligated to address.

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That is about as uneducated a take as one could possibly have.

Keep in mind "isekai" as a genre also exists in western entertainment; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and The Chronicles of Narnia are some prominent and famous examples. Are those specifically for shut-ins and nerds too?

excuse me why are you browsing hn which is a leisure activity instead of fighting world hunger? Why are you ignoring starving people?

I value entertainment that demonstrates how to thrive more than "entertainment" that demonstrates struggle. Struggle is important and necessary, but it should never be an end unto itself. True entertainment should uphold the dignity of as many people as possible.

If capitalism wasn't the leviathan that it was, then I wouldn't blame anyone for trying to escape the life that capitalist neo-colonialism has brought into existence. Pretty soon, at this rate, life itself will be a subordinate of the democratic global capital project.

Maybe you don't realize it, but we're on the same side.

Japanese entertainment isn't In Your Dumb Face about things unlike western entertainment, it respects your intelligence and sheer common sense. You're not being talked down to, your ability to just pick another (better) product to be entertained with and walk away is respected; and it's an escape from the rest of the world shouting at you about something.