No Game No Life (which may arguably be even worse than Shield Hero, if less explicit), an isekai about a world that runs on yu-gi-oh style calvinball bullshit where the losers become slaves, predates Shield Hero by a couple of years. I haven’t read this (or Shield Hero for that matter), but I did slog through the anime on netflix a decade ago; it’s not good, and as bad as the anime was, well, just look up what the cover of volume 1 of the LN is. I only saw that recently, which unfortunately reminded me that the series existed at all.
Shield Hero itself may be what popularized it for isekai slop, and was probably drawing on just nebulous fantasy tropes about slavers. Or was drawing on hentai tropes, that’s a very real possibility.
Mushoku Tensei is often credited as being the progenitor of a lot of the worst isekai trends, for all that it’s still better than the baseline for fantasy anime in general on a lot of poitns, but it was late to the ball for this particular point. It does seem to have arrived at it on its own without copying more than general fantasy genre tropes, though.
No Game No Life (which may arguably be even worse than Shield Hero, if less explicit), an isekai about a world that runs on yu-gi-oh style calvinball bullshit where the losers become slaves, predates Shield Hero by a couple of years. I haven’t read this (or Shield Hero for that matter), but I did slog through the anime on netflix a decade ago; it’s not good, and as bad as the anime was, well, just look up what the cover of volume 1 of the LN is. I only saw that recently, which unfortunately reminded me that the series existed at all.
Shield Hero itself may be what popularized it for isekai slop, and was probably drawing on just nebulous fantasy tropes about slavers. Or was drawing on hentai tropes, that’s a very real possibility.
Mushoku Tensei is often credited as being the progenitor of a lot of the worst isekai trends, for all that it’s still better than the baseline for fantasy anime in general on a lot of poitns, but it was late to the ball for this particular point. It does seem to have arrived at it on its own without copying more than general fantasy genre tropes, though.