I don't understand the context of your statement. Auto tags? Are you talking about a car/automobile/vehicle?
I thought GSA stood for Gay Straight Alliance?
I heard two gunshots outside my window within the past five minutes!
Isekai (Japanese: 異世界, transl. "different world" or "otherworld") is a Japanese genre of portal fantasy. It includes novels, light novels, films, manga, anime and video games that revolve around a person or people who are transported to and have to survive in another world, such as a fantasy world, virtual world, another planet, or parallel universe. Isekai is one of the most popular genres of anime, and shares many common tropes, namely having an overpowered protagonist be transported to another world and show up everybody in it, often by fighting. This plot device typically allows the audience to learn about the new world at the same pace as the protagonist over the course of their quest or lifetime.[1] If the main characters are transported to a game-like world, the genre can overlap with LitRPG.
The concept of isekai started in Japanese folk tales, such as Urashima Tarō. However, the first modern isekai works were Haruka Takachiho's novel Warrior from Another World and Yoshiyuki Tomino's television series Aura Battler Dunbine.
Characteristics
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The genre can be divided into two types "transition into another world" (異世界転移, isekai ten’i) and "reincarnation into another world" (異世界転生, isekai tensei).[2] In "transition into another world" stories, the protagonist(s) gets transported to another world (e.g. by traveling into it, or being summoned into it).[2] In "reincarnation into another world" stories, the protagonist(s) is sent to another world after dying in the real world, often suddenly. Common methods of death including being run over by a truck, spawning the meme of "Truck-kun", a truck which appears in many isekai series that sends various characters to the next world.[citation needed]
In many examples, the main character is an ordinary person who thrives in their new environment thanks to things normal in the real world being seen as extraordinary in the "other" world. This can be physical characteristics, such as hair or eye color, or normal, every day skills they learned in their previous life such as cooking, engineering, basic education, or medicine, which are far more advanced in the modern, real world than in the world they are sent to.[3] In Sorcerous Stabber Orphen, an entire population of humans appeared in the magically created world, transported from Earth, and were partially mixed with local dragonlike Heavenly Beings.[4]
While the protagonist of a classic isekai work is usually a "chosen hero", there have been a large number of alternative takes on the concept. One trend is the protagonist inhabiting the body of an unimportant side character, or even a villain (as in My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!). In these stories, the goal of a protagonist is typically to reform the character in order to avoid a bad fate or death, often being so successful that they become the new lead. There are even instances of protagonists becoming inhuman creatures, such as in That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, where the protagonist starts as a slime with special abilities rather than a human, or even inanimate objects, like a magical onsen.[5] Others, known as "reverse isekai", follow beings from a fantasy universe who have been transported to or reincarnated on modern-day Earth, including the anime Laidbackers and Re:Creators.[6]
An offshoot of the isekai genre is the "second chance" or "reincarnation" genre, where a protagonist who, upon dying, finds themselves transported, not to a different world and new body, but into their own younger self. With their new knowledge and older intellect, they are able to relive their life avoiding their previous pitfalls, such as Replay and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. Another offshoot of the genre include the "slow life" approach, where the protagonist was overworked in their previous life, so decides to take it easy in the next.[3] Another offshoot is where the protagonist uses the new world to explore an interest, hobby, or goal they had in the previous world but where unable to achieve, such as studying or perhaps opening a business, like in Restaurant to Another World.[3]
In many works, isekai overlaps with the harem and LitRPG genres, where the protagonist gains the affections of several potential love interests, who may or may not be human. One example of this is Isekai Meikyū de Harem o.[7]
Writing for the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, Paul Price in his article "A Survey of the Story Elements of Isekai Manga" argues for the existence of four kinds of isekai, based on Farah Mendlesohn's framework of organizing fantasy: "portal-quest", where the protagonist enters the isekai via some kind of portal (Price sites Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody as an example); "immersive", where no such portal exists and all the action takes place in the other world (Slayers); "intrusion", which are akin to reverse isekai in which the fantastic enters the real world (The Devil Is a Part-Timer!); and "liminal", where the portal becomes a liminal space where the real world and the isekai mix (Restaurant to Another World).[8]
History
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The concept of isekai has origins in ancient Japanese literature, particularly the story of a fisherman Urashima Tarō, who saves a turtle and is brought to a wondrous undersea kingdom. After spending what he believed to be four to five days there, Urashima returns to his home village only to find himself 300 years in the future.[9] The folk tale was adapted into one of the earliest anime films, Seitaro Kitayama's Urashima Tarō, in 1918.[10] Other precursors to isekai include portal fantasy stories from English literature, notably the novels Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), Peter Pan (1904) and The Chronicles of Narnia (1950).[9]
https://residentevil.fandom.com/wiki/Bandersnatch
LitRPG, short for literary role playing game, is a literary genre combining the conventions of computer RPGs with science-fiction and fantasy novels.[1] The term is a neologism introduced in 2013. The proponents of the term state that in LitRPG, games or game-like challenges form an essential part of the story, and visible RPG statistics (for example strength, intelligence, damage) are a significant part of the reading experience.[2] This distinguishes the genre from novels that tie in with a game, like those set in the world of Dungeons and Dragons;[1] books that are actual games, such as the choose-your-own-path Fighting Fantasy type of publication; or games that are literally described, like MUDs and interactive fiction. Typically, the main character in a LitRPG novel is consciously interacting with the game or game-like world and attempting to progress within it.
If the main characters are transported to a game-like world from our world, or can remember the real world, the genre can overlap with isekai.
History
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The literary trope of getting inside a computer game is not new.[3] Larry Niven and Steven Barnes's Dream Park (1981) has a setting of LARP-like games as a kind of reality TV in the future (2051); Andre Norton's Quag Keep (1978) enters the world of the characters of a D&D game. With the rise of MMORPGs in the 1990s came science fiction novels that utilised virtual game worlds for their plots. Early examples are Tad Williams's 1996-2004 tetralogy Otherland, Conor Kostick's 2004 Epic[4] and Charles Stross's 2007 Halting State. In Taiwan, the first of Yu Wo's nine ½ Prince (½ 王子 Èrfēnzhīyī Wángzǐ) novels appeared, published in October 2004 by Ming Significant Cultural.[5] In Japan, the genre has reached the mainstream with the release of the media phenomenon Sword Art Online in 2009. Also of note is the Korean Legendary Moonlight Sculptor series with over 50 volumes.
While these novels and others were precursors to a more stat-heavy form of novel, which is LitRPG proper, a Russian publishing initiative identified the genre and gave it a name. The first Russian novel in this style appeared in 2012 at the Russian self-publishing website samizdat.ru, the novel Господство клана Неспящих (Clan Dominance: The Sleepless Ones)[6] by Dem Mikhailov set in the fictional sword and sorcery game world of Valdira, printed by Leningrad Publishers later that year under the title Господство кланов (The Rule of the Clans) in the series Современный фантастический боевик (Modern Fantastic Action Novel)[7] and translated into English as The Way of the Clan as a Kindle book in 2015. In 2013, EKSMO, Russia's major publishing house, started its multiple-author project entitled LitRPG. According to Magic Dome Books, a major translator of Russian LitRPG, the term "LitRPG" was coined in late 2013 during a brainstorming session between writer Vasily Mahanenko, EKSMO's science fiction editor Dmitry Malkin and fellow LitRPG series editor and author Alex Bobl [ru]. Since 2014, EKSMO has been running LitRPG competitions and publishing the winning stories.[8][9]
GameLit
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Many of the post-2014 writers in this field insist that depiction of a character's in-game progression must be part of the definition of LitRPG, leading to the emergence of the term GameLit to embrace stories set in a game universe, but which don't necessarily embody leveling and skill raising.[10][11] One of the earliest examples is Chris Van Allsburg's Jumanji which is a children's book about a magical board game.[12][13]
Although released in 2011, Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One which depicts a virtual reality world called OASIS filled with arcade references from the 1980s and 1990s, became an example of this new genre.[14][15][16] Other examples include Marie Lu's 2017 novel Warcross which is about an online bounty hunter in an internet game,[15] and Louis Bulaong's 2020 book Escapist Dream which tells the story of a virtual reality world where geeks can role-play and use the powers of their favorite comic book, anime, movie and video game characters.[17][11]