Welcome to c/anime on Hexbear!
A leftist general anime community for discussion and memes.
Simple rules
Be nice.
Use spoiler tags.
Don't sexualise underage characters, including 1000 year old loli ones.
Don't post hentai here. This is an anime community.
High quality threads you should definitely visit
Gigathread: Good Anime Talks, Presentations, Conventions, Panels, etc
Piracy is good and you should do more of it. Use https://aniwave.to/ and https://4anime.gg/ for streaming, and https://nyaa.si/ for torrents. Piracy is the only means of digital protest that audiences have to fight poor worker treatment.
The world's most notorious "talker" runs the world's greatest clan
Should've known from the light novel ass title 
I'm in Love With the Villainess is pure genre fiction slop (isekai slop, and generic magic school slop, and generic villainess slop), but with some redeeming qualities like being class-conscious yuri. I don't remember how much of the commentary on homophobia and repression and how unrequited love is toxic and unfair to both parties made it from the light novel to the anime though, and it's probably not going to get another season which means most of the best content is left unadapted. The protagonist is still a piece of shit in that, though, although she's at least somewhat aware that what she's doing is bad, actually.
Spoilers:
Rae is basically grooming and gaslighting a straight teenage girl, and despite reflecting on how that's actually a very not-good thing to do a number of times she just keeps on doing it, justifying the whole scheme as just trying to save Claire regardless of whether she wins her as a prize for this good deed or not. And then instead of maturing as a person and giving up on this unrequited obsession and finding a more appropriate partner, she is in fact just rewarded with Claire's affections as a prize for doing enough good deeds.The Executioner and Her Way of Life is actually pretty decent and is fairly creative despite also being more genre-mashup slop. Notably the protagonist is not* one of the isekaid characters and instead has an adversarial and comically yuri-bait relationship with one. This one also probably won't get any more seasons, but the novels are ok and are about to wrap up this year.
* Spoilers from the novels:
She's actually the clone of one of them, specifically Hakua: the villain of the story who's so obsessed with Akari that she's been conspiring for a thousand years to sacrifice the entire world just so she can return home with her. You know, normal very good friend stuff. It's still up in the air whether it's bait or not, but at this point it's so absurd that if it is it's almost a pisstake on yuri-bait because of how egregious all the "flowery declarations of love, explicit horniness, and Menou and Akari literally merging their souls together so that they're one person split between two bodies - truly the very best of friends" shit is.I cannot believe I'm saying this, but despite its author and series Sword Art Online: Alicization is ~~actually sort of halfway decent~~ ok on reflection it's not actually halfway decent because despite having more redeeming qualities than any other mainline SAO and also than basically all isekai series it has way more SA than I remembered at first: Kirito is depowered and/or in a coma for like 95% of it, the US and US-collaborators are the villains, the harem shit is replaced with yaoi-bait and later a bunch of characters arguing over Kirito's comatose, withered husk in something so egregious and dumb it circles back around to being very funny, and explicit humanization of the designated-ontologically-evil-by-the-simulation-devs peoples. I mean it's still SAO so it's still weird, gross, and incredibly dumb with shoddy worldbuilding, but unlike the rest of mainline SAO it actually manages to have fragments of an interesting core premise with the literal artificial human souls shit and its conclusion that they are, in fact, people too and killing or exploiting them is bad, actually. It really benefits from having Kirito in a coma so other characters get to move the plot and resolve things too.
Thank you for the explanations. I watch few series, anime or not but at least knowing that there is a bit more to it than some of the more popular stuff that I hear about is good. Still I have to say the examples you give seem to be basically having all the same faults within category of its genre just shifted a bit more towards having bit of character exploration and a touch of self-awareness. However that's surprisingly optimistic still even if I don't watch those since it means it's not as static as I imagined even within its specific category but there are a lot of these things apparently much more than I thought especially when the novels are involved.
In a lot of ways, yeah. Like I'm in Love with the Villainess is 100% still a wish-fulfillment fantasy about a depressed gay office worker getting to have a healthy, normal life with the video game character she developed a parasocial relationship with and also she has cheat powers and complete meta knowledge of the setting and everything that's going to happen to accomplish that goal with, but it's also self-aware and includes cogent commentary on real-life LGBT issues.
Honestly, I think the biggest trend I've noticed is that an isekai with a female protagonist (whether they're the isekaid hero or someone else) tends to be meaningfully better even when it's still horny trash or just fluffy slop, while isekai centered on male protagonists tends more towards the "incel loser gets a harem by redeeming special good boy points in another world, continues being awful" pattern. Though I will say that for all the scorn that SAO (deservedly) gets (seriously, it's a bad series from a mid author who just can't help but write bad and gross things even when he's earnestly trying to be better about it), it does get some credit for making Kirito end up a well-adjusted, sociable guy with a diverse friend group who just kind of ignores the harem shit because he's too earnest a wife guy to ever think about anyone other than Asuna.
I have noticed also from what you have said and from what was written both here and elsewhere female protagonist, LGBT themes or both seem more commonly move past some of the worst impulses of anime, at least ones that aren't outright fanservice or queer-baiting. Not to say that there isn't any of this in any other LGBT-oriented media, but perhaps maybe it is has more of a baseline of self-examination and introspection. Sword Art Online just seems to be both ur-isekai for the category I have in mind and and also the ultimate slop of its own genre somehow, which is interesting.
I watched executioner recently, and yeah the anime didn't feel baity but more like the clear romance thread doesn't need to be explicitly spelled out. I get where the phrase yuribait comes from (fuck you, sound euphonium!), but unless you're willing to call the same thing but with a characters gender changed to man heterobait, idk.
it was a fun watch though, seeing menou struggle and not be an overpowered girl who wins without any help is fun to see, and Akari in general is left in a place where she might be interesting to watch. also free momo from the curse of not having requited feelings
I'm going off the first seven novels (I haven't read the eighth yet and the others aren't translated and/or released yet), which you might want to read for the rest of the story since I'm pretty sure the anime will never get another season let alone the 4-5 seasons it would take to finish it without huge cuts. The prose isn't great, whether that's a translation issue or a problem with the original text, but it's not terrible either.
I think Momo is the only character who remains 100% unambiguously gay, while Menou continues being kind of ace and
who's baffled by the attention she gets and never displays any sort of attraction towards anyone, and Akari is kind of inscrutable even to her own inner monologue for plot reasons. Even after all the spoiler stuff happens they're still textually "very good friends." There's a reason I'm calling it absurd and egregious: Menou and Akari so obviously have a romantic relationship and are literally soulmates that when we see their internal monologues where they textually don't see it that way it's jarring to the point that it seems like parody.
sad :(