Quote:
Originally Posted by David Johnston2
Ick, that's a genre that has gone a bit off the rails with regard to game balance. Or even writing stories with interesting plots. But the underlying concept of some kind of group that has taken to reincarnating the untimely dead in new universes with the memories of their original life...that has a bit of potential.
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Isekai's all about the lack of balance. The idea of Iseko is that she would be encountered in the form of her markedly less powerful dupes. The reason she doesn't just feed a part of herself (and promptly regenerate) to her dupes in order to bring them up to her level of power is because the consumption ability is fairly all-or-nothing - they'd become perfect duplicates, which would
also mean they'd lack loyalty to her. The current Iseko probably isn't the original - I'd imagine at some point in her career, she tried to bring several dupes up to her own level of power, and the current Iseko is the victor of the resulting bloodbath.
My initial thought actually
was for some sort of
isekai organization, made up entirely of reincarnated dead people (all of whom were inexplicably Japanese in their prior lives). I realized the Devour/Consume/Absorb/whatever ability that often shows up in the stories could actually result in such an "organization" that was functionally just a single person, provided one of the characters she consumed had a duplication ability. That simplified matters for me, and made it easy to name the organization. Making the character female and extremely self-serving was primarily to play with the trope, since the protagonists are typically males (inexplicably surrounded by extremely attractive women) who are ultimately altruistic. It also, again, made it easy for me to give her a (sorta punny) name.
For what it's worth, the worldline Iseko found herself on following her reincarnation was one that had a sizable number of reincarnated people with "cheat" abilities, and most of the power (and a good deal of the knowledge) she gained was from consuming such characters.