What you will also achieve is alienation of boys who are indeed smarter and get bored with reading same hero action book again.

I am no pearl clutching moralist, but having the mainstream publishing industry push softcore smut onto young girls and even virtue-signaling about how girls read a lot of books, is not something I'm comfortable with.

It's like selling cigarettes to kids, and bragging about how they seem to like them.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is the height of literature, but I wouldn't say it's harmful.

That said, I don't have a daughter of reading age, so actual parents might have better takes on this.

There is an obvious retort about Narnia being an isekai, but I feel a more appropriate comparison would be Ascendence of a Bookworm, which is an actually well written Japanese isekai literature (written by a female author and featuring a female protagonist, ironic given the main topic) that explores the clash of Earth based norms and customs in a society where gods actually exist, and nobles are literally superior beings, since only their god gifted mana can turn a blank land into fertile soil. In such a world, what value does a mana-less peasant have?

But it does so in a narrative that's engaging rather than scolding; the MC realises that norms arise out of local conditions, and instead of going on some weird emancipation spree, mostly acknowledges local the situations, but still tries her darndest to change things given her constraints (with literal gods intervening, there is little she can do).

The story is titled Ascendence of a 'Bookworm' because her main tool of rebellion is democratising books and knowledge; by inventing the paper and printing press, she will (slowly) help peasants improve their lives over the next coming generations; they will never become equal to nobles who are literally god-gifted, but it's still an important ripple that will change the trajectory of the world.

It's an Japanese isekai, but it resists the urge to dabble in the other other tropes. Yes, Sturgeon's law still applies, 90% of isekai will still be trash and slop, but if you promote good isekai books, then there is still chance for future good literature, even in such a maligned genre.

Even if most of what's on RR is is slop, reading is always the better vice.

Interested in some good ol' reading slop? maybe with a side-dish of a nice community? you like comments, right? you like discussions about a fast hard hitting chapter?

boy do i have a forum for you: https://forums.spacebattles.com/forums/creative-writing.18/

more and better fiction than two RRs combined!*

*terms and conditions apply, knowledge of Worm and Worm-related media required

as for worm... i read it a bit but dropped it because i arrived too late (iirc author had already moved to the third series when i heard of it) and the backlog was too daunting. That said, apparently there ia graphic novel coming up so might look into it.

It's never too late for Worm. There is no backlog, it's a self-contained story. I'd recommend reading it before the comics (not graphic novel).

Any other recommendations?

A boy (or girl! They're allowed to read, too now, like Belle) buying a copy of The Hobbit doesn't help much, they need consumption of the new mass-produced stuff to keep the machine running.

Where does this nonsense come from? I didn't nor did anyone I know. I snorted any kind of adventure books but superpowers? Nuh uh, boring and cheapest of plot devices, and yes, I thought so at 7.

My parents brought me to the library every two weeks and let me read whatever I wanted, I think that's most important. Also, show you read yourself, and if you don't, wonder why.

Adventures don't need heroes at all.

You could fix it. Drop the levelling, keep the portal story-- portal stories can be fun, C.S. Lewis and Astrid Lindgren have done portal or portal-adjacent stories and they can be fun.

I don't think a fixed portal story is necessarily attractive to idiot-readers though. I think popularity of Isekai or levelling stories might have more to do with impatience and inability to tolerate uncertainty.

I read 1632, it's a bit sci-fi pulp-y but entertaining, especially when you're a Swede and some of the characters are familiar from real-life history. I've written stories in this direction myself too, and portal stories.

But my portal stories are usually in opposition to Isekai tropes, and I think most of this stuff is too. 1632 isn't an Isekai, ISoT isn't an Isekai, Narnia isn't an Isekai-- maybe it shares some destiny tropes with Isekai-type stories, but there's an attempt to give it weight, etc.

The bad aspects of the Isekai aren't that there's a portal, it's excessive indulgence.