Anime Semantle

Fantasy is the single largest genre axis in the 800-title answer pool at 186 titles (23%), and 35 of those carry the Isekai theme. This page measures both axes across the whole pool to show why probing the narrow "isekai" axis beats the broad "fantasy" one — and why, after that, you have to read tone rather than tags.

1. The narrow axis is far stronger than the broad one

Apply the same measurements to Fantasy's 186 titles and Isekai's 35, and the narrow axis wins on every count.

The last row is the point. "Fantasy" is so common that hitting it tells you little (3.3×). But 24 of the 35 isekai titles had an isekai title as their single closest neighbor, against a 4% baseline. Once you have an isekai signal, staying in that small neighborhood pays off enormously.

※ Fantasy's 186 titles most often also carry Action (66%), Adventure (60%) and Drama (30%). Isekai's 35 carry Fantasy (97%), Comedy (40%), Adventure (37%) and Suspense (20%) — and 43% of them also carry the Reincarnation theme.

2. Yet most neighbor slots aren't isekai

That 69% describes one slot — the top one. Widen to the top ten and the picture changes. Here's how many of the top ten neighbors are actually isekai, for the three highest-rated anchors.

So isekai is strong at predicting the single closest title, but something else fills the slots below it. What that something is drives the rest of this page.

3. Same "isekai" — so why only 0.6?

Re:Zero and Overlord IV — both flagship titles built on the "transported to another world" premise. Yet their actual in-game similarity is:

The reason: the two shows have completely different tones. Re:Zero is a suspenseful psychological drama built on repeated death and suffering; Overlord is a dark-fantasy power fantasy about an overwhelmingly strong protagonist looking down on everyone else. They share one line of premise — "sent to another world" — but differ in mood and narrative structure. The model reads that texture, not the tag.

4. What genuinely close titles look like

Mushoku Tensei actually scores closer to Re:Zero (0.706) than Overlord does — both share a narrative arc built on the protagonist's failure and growth. It's a clear example that narrative tone drives the score more than premise.

5. Re:Zero's neighbors aren't isekai — they're psychological pressure dramas

Push that claim to its conclusion on one anchor. Seven of Re:Zero Season 4's ten closest neighbors are not isekai at all, and what fills those slots comes from entirely different genres.

3-gatsu no Lion, which has no fantasy element whatsoever, sits at 0.704 — much closer than fellow isekai Overlord (0.609). What defines Re:Zero isn't "another world" but a protagonist under relentless psychological pressure, and that's what the model reads. In play: if isekai guesses stall near 0.7, stop adding isekai titles and probe non-fantasy shows that share the same emotional register.

6. Conversely, isekai pairs that are strangers

Both carry the isekai theme, yet these are as far apart as the axis gets (franchise pairs excluded).

Note that the floor here is 0.440. In romance, same-tag pairs fall all the way to 0.201. Isekai is a narrow, homogeneous axis whose most distant pairs still don't drop below 0.44.

7. Characters score dramatically higher

The actual top 20 neighbors of Re:Zero are dominated by its own cast at the very top.

※ Interestingly, supporting characters can score higher than the protagonist or heroine. Similarity reflects narrative weight and textual characterization, not popularity — the lead isn't automatically the top score.

8. Playbook

See also

Check the main strategy guide for the full score reference table and an action-genre walkthrough, or the romance guide for real data on the romance cluster. The sports guide shows, across ten genres, that the score scale itself differs by genre, and the supernatural guide covers the opposite end — the axis where anything you type scores — across 16 genres. Difficulty along the finer theme axis is covered in A Sharper Axis Than Genre, per-genre difficulty rankings in Which Genres Are Hardest, and the full data on character timing in When to Guess a Character.

Measurement basis — 800-title answer pool, collected 2026-08-05. Similarity is cosine similarity over embeddings of the title descriptions; same-franchise pairs (sequels, films) are excluded from all aggregates (the season comparisons in section 4 are shown separately as illustration). Values shift slightly whenever the dataset is refreshed.