One of isekai anime's most common tropes is the basis for Wikipedia's April Fools' gag this year.
The joke is tucked away in Wikipedia's Did You Know section for April 1. In between joke facts about The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, the page states "Did you know that a common way to travel to another world is to be hit by a truck?" The bullet point links out to the Wikipedia entries for the isekai genre and the Truck-kun meme that it spawned. A screencap of the section is provided below.
"Isekai," a term roughly translated to "other world," refers to a genre of story that involves the protagonist, who is usually from the real world, being transported into a fantasy or sci-fi world that is substantially different from our own. While stories using this setup have existed for sometime, the genre has exploded in popularity in Japan within the last decade, with the most popular examples being Sword Art Online, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, So I'm a Spider So What and KonoSuba: God's Blessing on This Wonderful World.
Notably, many of the genre's protagonists, including the heroes of Mushoku Tensei and Didn't I Say To Make My Abilities Average In The Next Life?!, find themselves transported to their new worlds after being struck and killed by an oncoming truck, usually while pushing somebody else out of the way. The trope has become so ubiquitous that it spawned the Truck-kun meme, which posits that the truck is a reoccurring anime character that possesses one of the highest body counts in the history of the medium. The cliche was lampooned in the set-up for one of the genre's most popular series, KonoSuba, in which the hero initially believes he died saving a beautiful girl from an oncoming truck, but is later told that the vehicle was actually a slow-moving tractor that the girl easily avoided, and that his actual cause of death was the stress caused by his overreaction to the situation. The joke has even spawned its own parody manga, Isekai Transporter, which casts the truck as a noble figure that heroically sends young people to be reincarnated into the worlds that need them most.
Many of the previously mentioned isekai anime series are available for streaming on Crunchyroll. Isekai Quartet, a crossover series featuring characters from many of the genre's most popular shows, will premiere a new movie in Japan on June 10.
Source: Wikipedia
