You know that specific setup where the FMC is completely, boringly human with no secret powers, no hidden destiny (yet) and then suddenly she's surrounded by werewolves/vampires/fae who are all way more powerful than her?
And the whole appeal is watching her navigate a world she has no business being in, using nothing but her wits and stubbornness?
Does this trope have a name? And more importantly what are the best books that do this well? I've been craving this lately and I can't find enough of them.
by TillSalty
5 Comments
Fantasy
I think it falls under “portal fantasy” or sometimes “fish out of water” but neither quite captures it when it’s specifically a human in a supernatural/paranormal world.
The best one I’ve read recently for this exact feeling is [The Human Among Wolves](https://www.novelflow.app/novel/human-among-wolves/chapters/1?post_code=b0011amongwolves&post_ab_name=nolist), human girl gets accidentally enrolled in a werewolf academy (she was supposed to be somewhere else entirely) and the whole book is her being stubbornly, defiantly human in a world that keeps underestimating her because of it. There’s a love triangle too. Free to read and genuinely hard to put down once it starts.
You will find many uber the LitRPG tag. Also in anime this is called isekai so you could search that too. Some that I really like are:
Nova Terra by Seth Ring
He Who Fights with Monsters by Shirtaloon
Heir Apparent by Vivian Vande Velde
This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me Ilona Andrews (coming March 31)
The Wandering Inn Pirate Aba
Do you mean the character being moved into a separate realm, or the character discovering a previously unseen supernatural society in their own world?
The former would usually be portal fantasy (also commonly called isekai after the Japanese genre nowadays). The latter is often called urban fantasy or urban paranormal.