Charts, Not Rankings
Why Yisekai grades isekai protagonists on six dimensions instead of throwing them on a power-tier list.
Power-tier lists collapse a character into a single point. That single point is almost always the wrong number — it answers a question nobody is really asking ("who would win in a fight?") and ignores the questions readers do care about ("why does this character feel different from that one even though both are supposedly broken?").
We grade six dimensions. Each is a 0–100 axis, scored by an editor first, then re-scored by the community. The shape of those six points — not their sum — is the character's identity.
The six axes
6dimensions 100point scale per axis 0totals on the page- Power — peak ceiling, normalized against the YPS scale. A YPS-7 floor still scores higher than a YPS-3 ceiling.
- Growth — distance traveled from baseline to peak. Anos starts maxed; his Growth is near zero by design.
- Darkness — willingness to do the harsh thing. Not a moral score — context matters and we say so.
- Bonds — how many named relationships do real work in the story.
- Ego — self-importance, including ironic or performative versions. Cid Kagenou scores high here — chūnibyō counts.
- Luck — how much of the protagonist's success is structural fortune vs. earned outcome.
Two YPS-7 protagonists can have the same power ceiling and feel like different genres. The shape tells you why.
Why we won't sum the six
Pick any two characters from the compare page and look at their hexagons. Ainz and Rimuru both hit the YPS-S register on Power. Ainz's shape leans heavy on Bonds and Ego (the NPC family loyalty, the performative overlord); Rimuru's leans on Bonds + Growth (nation-building over centuries). Same Power, different stories.
Adding them to a single number — "is Ainz a 78 or an 82?" — destroys the only signal worth keeping.
The dispute court
When the community's average score on a dimension diverges from the editor's by more than 10 points, the system opens a court case. Both sides file a brief. Side-vote runs for 48 hours. Quorum is 50 votes; below that, the editor's call holds. Above that, majority wins, and we record the result as a snapshot — the editor's score doesn't change automatically, but the dispute outcome is permanent record.
This is the part power-tier lists can't do. They have nowhere to put disagreement.
What's coming
- Archetype overlay — patterns visible across characters with similar shapes (Reluctant Tyrant, Sacrificial Loop, Stealth Apex, etc.) — already shipping as tags.
- Season tracker — which currently-airing isekai is bending the genre's median shape and how.
- Trade-offs view — heat map of where the genre clusters and where the gaps live.
Numbers are how we keep ourselves honest. The point is the conversation around them.