My Apartment Manager is not an Isekai Character

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My Apartment Manager is not an Isekai Character‎ is a shared-world crossover fan work, hosted on Bob Schroeck's "Drunkard's Walk" Forum but deliberately not linked to that story except by the occasional Shout-Out.

Thanks to a multi-cause multiversal snafu, people from various works of fiction are being deposited into what would otherwise be a universe indistinguishable from Real Life beginning in late-2016. Trustworthy natives (including the self-insert characters of the writing circle who are outnumbered by Original Characters) are originally tasked with making sure these "displacees" have a place to live, but will end up taking on additional responsibilities ... especially when some displacees decide they don't like the arrangements in their new universe. Some will jump at the call to defend their new homes. Others will refuse it. Many will not be called at all. And they all have places in this world.

The story is an inversion and deconstruction (to a greater or lesser extent) of the Trapped in Another World concept; instead of the self-insert characters being transported to another world, characters from other worlds are being transported to the self-insert characters, and real-world economics and law enforcement play at least a small part in the narrative.

Writing of stories set in the shared-world began in 2016. For reasons that will not be discussed here, the setting was retconned in 2022 and 2023. This page primarily applies to the revised edition of the stories.

This page includes tropes and other information about story elements that as yet exist only in the authors' working notes (some of which have been mentioned on the forum, or are available to writers and pre-readers on the work's private wiki). WARNING! There are unmarked Spoilers ahead. Beware. Anything that hasn't happened yet in any of the published stories is marked as a spoiler, but not everything that is marked as a spoiler are things that haven't happened yet in any of the stories that were published either before or after the retcon.

You can read the published stories here.

As a Mega Crossover fanfic, My Apartment Manager is not an Isekai Character incorporates elements from the following works:

An incomplete list:

Tropes used in My Apartment Manager is not an Isekai Character include:

After a beat, he added, "And I just lampshaded that. All The Tropes has ruined my life."

"I'm not sure. But she's the Goddess of the Future, so she had to be have been foreshadowing something," replied Rob as he half-consciously adjusted the lampshade on one of the room's lights.

  • Bait and Switch Comment: Accelerator reminds Sailor Jupiter of her sempai. The one who she dumped.
  • Barbie Doll Anatomy: Kazakiri Hyoga, to begin with. It comes as a surprise to her that other girls have anatomical features that she doesn't. Because of various circumstances, this doesn't last.
  • The Big Board: One is jury-rigged during The Big Raid.
  • Butterfly of Doom: A literal one enticed Andy's Right-Hand-Cat Cujo into flipping a lever, activating a mad science invention.
  • Calling Me a Logarithm: Played with, in that "troglodyte" was meant as an insult, but not to the person who asked what the word means.
  • Cats are Magic: Cat Síth, Luna, Artemis, Diana, Chiyo-chichi, President Aria, and Maya - from most to least magical.
  • Caught the Heart on His Sleeve: A non-romantic example when ITEM first shows up in Ottawa and Rob volunteers to go meet them.
  • A Chat with Satan: Both literally and playing the trope straight, in the epilogue to "Channeling Mana".
  • Comic Book Movies Don't Use Codenames: Defied. When Ami Mizuno visits the displacees from Mahoromatic and everybody calls her Sailor Mercury despite her never using her codename, she finally realizes that she's a celebrity in the setting.
  • Compulsory School Age: Played Straight and Averted, Depending on the Writer. Rob's stories have his characters place out of high school if they're smart enough; only half of these characters continued to university. On the other hand, Brent's stories have the youngest Undine forced to attend high school despite having been about to graduate in her own universe – at least it's only part-time.
  • Crapsack Only by Comparison: Frenda's opinion of the living arrangements.

Frenda: Are you sure this is the right place? It basically looks like a dump - why would Railgun be living here?
Shiage: It's hardly a dump, unless you compare it to either of the Tokiwadai dorms.

"Remember that I showed everybody one episode of the anime that was made about you, and everyone complained about the voices being a little bit wrong?"
"You said it was because we weren't in this universe, so they had to use voice actors instead."

  • And then played with when Japanese seiyuu start visiting their characters.

Brent: The network name is "Pokoteng", and the password is 'swordfish1!', that's digit 1 and exclamation mark at the end. Don't want to make it too easy to guess, after all.

  • Pinky Swear: Tomo offers this to Yomi, but given that they were just talking about yakuza, the implication is Yubitsume.
  • Playboy Bunny: Mii Konori's costume for the 2016 Halloween Party.[2]
  • Polyamory: With the (known) gender balance among displacees skewing so much that females noticeably outnumber males, this is a possibility for everyone in the stories. Consider also that characters from Tenchi Muyo! were among the earliest displacees. It's known to be more than a possibility in a small minority of the residences. (This plays out as For the Love of Many; as of February 2017 in universe (late-2022 in Real Life), Three-Way Sex has yet to be mentioned as happening anywhere.)
  • Promotion to Parent / Sink-or-Swim Fatherhood: In order to keep the Academy City girls from being separated in foster care, and then the same happening to the Sailor Senshi, Rob had to become foster father to them all. He made sure to get their permission first, but he still went from being a bachelor to having ten tween- and teenage daughters in a single week.
    • Happily Adopted: And then after she learns about the dark side of Academy City and decides she's never going back there, Ruiko Saten agrees to be adopted by Rob. As in real life, it will take a year in-universe for the process to be completed.
  • Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: During the Halloween party:

Yomi: "They're yakuza, Tomo. Ya-ku-za!"

  • Refugee From TV Land: See the list under Mega Crossover. Many of the displacees got to watch their own television shows or movies when they arrived, often as evidence that they had changed universes.
  • Remember the New Guy?: Malleable Causality turns this trope Up To Eleven.
  • Rule of Three: A motif in Donaldson en Kazakiri. Some words are used three times in the same sentence, there were three encounters on the way back to the portal home, and three objections each were raised to the title characters returning to Earth.[3]
  • Scattered Across Time and Space: Common to larger groups of characters from long-running works. The most obvious example is the characters from A Certain Magical Index, whose arrivals were spread out over a full year and across two continents despite them leaving their own world at the same time.
  • Secret Path: The tunnel running between the Banzai Institute compound and the Roadhouse in Somerset NJ is the "go somewhere without being noticed" type.
  • Self-Insert Fic: With anywhere from two to five self-insert characters active at a given time in Real Life.
  • Shipper on Deck: Tomoyo, approaching The Matchmaker except that she does understand "personal space".
  • Side Bet: In the Halloween story: "Okay, who had 'As soon as she saw him' in the pool?"
  • Slice of Life: particularly in Brent's stories.
  • Snowball Fight: Told, not shown, in "Donaldson en Kazakiri" after the world has been saved but before the heroes leave Niflheim.
  • Spared by the Adaptation: Invoked for a bunch of folks, including The Misaka Sisters, Frenda Seivelun, Mahoro Ando, Pyrrha Nikos... and Gauron.
  • Spell My Name with an "S": Rob is using Hepburn romanization, not Kunrei-shiki; hence, a certain character from A Certain Magical Index is named Kazakiri Hyoga here, not Kazakiri Hyoka. This will become a plot point once Academy City as a whole shows up.
  • Sue Donym: Accelerator's ID lists him as "Axel A. Rayder". Even he thinks it's a stupid name.
  • Tarot Troubles: Sakura Kinomoto's cards foretell her difficulties two different destinies: in the Clear Card Arc (canon path) and in My Apartment Manager is not an Isekai Character (fanfic path).
  • "There and Back" Story: "Donaldson en Kazakiri"
  • Translation Convention: Played straight, as characters who know Japanese or German may be speaking it to each other, but it's written in English. Also enforced, as most displacees were given knowledge of the local language (usually English) on entering the world. Also inverted, as characters subject to the convention in their home canon don't actually know the language, like how all but Akari from Aria don't know Japanese.
  • Trapped in Another World: Inverting the trope is the premise of the entire shared world; instead of the self-inserts going to a fictional world, fictional characters come to the SIs' world.
  • Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe: Averted, despite the number of "displacee" anime characters, because the writers and thus the residences are located in Europe and North America. Tokyo is barely an afterthought in this setting to begin with, with only two known displacees (out of over 500) resident there as of Real Life 2022.
  • Undead Tax Exemption: Averted. Either due to "malleable causality", the explicit efforts of the gods and demons, friendly hacking by HAL 9000, or a combination of the three, displacees generally enter the setting with complete, consistent and fully-backstopped histories (including, yes, tax records where appropriate).
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Thanks to "malleable causality‏‎", nobody who notices that the displacees are displacees seems to care who they are... until the system breaks down when Academy City as a whole and many of the school ships show up on the same day and it becomes impossible to hide the fact that there are displacees present in the setting.
  • What Is This Thing You Call Love?: Becomes a Discussed Trope when the Misaka Sisters ask Sailor Venus about this on Valentine's Day.
  • Your Costume Needs Work: Alice Carroll to Saber, the morning after the Halloween party.


  1. ↑ Yes, this averts the One Steve Limit. They're different romanizations of the same car name.
  2. ↑ And the writers discovered that as of late-2018 Pixiv, Safebooru, Zerochan, and E-shuushuu between them had fan art of every major heroic-side female from A Certain Scientific Railgun in the outfit except for Konori.
  3. ↑ Yes, we know that this is three uses of the Rule of Three.
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