Isekai Punishment Program
Scope
The motivation behind building Isekai Punishment Program
My motivation for building this world stems from a desire to explore the intersection between entertainment, justice, and identity in a society driven by profit and spectacle. I wanted to create a setting where morality is gamified, where cruelty is rewarded not because people are evil—but because the system is designed to make them that way. It's a commentary on how society consumes punishment as entertainment, and how easily empathy is discarded when suffering is packaged as fiction.
At the heart of this story is a girl who’s been stripped of everything—her identity, her family, and her truth. She’s thrown into a narrative where she’s meant to be hated, not just by the characters around her, but by the audience. I wanted to challenge the trope of the villainess by making her someone who actively fights the role written for her. Her journey reflects the real-life struggle of reclaiming your narrative in a world determined to define you by your worst day.
This world also lets me explore themes of memory, systemic manipulation, and what it means to resist a story that’s already been written for you. It’s a space where the lines between fiction and reality blur—and where love, loyalty, and humanity survive even in the most artificial of prisons.
The goal of the project
I’m building this world for a novel—something layered, character-driven, and emotionally intense. I want to create an experience that pulls readers in with high-stakes fantasy and sharp twists, but stays with them because of the emotional complexity underneath. This world gives me a place to tell a story about survival, identity, and defiance in a system that’s stacked against you.
What I hope to get out of it is a world that feels immersive and horrifyingly believable. I want readers to question what makes someone a villain, to feel the weight of choice when kindness is punished and cruelty is rewarded. More than that, I want them to root for a protagonist who refuses to break, even when the whole world is scripted to destroy her.
For myself, I want this project to be a place where I can push my creativity, tell a story I haven’t seen before, and build a world that feels as alive as the characters who suffer and fight inside it. It’s a long-form exploration of injustice wrapped in magic, mystery, and morally grey choices.
Isekai Punishment Program's Unique Selling point
The unique hook of my world is that capital punishment has been transformed into televised fantasy entertainment. Criminals—especially those accused of the worst crimes—are sentenced not to death, but to immersive narrative simulations, where they’re forced to play out villainous roles for the entertainment of the masses.
My protagonist is a girl falsely accused of murdering her family, thrown into a “villainess” scenario where she’s fated to die over and over again. The twist? She knows how the story’s supposed to go—but refuses to play her part. And deeper still, the characters who are supposed to be fictional aren’t AI—they're real people, bred to believe they’re part of a fantasy world, with no idea they’re trapped in a lie.
What makes this world special to me is how it takes familiar tropes—like the villainess, the Saint, the Demon Lord—and places them in a dystopian system that rewards cruelty, punishes empathy, and turns redemption into rebellion. It’s not just about escaping the scenario—it’s about breaking the script, rewriting your role, and exposing the machinery behind the illusion.
It’s a story about defiance, identity, and sisterhood, wrapped in fantasy, conspiracy, and brutal beauty. That’s what draws me in—and what I hope pulls others in too.
Theme
Genre
The genre is a hybrid of dark fantasy, dystopian science fiction, and psychological thriller, with strong mystery and drama elements.
At the surface, the story plays out like a classic magical academy fantasy—complete with noble houses, prophecies, saints, and demon lords. But beneath that, it’s set in a futuristic, consumerist dystopia, where these fantasy scenarios are actually simulated punishment programs disguised as televised entertainment.
The world blends high magic (in the simulation) with advanced technology (in the real world). Magic is systematised and narratively structured within the VR-like scenarios, while outside the simulation, tech corporations and justice systems exploit these simulations for profit and social control.
The tone is dark, emotionally intense, and morally grey. The world is beautiful on the surface but corrupted at its core—designed to break people while making it look like justice is being served.
Reader Experience
The world is meant to feel like a beautiful nightmare—a place that lures you in with magic, grandeur, and romance, only to slowly reveal its rot and cruelty. On the surface, it’s full of opulent academies, glittering courts, and high fantasy wonder—but everything is artificial, manipulated, and built on suffering.
I want readers to feel a sense of dread masked as enchantment. There’s always an undercurrent of tension—because they know that every kindness could be punished, and every reward might be a trap. The world should make readers question their own reactions: Why did I enjoy that moment? Should I have? What does it say about me?
Emotionally, I want readers to feel deeply moved, especially by the protagonist’s struggle to reclaim her identity and protect the sister she thought she lost. It’s a story of surviving dehumanisation, of finding love and humanity inside a system designed to erase it. There’s horror, yes—but also resistance, beauty, and the ache of something real breaking through the lie.
The world feels tragic, intimate, and dangerous, like a fairytale written by a tyrant—and slowly rewritten by someone who refuses to play their part.
Reader Tone
The tone of the world is dark, emotionally intense, and psychologically complex—somewhere between The Witcher and Black Mirror, with touches of Made in Abyss or Re:Zero for the sense of beautiful dread. On the surface, the simulation presents a bright, romantic fantasy—glittering magic academies, royal balls, divine prophecies—but it’s a façade covering a system built on exploitation, cruelty, and manipulation.
It’s difficult and dangerous to live in this world, especially if you question the roles assigned to you. Ordinary people suffer in silence, their lives written by someone else’s script. “Villains” are punished spectacularly for stepping outside the lines, while “heroes” are rewarded for playing their part—even if that means hurting others.
The tone is not without moments of warmth or wonder, but those moments feel fragile, hard-won, and precious—small rebellions of sincerity in a world that treats emotion as performance. Wondrous and horrible things happen side by side. It’s a world that invites you in with charm, then makes you flinch when you realise what’s beneath the surface.
This contrast between surface-level fantasy and underlying horror is what gives the world its unique tension—and what makes the protagonist’s fight for truth and identity all the more powerful.
Recurring Themes
1. Identity vs Role
“You were cast as the villain—but who are you, really?”
This theme explores how people become trapped by the roles assigned to them—whether by society, fate, or programming. The protagonist constantly struggles between the scripted actions she’s expected to perform and the person she actually is. The more she resists her “villainess” identity, the more dangerous her world becomes. But it’s through reclaiming her agency and rewriting her role that she begins to shape her own destiny.
This theme appears in:
- NPCs glitching when she breaks the script.
- The MC being rewarded for cruelty, but punished for compassion.
- The Saint struggling with her own programming, mirroring the MC’s arc.
2. Manufactured Justice and Spectacle
“Your death is a season finale.”
The world’s justice system is built on illusion—punishment disguised as entertainment, morality traded for viewer ratings. Everything is curated, commodified, and consumed. The theme critiques how society turns suffering into spectacle, desensitising people to pain in the name of profit and control.
This theme appears in:
- “Justice” being decided by audience manipulation and narrative outcomes.
- The simulation adjusting for drama—twisting events to keep the show “entertaining.”
- Criminals being forced to act in roles written to destroy them, with no audience knowing (or caring) that it’s real.
3. Sisterhood, Memory, and Lost Truth
“She reminds me of someone… but I buried her years ago.”
This is the emotional heart of the story. The bond between the MC and the Saint—who is secretly her real sister—is what drives the MC to resist. It's about memory suppressed, grief manipulated, and love surviving even through lies. As the MC pieces together who her sister really is, she also reclaims pieces of herself. It’s a theme of redemption through connection, and of protecting the one person the system wants her to destroy.
This theme appears in:
- Glitches tied to shared memories.
- Repeating visual motifs (like a lullaby, a hair ribbon, or the sister’s voice saying the MC’s real name).
- The growing emotional tension as the Saint begins to remember too.
Character Agency
At the beginning, character agency is extremely limited—by design. The simulation scripts every major event, and the system punishes deviation through social collapse, magical backlash, or forced correction. Most criminals placed into these scenarios either follow the role because they believe it’s their only chance at survival, or because they’ve been broken by the system.
For the protagonist, this makes even small acts of defiance feel monumental. Her ability to change the world is minimal at first—but as she unravels the truth, uses her forbidden magic, and discovers the hidden backdoors her father left behind, her agency grows. She's able to disrupt the system from the inside, not by brute force, but through clever subversion and moral resistance.
Her choices start to have ripple effects—changing how characters behave, glitching scripted events, and eventually revealing the hidden reality beneath the simulation. Long-lasting change is possible, but hard-earned. It's not just about beating the scenario—it’s about rewriting the very logic of the world.
The story is ultimately about reclaiming agency in a world that was built to strip it away.
Focus
Drama
The Arrival of the Saint
A meek, mysterious girl has been “discovered” in the countryside and brought to the academy under Church protection. Nobles whisper she is a commoner mistake, while others treat her like a divine miracle. The Saint’s appearance coincides with signs of magical instability and renewed Demon Lord activity, raising tensions across the school and the kingdom. Everyone is watching her—but no one knows she’s the protagonist’s real sister.
The Villainess Engagement Decree
The MC, daughter of a disgraced noble house, has been forcibly engaged to the Crown Prince as a political tool to test her “loyalty” and reinforce the simulation’s narrative path. The prince loathes her—or is pretending to—and students are placing bets on how long she’ll last before being executed, exiled, or worse. This creates a countdown clock of social sabotage and emotional pressure.
Rumours of a Demon Cult Inside the Academy
A growing faction of students and professors are secretly fascinated by Demonkin philosophy, claiming the Church’s teachings are corrupt. Some of them believe the Demon Lord offers true freedom from fate. Students begin disappearing or changing personalities, and suspicion falls on the MC—both as scapegoat and potential leader.
The Hero is Being Groomed for Political Marriage
The Hero Prince—charming, dutiful, beloved—is being quietly pressured into choosing a noble fiancée. Multiple houses are vying for the match, and the academy’s social politics are spiralling. The MC was once the obvious choice, but the Saint’s growing popularity and innocence make her a crowd favourite… which makes the MC look like a jealous, discarded villain. Again.
The Demon Lord’s Seal is Weakening
There are rumours among upper-level students and faculty that forbidden magic is leaking from the old ruins beneath the academy—manifesting as hallucinations, “dream sickness,” and sudden magical surges. The Church insists the seal is intact, but a few instructors have vanished under mysterious circumstances, and one student tried to gouge out their own eyes after hearing “a voice in the walls.”
Noble Houses are Secretly Forming Alliances for Rebellion
The fallen House of the protagonist isn’t the only one dissatisfied with the current regime. Several other noble families—quietly disgraced, politically frozen, or jealous of the church’s growing influence—are beginning to form clandestine pacts. Some want to overthrow the crown; others just want their power restored. The academy has become a political playground, and every ball, duel, or exam could be a front for conspiracy.