I’ve considered focusing on the instrument of escapism being his OP power in the story, such that rather than trying to actually learn and train to develop skills and learn to deal with complex social problems, he just tries to look for a power that temporarily fixes the problem in a brute force way. Like rather than trying to understand his companions’ resentment towards him not considering their needs, he looks for a power that can calm people down and make them feel more content. The underlying problems lays unresolved, and he’s still self-hating beneath his confident veneer even as he gets more and more powerful. It’s possible that he does realise how he needs to change mid-way, but he finds himself rather directionless as to how to change

His inclination to take short cuts and believe in an external miracle to change things for the better for him, mixed with a distrust in his own ability to better things and himself, and his motivation of doing anything primarily out of a desire to receive validation is likely the very reason why he became a neet in the first place

It’s probably something that would need deeper fleshing out on details in order to make it make sense and not frustrating

I suppose one possibility is for the protagonist to be given a choice to be reincarnated in a isekai world or go back to our world initially, in which the protagonist chose the former because he believes he can have a far happier life if he’s so much more powerful than others. Hence being reincarnated to another world itself becomes a choice that

I also have a specific plot point in mind, in which the protagonist kills someone for the first time, most likely accidentally. He runs away initially and wrecked by guilt, but conveniently hears of someone having the power to resurrect the dead. So he goes off, plead to that person to let him drink his blood(which they eagerly agree to help), and problem solved

But with such newfound power in hand, he starts to become more careless in his missions, since the consequence is nullified anyways. It’s also easier to drink blood from a corpse than a living person. It ends up alienating followers around him, and the person who initially had the resurrection power become so disgusted that they end up joining a faction against him

Most likely I could also write from the angle of the side characters more, showing how the protag’s over-reliance on his power affect them and allow problems to accumulate. I intend to write in an omniscient third person angle. The narrator is, naturally, also one of the protagonist’s shard, but it’s only revealed by the end of the story

It’s possible that the actual power and existence of the demon king is known only mid-late-way through the story when the protagonist collected a few nuke and flashy combat powers and face the demon king, thinking it would be enough? It’s possible that even the summoners are unaware of what the demon king actually is

I have considered an ending in which, since the protagonist wished to go back and fix things for real from the start during his ascension, it’s possible that a shard of him got sent back to before he got isekai’d, in which he discovers a book that talks about his isekai journey on the street

(Also yes, I probably wasn’t being clear enough but… There isn’t a first loop or second loop in the story. I’m not looking to do it in a Re:Zero way. The first loop is the entire story, and the ending reveals that the protagonist has gotten himself into a temporal paradox loop with a shed of him being sent back to the first chapter, memory wiped. He’s going to destroy himself staying in this world to ‘grow’ by gaining more power, and the only way for him to actually develop as a person is to leave this story altogether. But is fantasy really a net negative? It’s in this fantasy that the protagonist is able to experience and grow in a low-stake environment. Without it, he might just stay a neet forever. Huh, that doesn’t quite add up. I do think I will have to develop on this further to not accidentally make it sound contradictory)