Tag: satire

Anime Maru: ‘Magical Girl Recruitment Down’

I stumbled upon this recently, a satirical article from Anime Maru reporting that talking animal mascots have had a hard time recruiting new magical girls because of the increasingly dark tone of new magical girl anime.

I repost it mostly because I myself am a little tired of the dark turn in the genre since Puella Magi Madoka Magica and am ready for earnestly made but lighter fare.

With such challenges, many magical girl recruiting mascots have been forced to turn to drastic measures. It has been reported some are even going to alternative realities for recruiting, framing the opportunities they offer as isekei.

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Book Review: ‘Battle Royale’

The original bloody mess.

Battle Royale: Remastered, by Koushun Takami. Translated by Nathan Collins. VIZ Media, 2014 (originally published 1999). 647 pages. ISBN-13: 978-1-4215-6598-9.

Here it is, the instant classic that has informed so much of Japanese pop culture in the twenty-first century. If you like anime and manga, you sooner or later run into allusions to Battle Royale. Indeed, if you’ve followed this blog, the anime version of Magical Girl Raising Project, which I discussed at length, is basically Battle Royale with magical girls.

This novel by Koushun Takami appeared in 1999 and was an instant sensation probably in part because it resulted in some pearl-clutching. As an exercise in ultraviolence, it received some condemnations, and its notoriety was secured in the following year when the movie adaptation received criticism from members of the Japanese parliament. I noticed a DVD of the film at the store one day and saw that the blurb on the back proudly boasts that it is banned in several countries.

The effect of Battle Royale on pop culture reaches outside Japan: it is arguably the source of the slew of teen dystopias that have populated YA fiction of late, as it is a likely inspiration for The Hunger Games, though author Suzanne Collins may have come up with the concept independently. Whether or not Battle Royale is responsible for this trend in YA fiction, however, it is certainly responsible for at least one successful video game: the much vaunted Fortnite: Battle Royale is transparently inspired by the novel. Wikipedia even names “battle royale” as its own genre and give several examples of works that follow the general premise of the novel, including a lot of manga and anime. Continue reading “Book Review: ‘Battle Royale’”