![]() ![]() ![]() The two works may look alike at a first glance, but the way they handle their political elements couldn’t be more different. The similarities have been pointed out numerous times, though Hunger Games author, Suzanne Collins, has stated she never read Battle Royale. “Kids forced to kill each other in a deadly television game” is also the premise of famous novel/movie Hunger Games, released a few years later. The official English translation, though, somewhat defanged the original plot: publisher Tokyopop purged all political references from the story, making the plot revolve around a deadly television game instead. The novel also got a movie adaptation, but the manga is the version that got widely exported to the West. It can’t be really considered good, and yet it’s difficult to forget. The result is grotesque, over the top, and perpetually on the edge between shocking and utterly ridiculous. The manga also gives characters more space to tell their backstories, so we can feel even worse when they all die. Artist Masayuki Taguchi depicts every killing with a sort of perverse glee, meticulously inking every bloodstain, every tear, every drop of mucus. It’s not reading for the easily disgusted. Takami got the offer to pen a manga adaptation, and used the occasion to expand upon the original material. Now, Japan absolutely loves multimedia franchises when a work becomes popular, it often gets adapted to multiple mediums - anime, live action TV series, manga - in an attempt to reach an even wider audience. In 1999, Battle Royale’s author Koushun Takami managed to find a publisher, and the novel became a surprise best seller in Japan. Stuck in the middle of the ocean, and choked by collars that will explode if they try to rebel, the protagonists must choose between killing their friends or getting killed by them. In the book, a class of middle school teens is kidnapped and transported to an island, where they are forced to fight each other in a deathly game organised by the government. That’s why to understand the rise of battle royale games, we must start from the cult manga Battle Royale.īattle Royale started as a novel nobody wanted, rejected by the Japan Horror Fiction award due to its extreme content. Creators absorb ideas and translate them to different mediums, in a web of cross-influences and contaminations. But a decade ago, those same words only evoked bleak battles between crying teens, fought on the black-and-white pages of a manga - a Japanese comic.Īrt doesn’t exist in a vacuum. When you hear the words “battle royale”, most people in 2018 immediately think of the trigger-happy Plunkbat or the cheery Fortnite. A Panel Shaped Screen is a monthly column where Giada Zavarise explores how comics and video games inspire each other. ![]()
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