#koshun takami

[robottopurinta]

[i-oooo]

What the hell happened in the end of 00's to hive mind these three similar book series?

Hunger Games, Maze Runner and Divergent.

All of them are variations on isolated societies; experiments on children; death traps; high stakes; mad scientist tropes; teens killing each other; dangerous trials and scemes.

All of them in a dystopian sci-fi and/or dark fantasy setting.

BOOK RELEASE DATES:

Hunger Games September 14th 2008

Maze Runner October 6th 2009

Divergent April 26th 2011

FILM RELEASE DATES:

Hunger Games March 23rd 2012

Divergent March 18th 2014

Maze Runner 19th September 2014

WHAT DO YOU THINK HAPPENED?

I reckon that the answer is most likely that Japanese author Koshun Takami published his novel Battle Royale in 1999 (it wasn't translated to English before 2003).

It was also turned into a manga series and a movie in 2000.

[kaysbookpassport]

"But Shuya didn't like judging people on rumors. Someone once said, if you could see for yourself then there'd be no need to lend an ear to what others said."

~Battle Royale - Koshun Takami~

[pb-dot]

Film Friday: The Legacy of Battle Royale

Today, I want to air out an idea that has been rolling around in my head a bit, and it's not a straight film rec (or furious evisceration) but I figure it'd do in this "slot," as the starting point in this whole line of thinking starts with an obscure film that I rather like, although it ends somewhere decidedly less tidy. Today, let's talk of what became of (the) Battle Royale.

For the uninitiated Battle Royale started its lifespan in the public eye as a somewhat controversial Japanese horror/thriller novel. The novel depicts a dystopian near-future Japan where the solution to youth rebellion, truancy, crime, and altogether bad attitude is picking out a random class to go through a death game where they have to kill or be killed by their classmates. Technically, the term is older than the book, as the author was inspired by the wrestling term for large, no-holds-barred wrestling matches, but it's safe to say as the term as a short-hand for all-out violence has probably survived its wrestling origins. The book itself is cynical and heavy on the satire, taking great lengths to parody the Japanese "compulsory optimism" attitude prevalent in the era, which somewhat tinges the bleak proceedings with absurd black humor.

The 2000 movie version further expanded on this theme of contrasting the bleak meaninglessness of the concept with the absurd "Ganbatte!"-style optimism, in addition to attracting western viewers with a postmodern Tarantino-inspired touch to the ol' ultraviolence and showcasing yet another strong turn by Takeshi "Beat" Kitano and at least one future Quentin Tarantino collaborator in Chiaki Kuriyama. This flick drew Western attention to the Japanese style of violent cinema, thus giving Takaishi Miike steady work and Quentin Tarantino a quarter-chub at east. In addition to inspiring swathes of "Death Game" style stories in Japenese media in the coming years, a genre that admittedly lost steam once the novelty and shock value of game-ified murder wore off, albeit the odd resurgence with a gimmick, most recently the South Korean Squid Games is not unheard of. Still, Battle Royale's biggest cultural impact would not be known for many years.

Apart from the observation that teenagers are impulsive and have the potential to do violence if given a chance, Battle Royale's most ingenious mechanic is no doubt the bomb collars, an anti-stalling tactic that would prevent the students that weren't one MCR song away from going on a spree from barricading up and waiting it all out. The area of the battle royale "game" would periodically shrink, and the students would, lest they be decapitated by explosives, be corralled into an ever-shrinking area, making violence all but assured at an expedient pace. This, it turns out, is not only good for making your student violence machine produce student violence, it's also strong game design, and this is where the penultimate link in our chain of inspiration comes in.

Players Unknown's Battlegrounds, or PUBG , for short, jumped on this bit of good game design from the dystopian government playbook and expanded it into a series of mods as well as a standalone game. The Battlegrounds game design maintains some of the Battle Royale understanding of violence, in that the ever-contracting circle seeks to force the player into violence, making the whole thing brutish, unforgiving, and short. This approach probably limited the reach of PUBG some, and made it more a game culture curiosity than the protoplasmic juggernaut of media that took the torch and ran all the way past any point of satire.

Fortnite started its life as a co-op multiplayer game with base-building elements where the primary concern was to stop the zombies that now were everywhere from eating everyone. The game has since shown remarkable flexibility in game design, swapping out gameplay functionality Ship of Theseus-style until the removal of building in the main mood of the now pvp Battle Royale-style third-person shooter slash engagement-driven content platform.

Now, that last bit sounds a bit like me snarking I will admit, but I do have a point here, stay with me. While the gameplay of Fortnite certainly is still a sped-up more fun take on the PUBG formula, it would be missing the forest for the trees to describe it as a mere third-person shooting game. Fortnite is a platform, a delivery vehicle for expressive content in the form of digital avatars and animations. Just about every major media franchise has had a collab with Fortnite at this point, the debut of a pivotal plot point in the latest Star Wars movie took place on the platform as part of a cross-promotional tie-in, which sounds like something that should be a joke but it is not. Whatever else you can say about the thing, there is some strong multimedia brand management going on here, and whether such a Ready Player One-ass digital platform of unlimited brand recognition works is a good or at least Mostly Harmless thing or yet another symptom of a metatext-obsessed media-as-consumable-good cultural landscape slowly milling every aspect of the human soul and mutual recognition of the human spark inherent in creation that can be excised from the aether into hotdog filling "assholes and eyelids"-style, remains to be seen, and surely discussed.

Anyway, my point here is that of the many things Fortnite has assimilated, is the ever-shrinking safe zone, making for a dynamic an fast-paced action experience. There's something deeply ironic in that, in that the same thing that represents the inevitability of brutal state-enforced violence also represents the defining borders of the play area where you'll get a #1 Victory Royale and do The Carlton over the bodies (slash killcams) of your vanquished foes. There's a slight incongruity there I suppose, but there is some grim resonance between the "all smiles over instructions of how you'll be murdering or be murdered by your classmates" and "easy breezy gun violence as Hello Kitty murders Boba Fett" if you were to frame it like that.

Now, I don't mean to say Battle Royale predicted Fortnite any more than 1984 predicted whatever conservative pundits claim George Orwell predicted this time. Dystopias like Battle Royale don't predict the future other than incidentally. They comment on the present. It doesn't claim that in the future the Japanese Government will sanction youth murder games, it says that the things the Japanese Government is doing to the youth is, in some way violent and overly cruel. Battle Royale, I would argue, has much to say on the cresting population wave and the unsustainable pressures it puts on the youth generation and the inherent hopelessness of the future in such a situation. The real-world Japanese government has perhaps not forced the youth to participate in blood sport, but less social mobility, later retirement, lifted restrictions on child work, austerity, and general corrupt political fuckery sure does fuck over the younger generation pretty well without bomb collars being involved even a little bit.

So where does this all leave my point? I'm not sure I have one other than tracing the idea of "Battle Royale" as a genre centered around violence in a constricting playfield and how the meaning of it has changed. While I kind of want some subversive black comedy property to give the concept a whack again, it's probably just too solidly claimed by Fortnite to ever be anything other than a commentary on that game in particular. This isn't to say you can't make a salient commentary on one of the biggest media properties in the world, in fact, I'd love for someone more incisive than me to take a swing at it, but the symbolism here is probably out of the General Use bucket for now.

[yeyinde]

Hi! okay i would quite literally inject your writing into my veins if i could, but i wanted to ask you if you have book recommendations, because you just have this incredible way with words and metaphors and UGH. your writing is indescribable, its so visceral and reverent. I genuinely dont have the vocabulary to describe it, im so serious.

so, in that, i would love to know all of your books recommendations, because you seem like someone with incredible taste. (and i mean all, shit you loved, books you hated. anything and everything!)

thank you for gracing the world with your talent <3

ahhh, thanks!!! admittedly, i'm not as well-read as i'd like to be, but i've been trying to branch out since i gravitate more toward poetry, nonfic mythology, essays, and memoirs over novels most of the time. but these are some of the things i've read in the last few months/picked up recently or that stuck with me the most:

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (cheating here because i've read this eight times now but ahhh i could not recommend Achebe more. poetry, essays, novels. read everything. read it all.) In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones The Reformatory by Tananarive Due Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice The Innocents by Michael Crummey Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner Banyan Moon by Thao Thai Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista i think every rec list includes the classics so i tried to avoid adding them, but i also suggest: Battle Royale (Koshun Takami), Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), Kitchen (Banana Yoshimoto), the Xenogenesis Trilogy (Octavia E. Butler), No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai (among others).

[mingos]

wilder's comforts

comfort food(s): ministrone soup, new england clam chowder, black beans, peanut butter + banana sandwich, quesadillas

comfort drink(s): masala chai, hot chocolate, dr. pepper, milkshakes

comfort movie(s): friday the 13th ('80), candyman ('92), suspiria ('77), phantom of the paradise, nightmare before christmas, child's play ('88), pirates of the caribbean 1 + 2

comfort show(s): one piece, paranoia agent, great teacher onizuka, chucky, documentaries about nature, history, or something morbid idk i don't really watch that much tv.

comfort clothing: jackets/sweaters with thumb holes, clothing a size or two too big, compression socks, **beanies

comfort song(s): father's song - prince, tonbo - tsuyoshi nagabuchi, 'it was always you, helen' - phillip glass, temple of the king - rainbow, abstract (psychopomp) - hozier, really anything with dio or hozier on vocals.

comfort book(s): battle royale - koshun takami, the vampire lestat - anne rice, burr - gore vidal, scary stories to tell in the dark - alvin schwartz, the complete collection of edgar allan poe

comfort game(s): luigi's mansion, jetset radio, pokemon xd, kirby airride, pokemon mystery dungeon, clock tower (snes), clock tower 3, corpse party (remake + book of shadows), dino crisis, alone in the dark

tagged by: stole it uwu. tagging: @cptnslog, @hweyd, @belovedcorvid, @goreburdened, @gxdmade, @enruiinas , @heavens-sin, @notanuki

[romilly-jay]

Yay, Nostalgia

Not actually a snippy title. That's because my heart is full from the announcement that naughty penguin Feathers McGraw is returning to screens in the latest Wallace and Gromit, in, I guess, December 24.

[Yes, I'm writing this in June, when I first saw it announced - but I've got the blog pointed towards my lil series on 'cosy catastrophe' and frankly, I hate to disrupt the pattern and since this writing is more about capturing my thoughts somewhere I can find them again, I figure that the Real Time ness doesn't actually matter very much.]

I love the trope of the possessions being returned to the prisoner as they leave incarceration... I get a proper grin at the sight of the ridiculous rubber glove "disguise"... (It amuses me so much: the idea that the disguise was effective... the existence of a four-finger glove... It makes literally no sense other than to match the rooster comb the penguin is faking... but then again, if I want to enforce a five-finger glove standard in an animation about a criminal penguin, perhaps I'm losing track of my pre-existing willing suspension of disbelief?)

Speaking of losing track of rationality - it's not even like I'm a particularly dedicated watcher of Wallace & Gromit but they have an apparently unshakeable hold on my heart just the same. [Only apparently because - too bold to assume that my love of ANYthing will survive forever [clearly it won't] but also just on the slim off-chance that Aardman Animation will turn out to be villainous in ways I'm not able to separate from their art or prepared to overlook.]

Equally, despite never having read them - but I did eventually watch and enjoy the movies - I was <3 to learn that Haymitch is getting a turn in the spotlight in a surprise 5th Hunger Games book and movie. And again - irrationally attached to the *idea* of more 'screen'/page time for a pre-Games/mid-Games H. Irrationally because - I should maybe, possibly, perhaps read the books? Is it okay that I feel invested in this character simply because of Woody Harrelson?

This makes more sense to me than a prequel focused on Snow, though since I originally wrote this, I've now seen (not read) the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and... really didn't hate it. Landed for me as a deepening and not simply as a desperate dance to make a story within the constraints of knowing that the future has to land in a certain, specific place. Should say that Peter Bradshaw writing for The Guardian takes precisely the opposite view. One Star. Savage.

Finally - and not really about nostalgia at all, on the basis that it's too soon for me to be nostalgic about my MFA which at time of writing isn't actually even quite finished - I'm additionally affectionate towards The Hunger Games because it was cited by Adam Roberts (2016) in his discussion of the concept of cosy catastrophe.

This is what Roberts had to say about it:

p.481 the success of the Hunger Games crystalised a sense that the dominant mode of contemporary SF is dystopian.

p. 481 [The] grisly conceit seems to have been lifted from Japanese writer Takami Koshun’s cult novel Batoru Rowaiaru (Battle Royal 1999), also filmed, in which teens are deposited on an island, armed and informed they must kill one another. The difference is one of tone: Takami’s novel is inventively savage in a wholly unsentimental way; Collins parses her violence through a dewey-eyed love story narrative that tends to take precedence over the political satire and utopian dreaming.

Not at all similar in tone to the “harrowing anti-cathartic power’ of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic nihiltopia The Road (2006)

p.481-2 one of the most devastatingly affecting / novels of the decade, like Samuel Beckett with a high velocity rifle.

By contrast, The Hunger Games could be described (using a term from Brian Aldiss – again) as “cosy catastrophe”.

p. 482 the emphasis of a cosy catastrophe is more on the first term than the second term; the disaster that frames the narrative exists for our hero or heroine to have greater freedoms of adventure and to show them overcoming their adversities.

[Should add that after I first spoke about this, one of my Gen Z classmates who for sure knew more about The Hunger Games than I do came up to tell me that this was an unfair read of THG and I can see how that argument can be made - that it's more straight disaster/dystopia than dystopia-as-excuse-for-high-jinx.]

References

§Merlin Crossingham on X (2024) [X/Twitter]. Available at: https://x.com/ernyberny/status/1798823839129907682 (Accessed on: 07 June 2024).

§Olapido, G. (and agencies). (2024). 'Author Suzanne Collins announces fifth Hunger Games book - Sunrise on the Reaping to be published on 18 March 2025, set 24 years before original Hunger Games novel', The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jun/06/new-hunger-games-suzanne-collins (Accessed on: 07 June 2024).

§Roberts, A. (2016) The history of science fiction. 2nd edn. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

[mariyahcore]

tes livres (fiction) préférés ?

Marche ou Crève, Stephen King

La Peau sur les Os, Stephen King

Misery, Stephen King

Le Roman de la Momie, Alexandre Dumas

Battle Royale, Takami Koshun

Les Carnets de l'Apothicaire, Hyuuga et Natsu

[chuthulhu-reads]

[ID: A paragraph from Battle Royale, the novel by Koshun Takami. It reads as follows: Seated among the thick vegetation on the southern slope of the northern mountain, a boy peered into his hand mirror and ran a comb through his thick hair to neatly arrange his pompadour. Since the game had started, he might have been the only one in his class--even including the girls--to feel he could afford the luxury. But this came as no surprise. Despite his rugged features, he paid an excessive amount of care to his appearance. You see, he--the boy who, for a reason known to very few in Class B, was called Zuki by his friends, or rather, at this point he had been so called, anyway, this boy was...

...queer.

End ID.]

This is the funniest fucking part of Battle Royale, honest to god. Like it's queerphobic but the sheer drama makes it HILARIOUS. This is the tone the novel also takes to reveal such deep, dark tragedies as Kiriyama's severe brain injury or Mitsuko's sexual abuse. It's just so... is he, you know...

...queer.

[soleminisanction]

#2 for the book asks: top 5 books of all time?

Tough one! With the caveat that the order on these is complete arbitrary, as they're all roughly tied for first, I'd have to narrow it down to:

Good Omens by Sir Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

Battle Royale by Koshun Takami

Writing for Comics With Peter David by, well, Peter David

IT by Stephen King

and the original TPB collection of the Young Justice: Sins of Youth event, aka volume 3 of the collected edition.

Book meme!

[lullabiesinaglasswilderness]

“What's wrong with killing? Everyone has their issues.”

[robottopurinta]

[anamon-book]

バトル・ロワイアル 特別篇 編集・文＝木俣冬、スチール＝原田大三郎・加藤義一 東映 事業推進部 監督＝深作欣二、原作＝高見広春、出演＝藤原竜也・前田亜季・山本太郎・栗山千明・柴咲コウ・安藤政信・ビートたけし ほか

[clairefable]

Back in my edgy teenage weeb days I paid a small fortune for an imported video (yes, video- showing my age here) of Battle Royale after seeing it on some obscure cable channel in the middle of the night. It’s still one of my favourite films! (I eventually upgraded to a similarly expensive copy of the special edition DVD.)  Mitsuko deserved better! (Shoutout to @dysphorie for watching it at her flat one night drinking sake mixed with Bacardi Breezers while she was passed out on the couch)

[gumikon]

Battle Royale: Shuuya Nanahara Aesthetic

[franco-ikari]

A  história e a importância dos Live Actions: mangás e animes famosos ganham versões interpretadas por atores e atrizes famosos

O Live Action é um termo usado pra classificar adaptações de mangá ou anime com atores reais.Na verdade existem obras que seguem até um estilo Tokusatsu mas classificamos geralmente como Live Action.A idéia de adaptar mangá e anime em Live Action é antiga e começou de certa forma nos anos 60 quando tivemos o mangá Giant Robo de Mitsuteru Yokoyama e Magma Taishi de Osamu Tezuka pela P. Productions em 66/67. existe uma certa controvérsia pois muitos denominam estes como sendo Tokusatsu tendo o mesmo tipo de produção de séries do estilo porém eles continuam sendo produtos derivados de uma obra impressa.Existem ainda inúmeras outras séries assim como Baron-1 e Ninja Akakage. Porém a criação do Ultraman e do Kamen Rider fez com que as produtoras quisessem menos adaptar mangás e criar suas próprias séries sem ter que gastar em royalities então ficou assim durante muito tempo.Um Livew Action que fez muito sucesso adaptando um mangá famoso foi Sukeban Deka em 1985 que trazia uma colegial delinquente que vira uma detetive lutando com um iôiô de aço.Tendo 3 temporadas cada um com uma protagonista diferente(as atrizes são idols populares na época) mas ambas carregando o Codenome Saki Asamiya está série foi produzida pela Toei num formato de novela japonesa(os dramas) com 24 min cada. Essa inclusive foi a série mas popular que ouvi falar.Mais tarde foi feita uma versão de Video Girl Ai na década de 90.Mas a explosão do Live Action surgiu a partir dos anos 2000 com Battle Royale,adaptado da novel de Koshun Takami que ficou popular mesmo no mangá pela dupla Takani e Masayuki Taguchi e aí veio o Live Action depois fazendo boa bilheteria e muito sucesso de público e critica,sendo que ali os produtores viam que era uma ótima idéia adaptar mangá e anime famosos pra filmes e séries Live Action

Podemos então dizer que assim como o anime visa vender mais material original e popularizar a obra pra além do leitor de mangá o Live Action visa expandir ainda mais o público,afinal anime e mangá ainda é visto com certas ressalvas pelo público geral fora do nicho Otaku então trazer uma obra com atores populares bem famosos é uma forma de levar esse público ao cinema ou assistir na TV.Uma chuva de produções deste tipo começo a surgir a partir dos anos 2000 tendo como carros-chefe a versão de série de Sailor Moon feito pela Toei Company e tendo diretores e roteiristas de Tokusatsu como Yasuko Kobayashi e atrizes escolhidas pela própria autora que inclusive escreveu as letras das músicas da série.Com o desenvolvimento de personagens que o anime fazia muito bem unido ao drama do mangá,o Live Action fez muita gente se encantar.Na versão Live Action os personagens geralmente são feitos de modo a parecerem mais com pessoas reais não tendo aqueles padrões coloridos de cabelos.Em Sailor Moon as personagens só assumem aquela aparência do anime quando se transformam e foi bem legal este toque.Outra que veio em live Action foi a Cutie Honey de Go Nagai num filme dirigido pelo Hideaki Anno,o criador de Evangelion que capturou perfeitamente a essência da personagem usando bizarrices até mesmo nos efeitos especiais.Em 2007 ela ganhou uma série sem relação com a versão cinema estrelada pela atriz Miki Hara(Benikiba de Space Squad) e Ayame Misaki(Escape de Go-Busters). O pouular Death Note também ganhou um ótimo Live Action dirigido por Shunsuke Kaneko que inclusive foi importado pro ocidente pela Warner Bros devido a imensa popularidade do anime e como Death Note é muito parecido com nosso mundo a adaptação foi bem mais fácil de fazer e a fidelidade é absurda porém ele só cobre o primeiro arco do anime mas trás um final fechado similar a do mangá.Obras de romance como Kimi ni Todoke,Nana,Orange tiveram sua versão Live action e são as favoritas dos fãs enquanto outras como Mushishi e Attack on Titan deixaram a desejar.Mas sem dúvida o mais popular Live action foi o de Rurouni Kenshin em 2012.Com uma produção impecável e uma fotografia espetacular o longa enche os olhos com direito a um atuação esplêndida de Takeru Sato(o Ryoutaro/Kamen Rider Den-O) como Kenshin Himura o longa é considerado a melhor adaptação,ganhou uma sequncia em 2014 e recentemente ele ganhou mais dois filmes contando o passado e a história final de Kenshin nunca adaptada pra série em anime na TV.

Muitas obras famosas como Bleach,Bakuman,Shigatsu Kimi no Uso,Gintama e até Ranma 1/2 ganharam versões em Live action e com um faturamento que vai na casa dos bilhões de ienes essa idéia dos Live Actions vai seguir colhendo ótimos frutos.O mesmo não pode ser dito das versões ocidentais que deixam e muito a desejar com adaptações tão ridículas que dão desgosto como o Death Note da Netflix,o Dragon Ball Evolution e outros ainda querem tentar e muito emplacar versões holywoodianas dos animes famosos,já tem um de Cowboy Bebop em produção e até Saint Seiya e One Piece entraram na brincadeira ms enquanto os engravatados americanos pensarem só no bolso e não souberem captar a essência dos originais vão continuar fracassando miseravelmente

Eu gosto muito dos Live action japoneses.Tem quem reclame de muitos por tentar emular a atuação dos anime e tal mas não me incomoda.Os japoneses tem seu próprio jeito de atuar então a idéia é a esma que eu sempre digo:temos que nos adaptar.Uma outra coisa que ficou muito popular são as Peças de Teatro os famosos Stage Plays e os Musicais como o popular Sera Myu de Sailor Moon onde os atores são caracterizados fielmente os personagens originais até mesmo na cor dos cabelos parecendo cosplays de luxo mas tem sido bem feitos e muito populares também por ter conceitos similares ao Live Action. Kimetsu no Yaiba,Yu Yu Hakusho e tantos outros já ganharam sua própria Peça de Teatro e outros mais virão por aí como o recente Tokyo Revengers.E com isso grandes obras do anime e mangá ganham mais espaço no grande público