Battle Royale: The Novel

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They tried to believe in their classmates. They must have believed that if we could all get together, then we might end up being saved. We should commend them for that. We couldn't do that.” Tokyo International Film Festival Presentation, with footage from the gala screening at the Tokyo International Film Festival The novel and especially its film adaptation have been influential in global popular culture, inspiring numerous works of fiction in a number of different media, particularly in East Asia and the Western world. Since the film's release, the term " battle royale" has been used to refer to a fictional narrative genre and/or mode of entertainment inspired by the film, where a select group of people are instructed to kill each off until there is a triumphant survivor. The "battle royale" phenomenon has become especially popular in the 2010s. [49] A video game genre with the same name became popular in the 2010s, with games such as PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Fortnite Battle Royale, and Apex Legends setting player-count records. Other works focused on the doubt and mistrust among a group of people in a "murder game", such as the Saw film series, The Cube, and games in the Danganronpa series. [50] [51]

Again and again and again, we're told how this character or that character or somesuch other character just couldn't believe that their class was chosen, that their class was here, that they were really playing, that they were up for it and killing each other. Again and again. Every perspective change we have to go through the same 7-stage process. Every conversation covers the same ground. Does it make me a terrible person that I just wanted them to start killing each other already?? Just to stop the horrible repetition. E.T.A.: So, I watched the movie today online. (It's everywhere). If you saw the movie, you still don't know the book. Totally different! The movie is even more like the Hunger Games, but it doesn't scratch the surface of the book. It also is not true to the book at all. Even character names were changed. Read the book instead! ;-)Now I know that this is a translation, and not a very good one, by all accounts. And I know that Japanese culture is different from my own (one of the big themes in the book, actually), and that their way of speaking and thinking and behaving is different from the way I would do it. I have no problem with that. I would like to state for the record that I never expected this book to read as though it was written by an American. But I'm not going to just give all of the bad writing in this book a pass because it's poorly translated from Japanese.

Despite all the great things mentioned, I still had some problems with the novel. The main thing would be that there were too many characters to begin with. At first I thought it wouldn't be a problem, but along the way some characters weren't even that interesting. I'm aware of them being minor characters, but I still wanted at least an in depth explanation of who they were. Some characters were forced to be explained and they ended up pretentious and annoying. The good side though was that the good characters had more attention and were developed perfectly. Oh, and for those who thought Hunger Games was a violent book? Whooooooooo boy. This was absolutely horrifying at times. The gunfights were bad enough, but the graphic descriptions of hand-to-hand combat were particularly brutal. It's not the violence that's gratuitous, exactly, but the lengthy descriptions of it, and even that goes a long way toward world-building and accurately conveying the horror of the situation.Rose, Lacey; Goldberg, Lesley (January 14, 2013). "CW Boss Mark Pedowitz on Fates of 'Supernatural,' 'Wonder Woman,' 'Battle Royale' ". The Hollywood Reporter. If you thought of how much different things would have been if they'd been given guns and there were no game-maker toys to kill them, only each other - it's all here, baby! Edited: First to correct a typo, and second to add some commentary about the point of this book, which is from one of my posts in the discussion below: So. Battle Royale. Was. Epic. Dare I say it? It was better than The Hunger Games, and The Hunger Games is one of my favorites. Both have similar settings: a dystopian government that forces children into an arena and makes them kill each other off one by one. But Battle Royale ended up as the more striking, more intense, of the two. The novel grabbed me, strapped me to a poodle, and threw me off a cliff. How does a poodle save a person from a fall off a cliff, you may ask. It doesn't. That's why I kind of feel like an insignificant smudge on the ground right now. P.S. I know Suzanne Collins claims innocence when to comes to completely ripping off Battle Royale, but after reading this...

a b "Final Chapter Memorial Discussion: Koushun Takami and Masayuki Taguchi". Battle Royale. Vol.15. Tokyopop.

Table of Contents

Then there are the semi-apologies-in-advance. "I didn't tell you, but, here's an explanation of something that I had no reason to ever think to tell you previously because it's seriously irrelevant to anything but this exact situation right now, and you didn't need to know it anyway. But sorry I didn't tell you." Or "It might be disrespectful to say this, but, I am going to finish this sentence by saying something completely banal." (This one is probably a culture thing, to be fair.) Or "I don't know what to say, but, right now the words coming out of my mouth are going to be something appropriate to say in this situation, which is the very thing I said I didn't know how to say when I started this sentence." While all that bloodbath was scary to read and imagine as killers and victims all were teenagers, but it also gave the readers an insight into the mind of people when they were pushed to brink for survival. Whom to trust when every other person was someone who could kill you. Always looking over your shoulder, scared out of wits, and yet not sure if one would be able to survive next hour or breath. Además, también están las reflexiones respecto al gobierno totalitario que los obliga a participar en el juego; la sociedad en la que viven, la censura y el motivo por el cual nadie puede ir en contra de ellos. Muy pero que muy interesante. Vi un paralelismo con El Señor de las Moscas, en donde también están los que luchan para estar en lo más alto y otros que solamente quieren hacer lo correcto, tratando de no verse influenciados por las autoridades que los someten. Like I said, this is not an easy book to read. With so many school kids in the class there are constant deaths, usually in graphic and sadistic ways. I think a lot of people will be put off and not finish the book. At the start it's hard to know who to get emotionally invested in (a bit like Game of Thrones I guess), as the body count rises rapidly. The payoff at the end, however, was quite satisfying.