I just got done watching the first episode of King’s Game, or Ousama Game. In the event you were wondering ‘should I weeb out and watch this’, don’t. It’s nearly as bad as Big Order or Mirai Nikki, which is hysterical considering it borrows from those two shows very heavily, so you think it’d improve on them considering all you would have to do to beat Sakae Esuno is write at a fifth grade level, and yet whomever the author of this show is clearly failed to do this. Protip: if you’re going to have a hostage-demand show, then you write the story with the express purpose of killing off filler characters by explaining the rules after they’ve broken them, and you don’t make the only punishment be some form of death. That shit is Tsugumi Ohba level of ‘I have no idea how to write a fucking thing, but I bet if I put death in my work, teenagers will buy it because they’re retarded enough to look over all the flaws’, and many of you know how much I can’t stand the abomination that is Death Note that has continuously ruined the medium of anime since its inception.

In the aftermath of being so dumbfounded by yet another pile of visual garbage, I did the only reasonable thing a person can do and went online to confirm whether or not I was the only one who saw the trainwreck; seriously, how many more shows are we going to have to sit through where an omnipotent being just goes on a murderous rampage like God from the Old Testament? Surely it’s obvious that killing the lifeforms you have jurisdiction over is the fastest way to an eternal boredom, no? Anyways, one of the first results I ended up clicking on to get more information on the show happened to be this article on AniFem. I’ve covered AniFem before, and my opinion on them hasn’t change; in fact, I’ve since read more of the ‘work’ that’s on the site and am continually flabbergasted that people donate money to them for what is clearly grade-school level writing/analysis from a team that has unethically plugged their own outfit on other trash-tier media outlets and is only hopping into the Anime area because there’s no competition that will impede their ability to wring it to the point of sterility. This will also mark the first time I’ve said I’d be returning to something I’ve covered before and actually done so, so perhaps that’s worth something.

What comparison, where?

It’s sad how often Battle Royale gets mentioned these days when it doesn’t apply to most of the works that are apparently aping it. The only show that used the same impetus as the movie was Mirai Nikki in that there was an express purpose for the death game and not just a big facade to hand-wave pointless murdering. Also, guro has nothing to do with death, which is a riot considering the very link the author, Vrai Kaiser, provides explains in great detail that ‘guro’, in Japanese culture, is straight-up hedonism bordering on that retarded ‘bourgeois vs proletariat’ nonsense that put people like Lenin and Stalin in power. If you’re going to quote something, read it first so you don’t make a fool out of yourself in the process.

I may as well get to this now rather than later, but Vrai Kaiser is one of those new-fangled ‘queer’ people. I don’t mean ‘new-fangled’ as if I don’t believe that there is a queer spectrum, which I incidentally don’t simply because there is no concrete definition of what that spectrum is since the ‘scholars’ on the matter can’t seem to come to a goddamn consensus like adults, I mean it in the ‘this person clearly wants to be part of a fad’ way. Perhaps that’s rude of me, but if your name is ‘Vraipire Kaiser’, which isn’t even a name in any fantasy fiction that I’ve read/watched, and I’ve done a fuck-ton of that in my short time on Earth, you go out of your way to hide behind hand-drawn avatars made by other people, and put shit like

 

From anyone else, it’d be bigotry, but for a crusader, it’s just Tuesday.

And this:

My newfag alarm is going crazy.

Not that it’s important to the rest of what I’m going to write, but anyone who has watched any anime from the 80s and 90s (and honestly even earlier) would know that Japan has played with the idea of men and women being able to pass for either sex, mostly because many of the Asiatic races have body types and facial features that are soft and able to pass either way; fucking Christ, just google ‘visual kei’ and enjoy the amount of dudes who have no issue putting on dresses and pull it off. Old anime loved playing on these ideas, and you’d know this if you weren’t a fucking asshat who just started watching anime because of all the recent girl/lesbian-centric shows that have been exploding, which aren’t being made for retards like you, Vrai, but for straight, ‘cis-het’ men who, like all goddamn non-homosexual, red-blooded males, love the idea of two attractive women smashing their lips and ladybits together.

Also, and this is far more important, if the fact that Yuu Watase confirmed that Nuriko was a guy as canon for the story broke the show for you, kindly fuck the hell off and out of the anime ‘reviewing’ sphere, because it’s clear you don’t give a shit about characters being well-written and resonating with the audience. You only care if a show has someone you can crush on that fits your retarded post-modern Western first-world culture definition of ‘gender spectrum breaking’, and anything that doesn’t fit in such a narrow and dogmatic box is a piece of shit, even if it is objectively not the case. Then again, I don’t know why I’m going in so hard on someone who writes shit about vampires unironically, wears problem glasses, has nearly ten times as many tweets as followers, and looks like a potato. Maybe that’s mean, but the truth hurts, and the last thing I’m going to do is go out of my way to assuage someone’s feelings, especially if they’re championing a bullshit cause for moronic reasons and trying to push dogmatic nonsense onto people who have no interest in it.

I forgot to add it in above, but the whole crossing out the people in the photo isn’t a ‘try-hard’ thing. It’s overly edgy, sure, but shows like Angel Beats, Hataraku Maou-sama and others I’m forgetting have also done similar things with evolving end-credits, so it’s not just a ‘guro’ thing.

What?

Seriously, what in the hell does the opening statement even mean? I think Vrai is trying to say that King’s Game is based on other edgy anime from recent memory that have had a focus on hyper-violence, blood, and morbidity, but the phrasing makes no goddamn sense. Does she mean the author of King’s Game has seen these bloodbath anime?

Moving on, there was no ‘school’ in Battle Royale; it was a bunch of kids in the fucking jungle on an island setup specifically for the purpose of killing each other. If you want a perfect analog to Battle Royale in anime form that is not the anime version of the movie, go watch BTOOOM!. There were no cell phone orders in Mirai Nikki, there were phone diaries that would predict the future based on the daily events of every-day people who would interact with those playing the game, and based on actions taken by the diary holders to either instigate the deaths of other players, or avoid their own deaths. Another was the anime version of Final Destination, and just as awful, too; god forbid these shows hold off on the homicide long enough to get us attached to more than the main character and his/her main squeeze. I know I’m running the record needle down to nothing, but there’s no way anyone at AniFem is actually watching the anime they claim to and that they reference, because they wouldn’t make huge mistakes like this.

Additionally, none of these premises are ‘moody’, they’re dystopian. What you mean to say, Vrai, is that these shows aimed for a ‘moody’ tone, except for Battle Royale, which focused on over-the-top action (something you’d know if you watched it) and a through-line of the class beating the madman at his own game by coming together rather than being split apart. If you had paid attention in any of your writing/English classes, you’d know the difference between the two, and thus would be able to understand that you don’t need ‘tension’ for gore, because all gore is is violent depictions of dismemberment and bodily harm. You do, however, need tension in a story because then it establishes stakes and relationships, which helps with the narrative and characterization. How are you missing all of this, yet you’re a writer/reviewer by profession?

…

First:

Second, why is the phrase ‘you see’ the go to when one of these modern ‘writers/reviewers’ wants to put on their fucking virtual monocle and lecture down to their audience as if they’re imparting some holy nugget of wisdom? Third, the ‘naked-because-reasons’ has two of them:

1. Nakedness is tied to purity and skinny-dipping, which is a form of swimming. Thus, when he almost drowns in the tidal wave in his dream, it makes perfect sense for him to view the girl he fell in love with during the first game as a pure angel.
2. Nakedness is also linked to vulnerability, which is directly mentioned when Chiemi says, ‘I want to survive with you, Nobuaki’, and he moves to embrace her and protect her out of his love for her.

She then, of course, floats away while being dismembered, setting the tone for the story and giving Nobuaki a reason to be so distant from his classmates, even if he is being a moron and not explaining what’s about to unfold, thus resulting in the deaths of other classmates unnecessarily.

Third, there is no such thing as ‘manpain’. This is another word used by morons who want to push feminist and social justice agendas and are too fucking bogged down by their moronic dogmas to understand that pain is fucking pain. People always say that the worst pain a human can endure is childbirth, and I have always held the belief that this is utter horseshit. The worst pain a human can endure is being forced to be alone; it’s why solitary confinement is the most feared punishment when in prison. The second worst pain is the loss of someone extremely close and beloved, and then the typical ‘worst pains’ are next in line.

When you start adding in unnecessary sexism and sex-oriented bullshit terminology like ‘manpain’, you dilute the meaning of the word pain and separate it out so that you can later make the asinine argument of ‘well, this pain is worse because you can’t experience it because you’re not *insert thing here*’. Fuck you, all pain is terrible; it doesn’t matter which sex experiences certain pain. Not only that, but the hurt Nobuaki is clearly feeling at this point in the story is a type of pain that every single person can feel, so titling it ‘manpain’ is not only stupid and incorrect, but a clear indication that you only care about making this a retarded ‘men vs women’ issue, rather than sympathizing with something everyone can, has, and will undergo. Fuck you, Vrai.

Fourth, if you’re ‘queer’, you’re not a ‘woman’ anymore, you hack, meaning your opinion on what affects women is worth less than an actual woman’s opinion on what affects women. You’re either a female woman, or you aren’t; you can’t be any of this undefinable garbage just because you feel a certain way. Every day I wake up, I feel like a king, but that doesn’t make me a ruler of an entire continent. If you want to bitch about women’s issues, be a full-fledged woman or fuck off. I know this spits in the face of ‘male allies’ and everything, but the best an ally can do is sympathize and attempt to empathize, two things fuckers like Vrai are incapable of because all they know how to do is have passive-aggressive comparative ‘suffering’ competitions with each other. Plus, I also don’t believe in the whole ‘allies’ bullshit because it automatically means that if I don’t ascribe to every single one of your retarded ideas, I’m not on the team, which is dumb. I don’t have to check all the checkboxes to think that equality of opportunity is the way to go and anyone who stands in front of it is a dipshit.

Titty envy is never not funny.

Why is ‘expendable meat’ capitalized like it’s an actual term? Is our author just copy-pasting from TV Tropes like a tool because she doesn’t understand the material she just watched? There is also a comma missing after ‘which’ and after ‘show’, as the phrase ‘in this kind of show’ is completely unnecessary to the rest of the sentence and is only used as a descriptor; I wasn’t kidding when I said these people write like they just got out of the fourth grade. Natsuko being ‘cheerful’ has nothing to do with her ‘being punished by watching, witnessing, or suffering horrible things’ because all the characters are going to go through the same tribulations because King’s Game is gorror-porn. I also really like when girls who have no tits and are unattractive have to go out of their way to put down girls who have big tits and are attractive, even if they are fictional. It’s a great reminder that I will never be able to be sucked into the folds of social justice crusading simply because I love females who have all the traits commonly found on adult women. Jealous is always an ugly shade, Vrai.

This is surprisingly astute. Well done.

It’s rare you’ll find me agreeing with the people I go after, and the reason for that is the people I go after don’t have these moments of lucidity where they say something relatively intelligent that supersedes their ideology and transcends into a real topic of discussion. The inherent issue with shit like King’s Game is that it can’t decide what it wants to be: a dramatic horror story with world-building, characterization, twists & turns, cosmic apexes and bottomless voids in terms of emotions, or a ridiculous sight that plays into our visceral lizard brains that thrive on simple desires, like shiny things, or huge blood splurts, or badass sword fights. I would argue that Juni Taisen is just as bad because it’s so over-the-top that it breaks reality too often and just as poorly structured as King’s Game, but subjective tastes will, of course, be subjective.

Two in a row, wow.

I’ll be frank and say that the kid who dies from his blood exploding everywhere is pretty graphic and, at least for me, impressive. Not from a standpoint of blood splatter, because if you want that, go watch Hellsing or Elfen Lied, but because they didn’t puss out like they did with Re:Zero‘s opening episode and censor out the entrails when Subaru got eviscerated by super hot-stuff Elsa. In fact, the kid who they almost saved from hanging himself was a fairly grotesque sight, and if this show keeps it up, it will absolutely serve its main purpose of being gorror-porn. I will agree, though, that whomever wrote this story is a capital R retard because, as I said earlier, it makes no sense to murder half of the cast with a command they weren’t even privy to. Even Death Note at least did a litmus test death before Light went off the fucking diving board into the bottom of the insanity ocean. Additionally, good sentences don’t start with ‘and’; it’s a nit-pick, but I can’t go a whole two paragraphs of straight praise for these knuckleheads.

Of course it doesn’t last…

Can’t go too long without playing the ‘sex comparative suffering game’ can you, Vrai? Girls and guys both died and both suffered in the opening episode; how are you this obtuse? Oh, I know, it’s because you have an agenda to push and you’re going to peddle it even if the reality of the show would completely refute it, because you’re queer and you can never be wrong! Idiot. There’s a screen-cap I’m not including, because it’s not useful to this diatribe, but it does highlight how little thought was put into this story. The image shows one of the many ‘King’ texts, and it includes the seat number of where the King sits in the classroom. That means that, if these characters were sort of intelligent, all they would have to do is keep track of the texts for a few events to see if the seat changed, then find the seating chart, then kill whomever is the ‘King’ to test if the ‘King’ moves to other people, if it’s really a disembodied all-powerful entity, or if it stops when the King is killed. It’s also really apparent that whomever the ‘King’ is clearly gets off on controlling the fate of the kids in the classroom, so short of killing the ‘King’, the best way to beat the king is to just not play the game and face death like someone who isn’t a bitch. At some point the ‘King’ will either get bored or kill off all his/her toys and then be left alone forever, thus driving him/her insane in whatever void he/she lives in.

There’s also a command given where two kids in the class are to text whomever they chose to ‘die’, so why not text the ‘King’? If that’s not an option, then pick someone to survive the game and spend your time trying to figure out how to win and pass on the knowledge every time. Plus, if the show decides to follow the story, then you win by having more willpower than a brick, which incidentally has none because, surprise surprise, it’s a goddamn brick. Even Sword Art Online is better than this, and that is a pile of dumpster-fire gar-bitch.

Ugh, proof-read, you moron.

When an author cannot spell the main character name correctly throughout their entire piece, you really have to question if the author should be writing professionally or not.

There’s nothing ‘sleazy’ or ‘nasty’ in this show, it’s just stupid, edgy, and pretentious. As for the ‘King’s Game’ stuff, there’s no good reason for Nobuaki to be refusing to kiss Natsuko, at least from a survival standpoint. I mean, shit, if you read the story, he beats the fuck out of his friend for not fucking his girlfriend to save his life which, if I’m honest, I’d never do because as much as I love my friends, if I ever caught anyone of them smashing my girlfriend, that would be the end of that friendship. I get the whole point is that love triumphs all and that it’s an acceptable way to turn the Nobuaki into a cuck without actually being cucked (even if he’s being cucked). Again, it’s for morons and teenagers who think in absolutes, which is why it baffles me that people on AniFem hate it because they’ve done nothing else but think in absolutes for their entire existence.

As for the art, it’s certainly passable and, if I’m honest, it’s one of the better looking shows. That’s probably because I enjoy art styles which focus on great facial expressions and not this new wave of A-1 Pictures styled art with really bright-but-soft pastels, simplistic shapes, hair that has absurd tints, and the new styles of eyes that can only get bigger or smaller to show expression, which is idiotic considering how important the eyes are at conveying real, human emotions, so you’d think these anime artists would go out of their way to make the eyes the focal point. Instead, they’re simplistic fucking ovals ninety percent of the time. Maybe I’m an old fart, but characters in the 80s and 90s were much more appealing, although I could chalk a lot of that up to the art being done on cells, where an artist’s actual art was able to shine through, unlike on a goddamn computer screen, where you can Control+C and Control+V all day long until the job is done.

It’s rare that we’ve reached the end of one of these walls and I don’t want to incur some sort of self-mutilation to combat the idiocy I’ve encountered, but I guess that’s a good thing since it means that people on completely opposite sides of the sociopolitical line are able to see eye to eye sometimes, even if the paths taken to that point aren’t always correct. I’ll see y’all in the next one.