Case 1: The Hunger Games vs. Battle Royale

            Some time ago I semi-jokingly said that I was going to write a comparative essay about The Hunger Games vs. Battle Royale.  I say “semi” because I wanted to do it but probably wouldn’t because I’m a lazy ass, so I said it in a joking way so that everyone could just say I was joking afterwards.  No one actually gives a shit whether I write it or not, but that’s beside the point.

            In actuality, I only heard about Battle Royale shortly after going to see The Hunger Games movie and realized that everyone on the internet was complaining about them being similar.  This is something I like to call the popularity effect: as soon as something becomes popular enough to become a movie, people will complain about it.  Nobody had cared about The Hunger Games’ similarity to Battle Royale when they were just books even though the latter was a huge franchise with one enormous novel, two movies, an anime adaptation and a truly gargantuan manga series that had existed for eleven years.

            Anyway, I decided to do this thing and I bought the Battle Royale collector’s edition DVD set with both movies uncensored and the latest edition of the novel, which by the way comes with a sticker saying “The ORIGINAL survival game!”  I had been an established fan of the Hunger Games and already owned all of the books and after careful perusal of the other franchise, I came to a shocking discovery: NOT that Susanne Collins is a plagiarist who should be hanged for her crimes but that the two franchises are nothing alike!

            True, both works have a similar premise: high school aged children are forced to fight each other to the death by a totalitarian government in a huge arena, but the similarities end there.  You could say that this is a situation similar to when the first Doom came out and every video game that involved shooting things from a first-person perspective was automatically called a Doom clone because no one could understand that a new genre had just been created.

            Here I’m going to dissect the plots, themes and characters of both franchises in not so much a literary way as much as I’m tying you down and forcing you to watch me tear a monitor lizard and a capybara apart to show you that they aren’t all that similar despite being creepy-looking quadrupeds.  Furthermore, the plot of the Battle Royale movie differs from the book in a lot of significant ways while the Hunger Games movie is very loyal to the books, so it’ll sort of be a three-way comparison as opposed to a regular 1-on-1 thing.  One last note, I love both of these franchises and heartily recommend them to anyone who might actually read this.

            First off, Battle Royale has a much larger cast of characters.  Part of the reason is probably that the author wants to keep us guessing who the real protagonist is, although I’ve got to say that it’s pretty obvious (KAZUO KIRIYAMA) after watching the movie which only focuses on a few characters, while the book devotes at least one chapter to everybody except the two losers who get killed before the game even starts (sorry if you’re a fan of Yoshinobu Kuninobu).  Furthermore, all of the characters know each other, unlike in the Hunger Games where the kids were randomly selected from all over the country.  Susanne Collins probably did this to make it easier for the kids to actually kill each other without angsting over it for several hundred pages—who cares that I shot that guy, he was from District 4 and those guys are pricks. 

            So how does Koushun Takami, author of Battle Royale, get around this fact?  He doesn’t really per se.  While the kids in the Hunger Games may not be the most realistic portrayal of child soldiering, the characters, at least the ones that we really get to know, are realistic enough, hence the random selection.  However, the kids in BR are larger than life characters (LTLCs), at least some of them.  We have a genius hacker, an elitist snob, a martial arts expert, a sociopathic prodigy, a mysterious loner who’s good at just about everything, a seductive killer, a KAZUO KIRIYAMA, a crazy otaku, etc.  A few characters try to talk their former classmates into cooperating, but there are all of these weirdoes running around, plus they’re all going to explode if everyone isn’t dead in a few days, so these types get machine gunned down pretty quickly by the villainous LTLCs.  We get few people who get a more proper psychological analysis over why they would kill, like the fat kid who decides to camp the starting location because he thinks kids who made fun of him would go after him first.  Then there are a few kids who decide to kill themselves rather than murder their classmates.  Like I said these are all gotten out of the way first, leaving two camps: kids trying to escape the game and kids trying to win it.

            This is handled a bit differently in the film version, which first of all has an entirely different back-story.  The novel takes place in an Alternate Universe fascistic secular version of Imperial Japan that lasted into the 21^st century, while the film would have us believe that in the future child delinquency will become so bad that the government will sanction the kidnapping and execution-by-ordeal of children just to get their grades up.  Apparently, the director thought that having it set in an AU would keep people from relating to it.  Despite this nonsense, the film has a very interesting “game mechanic” whereby you can volunteer to be placed in a class that has less than the required number of students because of course there’s prize money involved (Funnily enough, in the book the grand prize is much smaller and includes an autograph from the Great Dictator, who [REDACTED] claims, has the hand-writing of a child). 

            Arguably the two most dangerous characters in the novel, Shogo Kawada and KAZUO KIRIYAMA, are introduced this way in the film to immediately let us know that they are a threat.  The novel establishes this by having them do things over the first couple of chapters that are certifiably badass.  To each his own.

            This brings us to our next point: villains!  Both franchises feature a psychopathic lunatic as the main antagonist among the players, a guy so vile that he actively volunteered to be put through this hell.  In HG, this is Cato, a boy from a wealthy district where they actually train their kids to fight to the death.  From what we see of him he’s very unpleasant and probably bipolar in the worst way.  Unfortunately, the book is told entirely through Katniss’ perspective, so we don’t really get to know Cato.  The real villain is the evil oppressive government, generally embodied through President Snow, a guy who’d do quite well as a bond villain.  Let’s just say he completely ruins the idea of roses for Katniss.

            That’s another thing; HG is about starting a revolution.  The seeds are planted in the first novel.  By the second Katniss has become a symbol for the budding revolution, and by the third the two sides are at all out war.  BR treats its games (actually “programmes” but for convenience I shall call them games) as entirely contained within themselves.  By the end of the novel, or either of the movies, the government is still standing and we never get to meet the Great Dictator, or whatever jackass showed up drunk to the Diet one day and proposed that they make children fight each other to the death for his amusement in the case of the films.  Therefore, the villains in BR are certified badass KAZUO KIRIYAMA, Mitsuko Souma, and the director of the game, who is literally a different character in every adaptation, so we’ll get to them in a bit.

            In the novel, Kazuo is a goddamned freak.  He was born with the inability to feel anything emotionally, and he tries his hands at everything in order to find something that might make him feel.  Without the crippling defect of emotion he easily masters all of his pursuits, be they music or martial arts, but nothing can make him feel anything and so he just moves on from thing to thing.  His defining moment as a character isn’t when he guns down those two girls within the first few chapters who only wanted to get everyone to resolve things peacefully.  It’s when Kazuo tells one of the people who considered him a friend that just before he showed up, Kazuo had flipped a coin.  Heads, he takes on the government.  Tails, he tries to win the game.  Guess which one came up?  (By the way, I have absolutely no doubt that this guy could have overthrown the government)

            In the film, Kazuo is a goddamned freak.  In a different way. (I made the same mistake twice when writing those first sentences, lol dumbass)  As I said before, he’s introduced as an exchange student.  He’s got messy red hair and a disheveled uniform, he looks like something between a delinquent and a vagrant.  And he never says a word.  He never changes his expression.  The director probably tried to get him to display that same emotionlessness as he had in the book, but without explaining it.  It’s just there.  And it works.  This guy is like an Asian Michael Meyers with a machine gun and a katana.  I love KAZUO KIRIYAMA from the book, but I fear Kazuo Kiriyama from the film.

            Mitsuko Souma is a great character, and funnily enough, she’s portrayed in almost the exact same way in both versions of BR.  She’s a sexy seductive student with a tragic back-story and a talent for acting.  She uses these talents to get close to boys and cut them to bits with a sickle.  She’s also got some considerable assets if you catch my drift.  I know nothing about the manga other than that the author must have a very sticky handshake, if you gather my meaning.  Mitsuko has a huge rack, if you read between the lines.  Anyways, she’s not a very dynamic character, but she doesn’t have to be.  If every character in a work had to grow as a person for it to be considered good then nobody would have anything to do with fiction.  Mitsuko has her means, method and motivation, and in the book at least, she does feel a twinge of regret for butchering a boy who might have actually liked her for her instead of her body, but her attitude towards that is se la vis.

            Now, the director.  In the book he’s Kinpatsu Sakamochi, a fake name if I ever heard one (I ingest enough Japanese media to distinguish pseudonyms, and yes I am a nerd).  He is the most vile, awful person in the book.  He’s a rapist, a sadist, a murderer, he’s betting on the games (for KAZUO KIRIYAMA of course), and he’s glad of it.  He’d do it all again in a heartbeat.  He’s Shakespeare’s Aaron, but less eloquent and with worse hair.  In the end of the novel [REDACTED] stabs him in the neck with a pencil, and good riddance to bad rubbish.  In the film however, he’s replaced by Mr. Kitano, one of the few things I think the movie did better.  Sakamochi had referred to the kids as his “classroom” in a mocking, creepy-feelings-all-over-you sort of way.  Mr. Kitano was actually their teacher once until he finally snapped and quit, due to Yoshinobu being a prick.  No one ever heard from him again until now.  He’s actually a sympathetic character.  He placed a bet too, but not on Kiriyama; he bet on Noriko Nakagawa, the primary love interest and the only student of the bunch who was ever nice to him.  He seems like such a nice guy, despite killing a dude with a throwing knife!  In the end he’s gunned down by the protagonist in order to escape from the island, which is the only demonstration of balls the kid makes in the film.

            That brings us to our next point: Heroes!  While my favorite character in either series is that paragon of indomitable spirit and masculinity, the badass whose reputation echoes far and wide across The Greater Republic of East Asia, the MIGHTY KAZUO KIRIYAMA!, he’s a villain, so my favorite protagonist is Katniss.  I know I said that BR was full of larger than life characters, but the tritagonists of BR only have one of those in their group and he’s cool and all, but Katniss!  She’s a fiery, passionate young girl who can shoot you right in between the eyes and has been the sole provider for her family since she was a twelve.  She’s a certified type III anti-hero because she’s terrified that being anything else would leave her family dead or dying, and she can manipulate like a pro.  She volunteers for a game she knows she can’t win in order to protect her sister and, though she won’t admit it, her deadbeat mother as well.  Of course she feels bad when she kills people just like any sane human being would, but as the war goes on she becomes desensitized to it; her character arc is that of hardening to be able to endure the awful world she lives in until it breaks her.  She’s awesome.  At least in the book version, the film Katniss was too girl-next-doorsey, but I’m not going to discuss that.

            Peeta Mellark is Katniss’s primary love interest.  We get to know him all right, but the principle thing about his story arc is that he and Katniss are on opposite sides for much of the story.  He teams up with some those rich kids I mentioned earlier to hunt down the children from the lesser districts, but he does it for Katniss, specifically to keep those assholes away from her.  Some people hate it when a female character’s primary motivation is a male character, but no one reacts when a male character does the same, and that’s fine because some people are really like that.  I digress.  Katniss refuses to work with Peeta because of this, and because she thinks he’s planning something.  Peeta publically declared his love for her on national television, and since the games are a televised event in which the general public is allowed to contribute to the players that means that he’s just garnered a lot of support for his campaign!  “Forbidden love!” the people will shout!  Oh the irony!  This leads us to another point, the purpose of the games, but we’ll get to that.

            In BR, we have a group of main characters trying to escape the game.  However, this franchise has a cast of forty plus change, so I’ll keep it down to the main four, in my opinion.  I’ll exclude Shinji’s story arc because while cool it doesn’t amount to much, and include Hiroki’s because while it doesn’t amount to much, this guy is possibly the only bigger badass than the private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks: KAZUO KIRIYAMA.

            Our tritagonists (forgive me if I’m using that word incorrectly, but it sounds cool) are Shuya Nanahara, Noriko Nakagawa, and Shogo Kawada (wow there’s a lot of Ns and Ks in this book—it might be daunting to some readers, such as myself).  In the film, Shuya is what TV Tropes would call an action survivor.  He’s good at surviving things, and very little else.  He boils down to this in the book too, but he’s still a capable man; he picks up a crossbow bolt and throws it back at a guy for christsakes!  Then later during the final showdown with Kiriyama he contributes just as much as Shogo does.  Also, he’s a cool rock-star and champion baseball player nicknamed “Wild Seven” in the book while in the movie he’s just, like, a depressed nerd.  That said, his primary purpose is to serve as the reader’s avatar into this world.  He’s strong and courageous, but also sort of a blank for us to project ourselves on.  As for Noriko, she’s nice, but there’s not much to her.  Yoshinobu asks Shuya to take care of her because Yoshinobu had a crush on her, and she and Shuya fall in love over time.  She exists to be two things: a voice of reason, and something for Shuya to worry about other than himself.

            Shogo is the character who’s tied with Hiroki for “Second Biggest Badass of BR”.  He’s a cool, slick, gentleman gangster, polite and eloquent but also menacing, who knows his way with a gun, around the kitchen, and he can be a medic in a pinch.  Ladies, this is the perfect man.  He’s got his share of tragic backstory; spoilers, he won the game once before!  He’s out for revenge for his girlfriend who wasn’t so lucky.  This is actually a little bit better in the film, where 1) we can actually see his girlfriend’s tragic death play out and 2) he volunteers for the game instead of just transferring to a school he thinks might be a future target of the game, like in the novel.  He does most of the heavy lifting so to speak throughout the novel, more so in the film.  If Shuya is supposed to be the reader, then Shogo is who the reader aspires to be.  There’s also this great gag in the film where whenever the others ask how Shogo can do whatever awesome thing he’ll respond with “of course.  My dad was a [x]” giving a different, contradictory answer each time.  I was saddened to see that in the novel his dad really was a doctor, although it’s logical.  That said, the gag came about because Shogo’s supposed to be mysterious, and the novel handles this in an interesting way; I don’t think he has more than one or two chapters from his perspective in the entire monstrosity that Takami calls a novel.

            Hiroki’s arc is short and sweet.  He’s a martial arts master looking to protect the girl he’s in love with.  His randomly assigned “weapon” was a tracking device.  When he meets the main three they, not being assholes, tell him about their plan to escape, but he insists that he find his girl first.  Seems like a pretty average storyline, but he is the only character in the novel to fight against the ultra awesome, chocolaty fudge coated, sugar-sprinkled, angelic, magical, fantastical, stupendously special, illegally sexual, genuinely brilliantly amazing goddamn, spank-my-ass-and-call-me-Suzie, mega-ultra-super, ayatollah of rock’n’rolla, King Kong ain’t got shit on KAZUO KIRIYAMA, and win!  Kazuo runs up to him covered in guns and blades and the blood of his enemies, and Hiroki kicks his ass with a broomstick.  He fails to kill Kazuo, and meets with a tragically ironic death, but damn.

            For a while there, BR dominated this paper, but that’s because we were doing characters.  Of course BR had simply a lot more characters, and it’s a much larger novel, and it’s a self contained story, and there are two goddamned self contained stories because the director of the film played fast and loose with the plot.  But setting is where the Hunger Games outshines BR, plain and simple.  The purpose of this paper isn’t to say which one is better than the other but simply to draw comparisons; however, I feel I can say this as a fact.  Susanne Collins is very good at describing things.  BR is more of a character driven piece, while HG is driven by plot and is very…I don’t want to say sensual because that has a negative connotation, or sensational because that has a weird connotation, but the literal meanings of both those words are perfectly appropriate to the situation.  Just find a page where Collins is describing food.  She makes even rye bread with corn syrup smeared on it sound delicious.  She can go on about the food at a party and what everyone’s wearing and what Katniss is wearing and what the designer was trying to invoke because these rich bastards will eat you alive if you don’t make a statement and how it feels and how it compares to what she used to wear at home and lord look at that freak these Capitol folk are so nasty can they really believe that any of the ridiculous things they do to look good (describe those ridiculous things in detail) actually look good and oh God this chicken. 

            But that’s writing style.  What about the actual setting?  Well, it’s the kind of setting most conducive to the kind of plot, I think.  If any real world government did what the ones in these franchises did, they’d have the goddamn UN bending them over a pommel horse in a few months, telling them they’ve got a purty mouth.  Therefore, HG is set hundreds of years after a near human extinction event.  Nature has reclaimed most of the planet (where life is still possible) and the remaining human population is controlled by one government situated in the Rocky Mountains.  They essentially live in a feudalistic society on a much larger scale.  Only people from the Capitol (note, the spelling is an attempt by Collins to demonstrate how the English language changes over time, there are other examples but none are plot relevant) may bear arms, vote, own land, etc.  Everyone else is a glorified serf.  They hang you for poaching (read: killing any wild animal at all) as if it were King John’s Britain.  Katniss herself is from a rural backwater that get’s the least of the Capitol’s wrath for the sheer fact of its inconsequentiality.  Really, this is more of a Fantasy story in the trappings of science-fiction than an actual science-fiction (note, to me these are just words and I don’t find any genre inherently superior to another but that’s another paper).  A rural girl goes to the evil dictator’s city to participate in his gladiatorial games and ends up becoming a symbol for rebellion while wielding an unusual bow?  Throw in some reclusive underground race to help out and we’ve got ourselves—third book?  Really?

            But I digress.  Koushun Takami’s Republic of Greater East Asia or whatever it’s called is indistinguishable from modern Japan, except for the fact that certain kinds of music will get you disappeared.  Katniss lives in a poor mining town in the depths of Appalachia.  Maglev trains can take you from there to anywhere in North America (Panem) in a matter of days.  Each little enclave of humanity is encircled by concrete walls and electrified fences, covered in white clothed guards ironically called peace-keepers whose job it is to make sure that you contribute to one of the highly specialized functions that each district provides the rest of the country.  The kids in the games don’t have crazy skills because they’re LTLCs but because they’ve been trained to use those skills since they could walk just so the family won’t get executed by firing squad.  Ruling over it all is the Capitol, a shining rainbow colored city where excess is the order of the day and ignorance the side dish.  They have democracy in the same way that Florence under the Medici’s was a Republic; the government’s more like the mafia than not.  The people are kept complacent by their excessive fashions; full-body modification is en vogue throughout the series, and by their appetites; all of that deliciously luxurious food is pilfered from the districts.  They eat until they’re stuffed and like the Romans vomit it all out afterwards; bulimia is the norm and not the exception.  And of course, there’s that great opiate of the masses: reality television, and they have the most dangerous game show of them all.  Damn, I referenced Marx and Richard Connell in one go, I’m good.

            This brings us to another major point, and the thing that makes all the internet nerds froth at the mouth: the games!  The goddamned games!  Say what you want about the characters and the setting, they both have children killing each other for sport and that’s awful plagiarism!  Dude, man, bro, this is once again the Doom argument.  Listen, there have literally been books written about how there are only a few different variations of plot.  How few?  7 (the writing teacher at the end of the Amazing Spider-Man is stupid; self-discovery is a theme not a plot.  What about the Odyssey bitch?  A brother can’t just be trying to get home?  He’s gotta be trying to figure out who he is?  Odysseus knows who he is he’s fuck mothering Odysseus!  You’re awful).  If you want to get technical, the earliest variation on this theme is when King Minos had the Athenians send him seven girls and seven boys every seven years to put in his labyrinth let them be eaten by his retarded mutant son.

            But let’s go back to the video game idea.  I’ve been using video game terminology to describe the death games and will continue to do so.  These two games have entirely different mechanics and different purposes.  In HG, the entire thing is a huge public affair and there are hidden cameras everywhere.  They fight on lovingly crafted stages made specifically for the purpose of children murdering the fuck out of each other, and it’s as full of traps and surprises as a Mario Party board.  There’s a huge pile of useful shit in the middle of the arena where all the kids are gathered at the start and literally half of them die there on the first day every time.  But if you don’t rush into the fray, you don’t get shit.  Unless of course, you managed to win over a lot of fans during the pre-game, then they can send you goody bags, but those get exponentially more expensive every day.  That’s another thing; the Hunger Games is like a send-up of modern celebrity.  They take these kids off the streets of the poor districts and make them beautiful, and dangerous, and have them pour their hearts out on stage, and then literally make them murder each other to get to the top.  The night before the game they essentially go have an interview with their version of Jay Lenno in front of a truly massive audience with everyone at home watching.  The trainers that give them a crash course in fighting (because otherwise it would be a bunch of scared teens poking themselves in the eye with a pole-axe and calling it a katana) also help them craft a stage persona and a public image, because a gift from the audience is the difference between life and death.

            BR has a very different survival game.  The government evacuates some isolated region and then kidnaps a classroom full of kids and slaps on these collars containing radios, tracking devices and bombs.  They don’t have the advanced pseudo-technology of Panem to bio-engineer monsters and hide traps all over everything, but they have these designated kill zones that spread across the island as the game goes on; stepping into such a zone will make your collar explode.  After 3 days, the whole island is a kill zone, and that’s essentially what the main motivation is supposed to be.  Kill each other, and one of you might live.  Don’t, and you all die.  At the beginning of the game, everyone is given a packfull of supplies, including one weapon.  Furthermore, you might get a “joke” weapon like a pot lid or a goddamn fork.  You don’t get anything from anyone else, unless you kill someone.  In HG, audience participation exists to keep the people complacent, but in BR the point is to instill fear in the population, so the bigwigs betting on the game don’t actually give a shit about whether you live or die.  Since there are no hidden cameras, only microphones, you’re free to plot and tinker away, but your collar will explode if it doesn’t feel your heart-beat.

            Now at the end of the day, BR is the more realistic of the two franchises.  At the end of the HG trilogy, which I won’t get into very much, I promise, Katniss and company succeed in overthrowing the government.  At the end of BR, our survivor(s) just run(s), hopefully for America.  There is no violent overthrow of the Great Dictator.  Shuya doesn’t become some revolutionary leader and blow up half of Tokyo out of revenge (except in the second movie, but that shit was stupid and totes not canon).  Kiriyama doesn’t come back to life and become Lelouch vi Brittania (but OMG, fanfic that shit).  The games go on, and our hero(es) just run(s).

            Despite this however, it seems to me that the less realistic work accomplished one thing better than BR.  The games in HG were meant to 1) instill fear in the people of the districts, and 2) keep the people of the Capitol complacent, so those with real power can laugh and count their gold (I am on fire with the references today), and it absolutely did both of those things.  Katniss never wants to have children so as not to risk even the chance that one of them would have to participate in the games, especially after winning in the first book, because she would have to train the child, and just read any page where a Capitol citizen talks about anything and you’ll be able to cross-reference that with the definition of complacent.  But in BR, the games were meant to only instill fear, and they don’t actually do that for anyone outside the game.  A character says that more people die in car accidents every year, and it’s not really a big thing in the media either, they just read the winner’s name on the news one day, and you’re like, “oh, was that this month?  Thank god it wasn’t around here,” and get on with your life.  Though to be fair, HG spends most of its length building up to the game, that’s why we know Katniss’ ideas on child-rearing and all of that gorgeous description. 

            But I’ve got to say, BR gets into all of its characters’ heads and it’s awesome.  My favorite scene in either franchise is when a certain protagonist is wounded and holed up with some girls.  While he’s asleep, they prepare him lunch, and one of the girls poisons it without the other knowing.  But another one of the girls snatches the bowl and digs right in, and suddenly she falls down dead.  The room, which had been like a nice little clubhouse, bursts into a conflagration of hysterical weeping, finger-pointing, name-calling accusations, and before you know it, everyone has their guns out, and a second after that they’re all dead except the poisoner.  She jumps off a light house.  Then, our hero wakes up and thinks what the fuck happened?  And he never finds out.

            In conclusion, these are two vastly different but incredibly worthy franchises and I hope that I have reached anyone who may end up reading this, and motivated them to either call off the hate-boner for a successful teen franchise or to buy a semi-obscure foreign novel with lots and lots of shooting in.

KAZUO KIRIYAMA