An assortment of Etho’s pokemon noises from his Pixelmon series.
You know the “if I were a pokemon” line in his newest HC video? He had another what-if-I-am-a-pokemon moment in his pixelmon series, where he makes some Etho noises, I guess. (It’s at the end if you wanna skip, but why would you ;D?)
at some point in your life you will be boiling fruit, water, sugar, and lemon juice in a pot to make a syrup or jam. the instructions will tell you to simmer for a certain amt of time. your timer will go off and you will look at the pot and go, "hm, this doesn't look thick enough. maybe i'll let it go for another 10 minutes." this is the devil speaking. it's only so liquid right now because it is at boiling point. it will thicken when it cools down. learn from the follies of my youth and do not let this happen to you
at some point in your life you will be making a sauce or a stew in which you need to add cornstarch to thicken it. and you will prepare a slurry of starch in cold water and think "this looks like way too little starch to thicken this amount of liquid." this is the devil speaking. cornstarch instantly polymerizes at 95°C and if you add too much it will turn into an impossibly thick goop.
at some point in your life you will be making some sort of cream based dessert that requires gelatin to thicken it. and you will soak some gelatin sheets in water and think "this is too few gelatin sheets for this amount of cream." this is the devil speaking. it will thicken in the fridge and if you add too much you will end up with milk jelly
at some point in your life you will be baking cookies. you will take the sheet out after twelve minutes as the recipe instructs and the cookies will still be glistening and soft. "these don't seem cooked enough," you will think to yourself, "i should place them back into the oven until their edges are nice and golden." this is the devil talking. this is how you get dry, overdone cookies. the cookies will continue to bake on the warm sheet for several more minutes and then harden up after sitting on a rack for a while. trust the process. trust the process.
at some point in your life you will be adding a small pasta to a soup and you will think "that is not enough small pasta." this is the devil talking. the pasta will absorb the stock and expand. this is how you end up with a soup that is a solid mass of soggy ditalini.
At some point in your life you will be adding garlic to a dish and you will think "that is not enough garlic." These are angels speaking. They are correct. Add more garlic.
The latter also applies to recipes that seem like they should have a bay leaf and don't have a bay leaf. Listen to the angels speak. They care about you.
As of writing, the English Wikipedia has no dedicated article for the death game genre. The closest it comes is a subsection of the battle royal article, the article being primarily about the boxing and wrestling concept rather than its use in fiction. Despite the subsection's ability to list over 30 notable examples of the genre, a discussion on whether to split it into its own article stalled in 2024 after the following comment by Paul_012:
The problem is that there aren't many reliable sources that refer to "battle royale" (common noun) as a fiction genre outside of gaming contexts. There are plenty of articles looking at the similarities and possible influences from the Japanese novel and film, but from a quick search the only pieces that refer to the genre as such are articles from Koktail Magazine and Campus Magazine (and the former refers back to Wikipedia). Screen Rant does mention "the battle royale sub-genre" once in this article [linked], and uses "battle royale shows" here [linked], but there are far more sources that refer to the genre as "death game" or "deadly game". That would probably be the better basis for a stand-alone article.
Wikipedia's confusion on the point stems from its insistence that the genre came about solely as a byproduct of the popularity of the Battle Royale novel (1999) and film (2000). This point is understandable, as Battle Royale certainly was influential both in Japan and the West (being a favorite film of Quentin Tarantino), and is often viewed as the starting point for the death game genre's popularity. That the massively popular Hunger Games novel (2008) and film (2012) also featured a battle royale-style death game only compounded the impression of the genre as revolving specifically around the concept of a "battle royale" in which participants fight to the death in an open arena.
The line between a genre and a collection of works imitating a single source is a fine one, and that's the real question Wikipedia is grappling with when it struggles to categorize what is, by this point, clearly a category of some note. The question of genre versus imitation was posed toward Hunger Games itself, which has continually fielded accusations of plagiarizing Battle Royale, most recently expressed by Quentin Tarantino on the Bret Easton Ellis podcast in 2025:
I do not understand how the Japanese writer [Koushun Takami] didn't sue Suzanne Collins [author of The Hunger Games] for every fucking thing she owns. They just ripped off the fucking book! Stupid book critics are not going to go watch a Japanese movie called Battle Royale, so the stupid book critics never called her out on it. They talked about how it was the most original thing they'd ever fucking read. As soon as the film critics saw the film they said, 'What the fuck! This is just Battle Royale except PG!'
Though it is impossible to know for sure, it's likely Suzanne Collins was unaware of Battle Royale when she wrote Hunger Games; if any 2000 film influenced her work, it was probably Gladiator. The literal possibility of plagiarism is less interesting to the question of genre than the perception of plagiarism, though. Nobody, for instance, would describe a story in which a detective solves a murder mystery as plagiarizing Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue," though Poe is commonly viewed as the mystery genre's progenitor. It is because mystery has reached the level of genre, a collection of shared narrative traits that many works operate within, that accusations of copying such traits seem ridiculous. Only copying the traits of a singular work is viewed as plagiarism.
Despite Tarantino's recent comments, the years have been kind to Collins's defense against plagiarism accusations, as battle royale and death game stories have massively increased in number. Notably, when Magical Girl Raising Project aired in 2016, nobody accused it of ripping off Battle Royale, despite it too following the basic premise of "participants are forced to fight to the death in a battle royale." (Instead, it was accused of ripping off Puella Magi Madoka Magica, a work to which it bears almost no narrative similarity.) In the span of only eight years from 2008 to 2016, the question of whether battle royale was a collection of isolated imitations or its own distinct genre had been seemingly resolved.
Yet still no Wikipedia page.
One of the major problems with the lack of an independent death game genre page on Wikipedia is the inability for it to catalog the genre's prehistory. As it stands, Wikipedia asserts the genre began ex nihilo with Battle Royale in 2000 (despite it listing the obscure 1980 film The Big Brawl and 1997 film Mean Guns as part of the genre). While it's certainly viable to claim the popular understanding of death games as a genre began with Battle Royale—even if that understanding was only truly crystalized sometime between 2008 and 2016—all genres have antecedents, examples or influences that predate the emerging of the critical mass of work necessary to constitute a genre.
For example, fantasy is commonly accepted to begin as a genre in the late 1800s, and only reached widespread popularity in the following century, but it borrows elements from the chivalric romances of the Middle Ages and the myths of antiquity. Science fiction emerges with Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jules Verne, but has predecessors in the speculative utopian fiction of the 1600s and earlier.
Though death games existed in reality in ancient times, they took a long time to appear in fiction. The Romans loved their gladiators, but they didn't care to write about them. The Roman Empire's foundational epic, Virgil's Aeneid, does feature a lengthy chapter describing games, but these are explicitly nonlethal games conducted in all sporting fairness, and contrast the brutal wars fought elsewhere in the work. The most notable gladiator of ancient letters was Spartacus, whose story was chronicled in history rather than fiction, and revolved around slave revolt rather than the specifics of the gladiatorial games.
Nonetheless, the legacy of the gladiators would prove a significant influence on the death game genre. Historical fiction about gladiators eventually did crop up in the 1900s, with Those About to Die (1958) providing the inspiration for the film Gladiator, which itself possibly informed the pseudo-Roman character of The Hunger Games.
Chivalric romance, by contrast, had a heavy narrative emphasis on sport in the form of its innumerable tournaments, and like real medieval tournaments the fictional ones often broke out into actual violence or else caused unfortunate fatal accidents. These likely couldn't be considered "death games" by any stretch, though. The death game genre's focus is on games where the stated consequence of losing is death, not where death might occur incidentally due to the dangerous conditions of the sport. The famous chariot race in Ben-Hur (1959), for instance, features several competitors crashing and dying, but this is an unintended outcome of the event, not an expected result of its defined rules.
My knowledge is unfortunately not encyclopedic, but the first true "death game" narrative I am aware of is the short story "The Most Dangerous Game" (1924) by Richard Connell. The similarity of the story's title with the term "death game" is entirely coincidental, as it refers not to an actual game being played but "game" as in "an animal hunted for sport." The story features a reclusive big-game hunter, Zaroff, who has grown bored of hunting animals and now captures "the most dangerous game," humans, whom he releases onto his private island and hunts to the death.
Despite predating the genre by nearly a century, this story contains many genre staples that remain to this day: the isolated environment, the helpless competitor forced to "play" against their will, the deadly stakes, and the sociopathic oligarch "gamemaster" who enacts the games primarily for sadistic pleasure. (In the story, Zaroff is a Russian elite who fled the communist revolution, establishing the class-based themes that would be echoed much later in The Hunger Games and Squid Game.) The story was immensely popular and has been adapted numerous times, most famously as Predator (1987), which changes the hunter into an alien.
Another significant early death game work features a similar premise to "The Most Dangerous Game": The Running Man (1982), written by Stephen King and published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. While maintaining the core plotline of "a human is hunted by another human as part of a deadly game," Running Man introduces another common aspect of the genre: the game as spectator entertainment. While "The Most Dangerous Game" occurred on a secret island for the pleasure of a single wealthy sociopath, Running Man presents a future dystopia in which reality television has become popular bloodsport. This aspect of the story itself derives influence from the emergent dystopia genre popularized by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
These two dystopian works generally define the two main branches of dystopian speculation: the first, represented by Brave New World, posits a future of hedonism and superficiality, while the second, represented by Nineteen Eighty-Four, posits a future of totalitarian government control through intimidation and surveillance. Running Man, with its sensationalized reality TV culture, is a dystopia of the Brave New World branch. In many ways, this branch makes the most sense as a setting for a death game story, given the historical antecedent of gladiatorial combat, often tied to the "bread and circuses" excesses of the Roman elite. Orwell's vision, by contrast, depicts a relatively dull culture based on the tightly-controlled propagandistic art of the Soviet and Fascist regimes, and seems at first a less fitting backdrop for riotous bloodsport.
Yet Stephen King published another death game story only a few years prior to Running Man much more Orwellian in character. The Long Walk (1979) is notable because, compared to "The Most Dangerous Game" and its adaptations, it uses the medium of a game to apply death to an otherwise nonlethal activity. Big-game hunting is, by definition, a lethal activity for the hunted; "Most Dangerous Game" only replaces animals with humans as its premise. There is nothing fundamentally lethal about what the participants in Long Walk are doing—walking—other than the fact that if they fail a soldier shoots them in the head as punishment.
Though subtle, this innovation emphasizes the "game" aspect of the genre. If the tension of the "Most Dangerous Game" style of death game is being forced into a lethal situation with no way out except kill-or-be-killed, the tension of the Long Walk is in the mundane being rendered an object of horror. This style would later find popularity in trapped-in-the-video-game narratives like Sword Art Online (2012), with the phrase "If you die in the game, you die in real life" representing a similar premise. This style also massively extends the range of games that a death game story can feature, as essentially any game from Jenga to tic-tac-toe is rendered lethal if there is some punishing entity waiting to dispatch the loser.
This style of death game also complements the Orwellian style of dystopia. While both "Most Dangerous Game" and Running Man critique hedonistic lust for ever more extreme modes of entertainment, Long Walk's game critiques the ability of a draconian government to render the innocuous arbitrarily lethal at a whim, with no accountability to any sane or fair system of law. Though the game in Long Walk is said to be watched by many, it is an exceedingly unentertaining spectator experience; the competitors walk for hours with nothing happening except their walking, with only very rare flares of action when a competitor is killed upon falling behind. Its dystopian government's power and control is expressed not only in its ability to make the basic human activity of walking lethal, but also that it is capable of forcing the entire country to watch. In this vein, Long Walk's game is a public demonstration of the government's power to say 2 + 2 = 5, to rewrite fact and reality as it sees fit. This "game" of our creation is your entertainment now, this is what you value. The megalomaniacal desire for control over reality itself reappears in later trapped-in-the-video-game narratives; the villain of Sword Art Online, for instance, expresses it as his motivation (after first saying he forgot what his motivation was).
If the death game genre has expanded massively in size in recent decades, it has remained strangely limited by these same few core plotlines for why the death game is occurring. Almost every death game story can be organized into one or some combination of these three styles:
"The Most Dangerous Game"—an oligarchic sociopath, or group of oligarchic sociopaths, hosts the death game for their own sadistic pleasure, profit, and/or esoteric philosophy (i.e., Social Darwinism or "a social experiment"). The game is illegal, but the host(s)'s wealth or power enables them to get away with it. Examples include Kaiji (1997), Spy Kids 3-D (2003), Saw (2004), Balls of Fury (2007), Danganronpa (2010), Sword Art Online (2012), Magical Girl Raising Project (2016), The Belko Experiment (2017), and Squid Game (2021).
The Running Man—Societal hedonism enables the death game as mass-market entertainment. The game is legal by popular fiat (or at least popular fiat of a privileged class at the expense of the underclass), regardless of its moral transgressions. Examples include Death Race 2000 (1975), Rollerball (1975), MrBeast (1998), Jimmy Neutron episode "Win, Lose, and Kaboom!" (2004), Doctor Who episode "Bad Wolf" (2005), The Hunger Games (2008), Deadman Wonderland (2011), Danganronpa V3 (2017), Dungeon Crawler Carl (2019), and Alien Stage (2022). In many of these examples, the "society" is extraterrestrial in nature, with humans as a species being the disposable underclass, though this doesn't really change the concept. Also, Death Race 2000 and Rollerball predate Running Man's publication, though King claims to have written Running Man in 1973. I'm less concerned with determining which example was "first" than providing a framework for categorization.
The Long Walk—A draconian government hosts the game to control the populace through fear, intimidation, or the suppression of dissidents. Examples include Tron (1982) and Battle Royale (2000). This category is, notably, the least common of the three, and often the line between it and the second category is blurred. Death Race 2000 and Hunger Games also feature totalitarian regimes, for instance, though they employ the games more for purposes of distraction than direct control. This ambiguity raises the question of whether it makes more sense to categorize these stories based on who hosts the game, why the games are held, or how they are spectated—or, perhaps, the kind of game being played, regardless of its external circumstances.
There is a fourth style, one that developed more recently and is much less common than the others, in which the death game is a ritual for the attainment of godhead or some other spiritual power. This style is present most notably in Fate/stay night (2004) and its resulting franchise, as well as Mirai Nikki (2011) and Platinum End (2021).
The 2006 horror film Stay Alive manages perhaps one of the more unique reasons for its death game, that being "the ghost of Hungarian serial killer Elizabeth Bathory did it." Or does this count as a "Most Dangerous Game" type, given Bathory's real-world history?
Then there's the always-classic "no reason is given" explanation, favored in particular by shape-themed death games like Cube (1997) and Circle (2015).
Any attempt to categorize a genre of many works into a limited number of bins will pose difficulties, and no genre has perfectly-defined boundaries. Do the large number of isekai where the main character sees the world with a video game overlay count as death game stories? In these stories, the game aspects are more a way the main character perceives the world than a rigidly-enforced game structure, but trapped-in-the-video-game examples like Sword Art Online blur the line on this point. Likewise, I included Death Race 2000 and Rollerball as early examples of the genre, but the game in neither necessitates death despite celebrating and being designed to encourage it. One could argue this places them closer to the dangerous chariot race of Ben-Hur than a true death game; there will always be a spectrum between purist and radical definitions of genre.
Outside of questions of categorization, though, is the question of why the death game genre exists, and specifically why it has only emerged as a "genre" in the past 25 years, with even its oldest fictional antecedents being only a century old.
People who are objectively wrong will sometimes claim that there are no original ideas in fiction, that everything has been done before. Outside of generalizing the definition of "idea" to the point of meaninglessness (for instance, defining all stories as either man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. self, and so on), or arguing that any recognizable aspect in a work discounts the originality of the whole (an argument that encompasses any work that features humans or is written in a known language), this claim is contradicted by the history of art in all mediums, where new genres frequently emerge that were previously unknown.
For instance, the genres of mystery, science fiction, and fantasy all arose in the 19th and 20th centuries, building upon earlier ideas but undeniably innovating to create types of stories that simply did not exist before. Furthermore, it makes sense why these genres arose when they did. The murder mystery relies on its readership believing in rational and empiric deduction, a philosophy that was not widespread until the Age of Reason. (Consider, in contrast, the medieval jurisprudence of trial by combat, in which accuser fought accused and whoever lived must be right on account of God's grace.) Science fiction, meanwhile, arose naturally out of the radical technological developments of the Industrial Revolution. Before then, technology had developed too gradually to sustain widespread speculation on its future, but authors in the 1800s and 1900s were able to see their lives transform in real time due to the invention of radical new machines, and so it made sense to wonder what other machines were possible, and how these machines might also transform humanity. Fantasy is trickier, since it has more direct predecessors in the form of myth, but as scientific progress and exploration rendered the world more fully "known" and denied the possibility of dragons, elves, spirits, and gods, fantasy developed as a vehicle to produce alternate worlds where these things could in fact exist.
If original genres develop in response to changes in humanity's lived experience, though, there's no explanation for the late development of the death game genre. Philosophy changed, technology developed, and myth was disproven. Death games, however, existed in reality since antiquity, even as a cornerstone of culture during Roman times. They simply weren't seen as a fitting subject for art. Why?
Wikipedia answers this question by attributing the development of the entire genre to the singular originality of Battle Royale. In its battle royal article, it claims:
Outside sports, the term battle royale has taken on a new meaning in the 21st century, from Koushun Takami's 1999 Japanese dystopian novel Battle Royale and its 2000 film adaptation of the same name, referring to a fictional narrative genre and/or mode of entertainment also known as death games and killing games, where a select group of people is instructed to hunt and kill one another in a large arena until there is only one survivor.
It continues:
Battle Royale set out the basic rules of the genre, including players being forced to kill each other until there is a single survivor and the need to scavenge for weapons and items. The "battle royale" concept first gained mainstream popularity in Japan, where Battle Royale inspired a wave of manga, anime, and visual novel works during the 2000s, before the concept gained global mainstream popularity in the 2010s.
I have no doubt that Battle Royale is a massively influential work within the genre. But its importance is not total, not a "Great Man" that through individual potency rewrote history. In the West, despite the praise of Quentin Tarantino, Battle Royale remained a relatively obscure work, certainly in comparison to death game predecessors like "Most Dangerous Game," the two novels by Stephen King, and even Death Race 2000, a domestic blockbuster hit that received a 2008 remake. Yet none of those works sparked the critical mass of interest in death games to generate a genre. If a less popular work was able to create a genre where earlier, more popular works failed, the implication is that it is not the work itself that was most important, but the cultural conditions around the work.
Furthermore, Wikipedia contradicts itself in its assessment of the "genre rules" Battle Royale established, particularly "players being forced to kill each other until there is a single survivor" and "the need to scavenge for weapons and items." These rules apply to less than half of the example works Wikipedia lists in the following two paragraphs, and most works in which both apply are exclusively non-narrative battle royale video games like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (2017) and Fortnite (2017).
Lastly, Wikipedia's claim ignores The Hunger Games entirely. To take Wikipedia at face value, Quentin Tarantino must be correct; Suzanne Collins was aware of Battle Royale and deliberately imitated it, rather than developing the idea independently from a different branch of convergent evolution. Again, this statement cannot be proven or disproven, though I consider it exceedingly unlikely the 46-year-old MFA graduate and former Nickelodeon show writer was keeping a close eye on the niche Japanese hyperviolence film scene to watch a movie that didn't receive any official American distribution until 2010 (two years after Hunger Games was published). Wikipedia's claim becomes more unbelievable when considering that not only must Hunger Games be derivative of Battle Royale, but so must every other post-2000 death game story, including works as disparate as Fate/stay night and Sword Art Online—works that have their own well-documented lineages that do not include Battle Royale at all.
I instead consider it far more likely that several death game works emerged concurrently but independently around a similar time frame, and also became popular in mostly independent circles (including Japanese and Western circles). In this interpretation, death games were not a genre brought into being by a wave of imitators inspired by a single work, but by an idea that, like science fiction and murder mystery, reflected a change in thinking among the public at large. Death games fundamentally made sense as a type of story in a way that they did not during previous centuries.
But why? What changed in the cultural consciousness?
To answer that question, the first obvious place to look is the dystopia genre, with which the death game genre so often pairs. Despite a long history of utopian fiction speculating on an ideal future society, a history that stretches all the way back to Plato, dystopian fiction doesn't really exist until the 1900s, with Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1921) usually cited as its first example.
Like science fiction and mystery, dystopian fiction likely required scientific and philosophical advances to be viable as a genre of fiction. If rapid developments in technology presented exciting new possibilities that made speculative fiction thrive, they also produced anxieties about how these technologies might be misused. Brave New World presents a society that abandons religion (and thus morality) in favor of technology, cutting the tops off of Christian crosses to worship the "T" in Ford Model T, while Nineteen Eighty-four demonstrates an all-powerful surveillance and propaganda apparatus driven by machinery. But dystopia is not technologic alone, and another important change that facilitated its rise was Sigmund Freud's popularization of human psychology as a scientific discipline in the 1890s. Freud and his acolytes, while mostly pseudoscientific, helped spark anxieties about social manipulation as a tactic for state control, anxieties that only festered when combined with anxieties about technological progress.
These developments, of course, would coincide with the arrival of new totalitarian states in the early 1900s, most prominently Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, which exhibited complete and barbaric domination of their subjects in ways alarming to the intellectual, book-authoring classes of relatively liberal societies who saw their Russian and German fellows purged en masse. With real-world parallels to draw upon, it only made sense that speculative fiction would begin to speculate with horror on the possibilities of future society.
I already established how dystopian fiction influenced Running Man and Long Walk, the first in terms of moral degradation in the face of mass media, the second in terms of complete state control. Yet while this lineage of thought explains why death games failed to become a genre prior to the 1900s, it doesn't explain the nearly century-long gap between the rise of dystopian fiction and the explosion of popularity of death games between 2000 and 2010. Why the delay, even with popular isolated examples of the death game genre scattered throughout the second half of the 1900s? What specifically about the 2000s caused the idea to seize the imagination, to render it a "genre" only so recently that Wikipedia still questions the basic tenets of its category?
Death games aren't the only new genre to emerge after the turn of the millennium, so maybe a comparison will help. Time loop stories and multiverse stories also started to become popular around the same time. Previously, I've argued that the popularity of these genres is a reflection of the incredible profusion of information due to the internet, which has changed the way people think about and interact with the world. Time loops and multiverses are a way of demonstrating a single idea—one distinct day, for instance, or a concept like "Spider-Man"—with an infinite multitude of facets and permutations. As such, they are capable of expressing massive amounts of information but in a way that remains digestible. Knowing one Spider-Man creates a framework by which any other multiversal Spider-Man, no matter how absurd, can be understood. (Every Spider-Man has an Aunt May, an Uncle Ben, a Mary Jane, et cetera.)
I won't dig into that argument in much detail right now, since it doesn't really apply to death games, which typically follow a single game viewed only once. (There are exceptions, usually ones that combine the death game genre with time loops or multiverses, such as Mirai Nikki.) The Running Man style of death game does deal directly with mass media and modern concepts such as game shows and reality television, but these only account for a fraction of the genre as a whole.
Another direction to look, then, is the "game" part of the death game genre. A large portion of death game stories take place inside video games, or are else modeled on them. Video games as a technology did not really exist in any popular form until Pong (1972), and fiction about video games took a long time to seriously develop due to the cultural conception of video games as being "for kids." (I discuss this point in more detail in my essay on Sword Art Online.) Only the popularity of the internet ultimately changed the way people interacted with and accepted digital spaces, so the increased popularity of trapped-in-the-video-game narratives beginning in the early 2000s and exploding in the 2010s makes sense. This also explains why death game narratives have been so popular in Japanese media specifically, as Japanese companies like Namco and Nintendo were some of the earliest and most important video game developers, leading video games to become a major part of Japanese popular culture faster than in many other countries.
While only a fraction of death game stories specifically feature video games, the popularity of video games along demographic lines might also explain the advent of the death game genre. Other than Long Walk, pre-2000 death games almost always featured adult competitors, and were viewed as adult media. But Battle Royale, Fate/stay night, Hunger Games, and Sword Art Online all feature teenage competitors, a feature that has continued into most subsequent examples of the genre. If video games are the primary driver of interest in the death game genre, this trend makes sense, as video games have historically been popular among teens (and younger children). The slow development of the death game genre is then explained by the slow development of media primarily aimed at teens in general. It might be surprising to hear now, when teens have so much prominence in the media landscape, but for a long time there was either media for children or media for adults, with little room in between. The PG-13 film rating did not exist until 1984; until then there was nothing between PG and R. The term "young adult literature" was coined in the 1960s.
It's arguable whether teenagers were even considered distinct from adults until relatively recent history. They were certainly allowed—often expected—to marry and work jobs, with child labor only outlawed in the United States in 1938 and child marriage outlawed (in most states) in 1950. The concept of a "coming of age ceremony" common to many cultures itself implies an immediate transition from childhood to adulthood, with no intervening period.
The development of a specific teenage identity then necessitates the creation of art for teenagers. The popularity of "game" media in general—whether deathly or not—makes sense as an extension of teenage and childhood interest in play, while the "death" aspect of the genre distinguishes it as less childish and thus distinctively teenage.
Furthermore, the institution of laws protecting teens has also had the effect of depriving teens of adult rights. Teens thus spend a longer period of time under the complete legal control of parents and schools than they did in the past, an arrangement that their semi-adulthood causes them to chafe against. The renewed popularity of dystopian fiction in teenage media is likely a byproduct of teens often feeling as though they are being controlled in uncontestable, authoritarian ways.
Nowhere is this expression of teenage interests more clear than in Battle Royale. Though I've spent most of this essay distancing Battle Royale from the rest of the death game genre to refute Wikipedia's argument that it is all-important, it is notable in how it directly aligns its dystopian government with the schooling system. The participants are a class of students, all of whom continue to wear their identical depersonalized beige uniforms the entire game, and the game's host is referred to as an "instructor." Their bloodthirsty competition to survive parallels the cutthroat competitive environment of a schooling system that ranks and grades students, with the results having immense bearing on their future prospects in life.
The last potential reason for the rise of the death game genre is class-based. After all, there is an entire branch of the genre—perhaps the branch with the most individual examples—that is divorced from dystopian anxieties of cultural degradation or authoritarian control. This is the "Most Dangerous Game" branch, which predates the others.
In this style of death game story, the game's host operates outside of established law and social custom. They are fundamentally criminal in nature, yet their wealth or power enables them to continue the games with impunity.
In some examples, such as the Saw franchise, the class-based implications of this arrangement are deemphasized. The Jigsaw Killer lives, seemingly, in squalor; he is if anything a victim of the system and acts as a vigilante with a twisted sense of justice. He targets lowlife drug addicts as well as rich insurance executives, and only his nigh-omniscient genius prevents his capture by the legal forces that seek to take him down. The films are consistently confused whether he is hero or villain.
But most examples, including "The Most Dangerous Game" itself, are concerned either implicitly or explicitly with class disparity. Not only does the wealth and power of the hosts allow them to act outside the legal restraints that bind everyone else, but their elitism causes them to view the underclass as subhuman, naturally fit to be disposed of either for entertainment or a twisted Social Darwinism (or both).
Due to the historic control of the upper classes and educated elite over art, class consciousness is itself a relatively new innovation in fiction. Most art was historically produced via a system of patronage, in which a member of the nobility—or, in some cases, the wealthy merchant class—directly financed an artist and thus wielded near total control over the art's subject. Only after the Renaissance, and especially during the Industrial Revolution, did the lower classes reach a level of literacy and disposable income that authors could finance themselves by selling their work to the public. Even then, classes with more money wielded more control over what was produced, and works remained subjected to censorship. Even as American literacy reached 99% in the mid-1900s, fiction remained gatekept by publishers and studios who often took it upon themselves to determine what was suitable for the public to read and see. (The Hays Code, which Hollywood imposed upon itself to avoid government censorship, is a good example.)
On one hand, this class-based moral policing of fiction explains the slowness of the death game genre to arise, as it is a genre that is senselessly violent by definition. It's likely no coincidence that many of the early examples of the genre I listed—the two Stephen King novels, Death Race 2000, Rollerball—appeared in the 1970s and 80s, shortly after the Hays Code was abolished, and graphic violence became a more socially acceptable subject of art. (Though even in 2000, Battle Royale was the center of some moral panic over hyperviolence.) On the other hand, it explains the slowness of a genre to arise that is focused on vituperative, uncompromising criticism of the upper classes.
"The Most Dangerous Game" illustrates this critical lineage in how it frames its sociopathic gamesman as a Russian aristocrat who fled the communist revolution. In doing so, it implicitly justifies that revolution, likening the near-feudal pre-communist Russia to a slaughterhouse where the elite thought of the lower classes as not "human," but "game." These pro-communist undertones place "Most Dangerous Game" in the tradition of Marxist literature like The Jungle (1906) by Upton Sinclair, which similarly emphasizes the dehumanization of the lower classes by the upper. One scene in The Jungle, for instance, describes how workers sometimes fall into the meatpacking plant's machines, being churned into lard that is then sent out to customers. One story likens humans to "meat," another to "game"—a strikingly similar metaphor, a similarity emphasized by the title of Sinclair's novel.
There are literary antecedents to this class-based hyperviolence even beyond Marxist literature. Antebellum anti-slavery novels, such as Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Twelve Years a Slave (1853), likewise depict an upper class that exhibits total domination over the underclass, whom they subject to dehumanizing and senseless hyperviolence for often arbitrary reasons, such as sociopathic entertainment or twisted Social Darwinist philosophy. It's no mistake that, prior to Battle Royale, the most notable depiction of a battle royale in fiction is in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), in which white southerners force black men to brutally fight one another for their entertainment.
The anti-slavery and anti-Tsarist works saw publication and widespread popularity because they placed the ills of class stratification elsewhere: the South or distant Russia. (The Jungle persevered because it famously "aimed for the heart and hit the stomach," as Sinclair later put it.) The modern death game genre is capable of expressing similar criticisms against the upper class—regardless of whether those criticisms are as justified as they were in 1852—due to the increasing democratization of fiction enabled by mass media and accelerated especially by the internet, where no gatekeepers to content exist. The popularity of this class-based criticism, meanwhile, is possibly a byproduct of widespread anxiety that the upper class is once more achieving a level of impunity from the law and a dehumanizing perspective on the common man equal to those of certain historic epochs.
One might say, these are stories about a deranged world.
My goal in writing this essay was to provide a historical overview of the development of the death game genre and refute Wikipedia's claim—founded, no doubt, on "reliable sources"—that the genre sprouted fully-formed from the head of Battle Royale in 1999. Unfortunately, even reliable sources seem uninterested in applying any amount of intellectual understanding to a pop culture genre that has only emerged in the past 20 years.
My knowledge isn't encyclopedic. I've read or seen most of the examples I discussed in this essay, though not all—I relied on summaries to discuss Death Race 2000 and Rollerball, and had to ask some Fateheads I know what the actual lore is behind its game, because I wasn't about to delve into an endless fanwiki mire to find out. I'd love to see anyone reply to this essay with their own insights into the genre, its history, and how if at all it reflects the ever-changing human experience. Thank you for reading.
Though I'm not particularly knowledgeable on the death game genre, I wanted to note that despite your acknowledgement of The Running Man concerning itself with the topic of game shows, I felt that you ended up understating the significant probable impact game shows and generally competition-oriented television may have had on cultural consciousness and the formation of the genre. The very concept of game shows and/or competition-oriented programs as publically broadcast entertainment (often with a recurring, scheduled nature) that follows clearly defined rules, has a number of participants that can be largely considered "ordinary" (i.e. there being no dedicated "playerbase" or "atheletes", setting itself apart from competitive sports and the like) with individual risk/reward or randomization elements where "elimination" from the game is often a fail state participants have to avoid makes a perfectly serviceable analogue for most of the works traditionally identified as death games, especially when considering that game shows really started taking off in the 1950s and gradually establishing more and more cultural juggernauts of the format (such as Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, Family Feud, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, etc. etc.) over the following decades, lining up with the emergence of death games as a tentative genre in the latter half of the 1900s until their surge in popularity at the turn of the millennium.
Most critically, however, are the elements of player isolation and disempowerment where they are at the mercy of the system itself; this manifests both in terms of the frequently recurring scenario of participants being in a physically isolated location where they can only interact with each other or the crew running the show as well as the core conceit of these shows basically being that anything outside of the immediate control/ruling of the 'game' and its participants is only allowed to exist in very limited ways. Clear examples of this are formats such as I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here (isolating celebrities away from civilization and have to weather harsh conditions to win; anything that ameliorates this is only given in response to good performance) or several versions of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire (utilizing the lifeline system to occasionally allow players to call people that are not participants, for instance) and, most fittingly of all, the infamous Dutch reality competition show Big Brother that arguably started the now common trend of entertainment formats isolating participants to a static location where they are observed at all times— all while being inspired by the dystopian hypersurveillance of Orwell's 1984 that you identify as a contributing factor of its own.
Any kind of proximity to the television entertainment complex, even if only as a consumer that occasionally reads a newspaper article or two about what new programs big networks are trying to develop at any given point in time will result in immediately recognizing those networks being in a constant desparate scramble to find new ways to evoke emotions in audiences and to be the ones to innovate on existing genres and tropes to create the next Big Brother; it's no surprise that, in conjuction with anxieties over technological surveillance that shows like Big Brother serve as such excellent fuel for ("if you could outfit a whole villa with cameras and recording crews and people could still live their lives inside of it normally, wouldn't it be easy to survey people for political reasons too?"), a cultural trend would start to emerge that concerns itself with the ethics of this kind of entertainment being founded on the discomfort and violation of others and their rights. Returning to the earlier example of I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here for a second— standard challenges involve eating insects/animal genitals or navigating enclosed spaces filled with animals such as spiders/snakes/etc.; they're all explicitly designed around causing players discomfort and allowing viewers to be gratified through watching someone else experience that discomfort whilst being at the mercy of a system they have to play along with if they want to 'win'. Is violence such a big logical leap for people to make in the face of actual long-time programs that basically thrive off of ritually humilitating their participants?
There is a lot more that could be said about this topic (for instance, Takeshi's Castle's role in popularizing physically daunting 'challenge' content as a staple of competitive television, and Japanese game show culture as a whole which is vastly different from Western game show culture) but I think the combination of a heightened awareness of how the mass entertainment complex with increasingly more outlandish and ethically dubious gamified television programs becoming more and more popular is definitely at the heart of the death game genre in some capacity. One can already cobble together the basic workings of a death game just from a few popular game show formats; would it be that surprising for Suzanne Collins, who was actively working in the television sector alongside people whose jobs were developing show concepts or even producing them, to base her own death game story on her own experiences as well?
My thesis statement isn't as coherent as I would like it to be, and I mean this in no way as a rebuttal, but rather an addition to the excellent dystopian fiction/teenage demographics/class-based analysis the original post presents. Thank you for the excellent essay! I look forward to whatever you write about next.
Honestly the game show angle mostly just slipped my mind. It's hard not to see its influence: Takeshi himself, of Takeshi's Castle fame, plays the host of the Battle Royale film, after all.
CARL IS BARELY A REAL CHARACTER. HES ABOUT AS MUCH OF A CHARACTER AS AS THE DEAD WISE CHINESE GUY WHO SAYS “BRAVERY…something something I forgot”
Are people really saying it’s racism that there’s not more shipping with Grace and fake character rather than Grace and real character from a different movie entirely.
How do you see that movie and think Carl is a character I want to explore. He’s an admin. He’s a personable secretary. We know absolutely nothing about Carl.
will you feel uncomfortable with me for a moment, please? I want to talk about what I mean I say I was "groomed on the internet as a teenager".
I felt like experimenting with adults was safer, in the sense that they were safer from me than people my age. I'd been taught over and over again that I could hurt people with sexuality, that I was being punished to prevent me from becoming someone who would hurt people. I didn't want to hurt anyone.
I wanted it. I sought it out. I felt powerful and in-control, nobody tricked or forced me into doing anything. I can tell you a funny story about having a threesome when I was 18, the husband insisted that we wrestle and I choked him unconscious twice in five minutes. fully asleep and snoring, I put him in the recovery position and made small talk with his wife while we waited for him to wake up.
I'd been talking to both of them, and a bunch of other adults in that community, since I was 15. it was the only place that I felt desired, they treated me like a kid but didn't think less of me for it. I don't have an uncomplicated Law and Order: SVU episode plot to give you, I can only tell you that I felt bad for that guy after that. I didn't mean to humiliate him, he never did anything like that to me.
it took me many years into adulthood to understand that I was trading sexual access for social access. I don't even really think that was necessary, nobody asked me to do it, I just wanted to feel something besides shame. I didn't know that I could be valued for other reasons, yet. the adults in the room should not have let that happen, they failed me, but honestly? I think the adults in my house failed me a lot harder.
everyone fixates on the sex, but to me that has only ever been a symptom, not the problem. have you seen people jokingly refer to things like being 13 and emotionally supporting a 35 year old woman through her divorce on World of Warcraft? that's a symptom of the same problem and it was more harmful to me, personally, than any of the sex.
and yet we can joke about it, because it's not about sex. we don't use scary words like "groomed" and "molested" even though that's how grooming happens. why?
I found out, years later, that a girl I thought was in her early 20s was lying about her age so that she wouldn't be excluded. she was too scared to tell me that we were the same age, 16 at the time. we would talk for hours, watch movies, and she'd change in front of me sometimes. she specifically told me that she did that because she felt safe with me, I was so proud of myself. she was my age that whole time and I just didn't know, I spent years thinking of that as part of the grooming. and it was.
two decades later and I'm here, looking around at the hypersexuality of queer/transfem spaces (not inherently a bad thing) and wondering, "do you know that you don't have to do that to be loved?".
on a cultural level, we don't have anything approaching a good understanding of these dynamics, much less how to avoid harm. there will never be a simple answer.
we have to engage with the complexity, we have to learn to talk to each other about these things.
I can't wrap this up in a bow for you, I'm sorry. can you please feel uncomfortable?
the grooming did not start when I gained internet access, it started the first time I got made fun of for staring at a pretty girl on TV. it started with jokey comments about having a "girlfriend" at school when I was still in kindergarten. my parents did that because they were taught to feel ashamed, and so they taught it to me.
airplanes, bullet trains, doordash, drum n bass, disney fast pass, sonic the hedgehog, speed racer, child labor, short films, f1 racing, replacing cable TV that had long ad breaks with streaming services that have short ad breaks, the fast and the furious, the speed running community, adderall... everything is so rushed, we have lost the art of lingering.
Any time I hear a song that's faster than 33 bpm, it really bothers me because why so fast? It's like they don't even wanna linger on the beats. They just wanna move onto the next musical note and be done already. And this is very similar to fast fashion, if you think about it.
You guys remember when Youtubers made 10-minute long vlogs full of nothing happening because 10 minutes is the length required to be able to monetize a video and shove a bunch of ad breaks in it? Yeah, well YouTube's not around anymore. Tiktok's the only video platform on the internet allegedly. And the creators there aren't incentivized to make their videos ten minutes long no matter even if they have nothing to say for that length of time. And this is bad because long media good and short media bad.
I remember when Over the Garden Wall came out and it was only 10 episodes long, and I said, "Only ten episodes? They didn't wanna linger on this story?" In fact, anytime someone I follow posts a 5 to 15 second long animation and they say, "hey guys, I worked really hard on this, it took several weeks to finish it, I hope y'all like it," I always leave a comment saying, "Um why is this so short though? Seems very rushed. It's like you've lost the art of lingering."
I love this post because every time I go to Wendy's and they hand me my order, I think about how rushed it was and how the linecooks didn't even care to linger on the burger they were making me. But I do have to wonder why the post is so short. The OP could've listed more things that are fast, she could've written a whole book about this, but she didn't. She didn't wanna linger on it for too long.
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
PITCH: We call it Moon Day, and then every 7 years when it falls on a Monday, that's an even BIGGER deal and we call that Moon Day Monday and go absolutely apeshit about it (the next Moon Day Monday is in 2026 so we have a couple trial runs first)
Also while it’s on my mind, I wanted to write down stuff from a really interesting panel I went to at the con, run by a guy who does anime market research and marketing strategy, about the data behind anime viewership and revenue. I think it’s especially interesting coming on the heels of the Crunchyroll Anime Awards and the discussions I've seen around it (mostly around not being happy with the winners).
I wasn’t taking notes during it, but this is what I remember to the best of my ability; apologies if there are any inaccuracies:
At this point there is more money coming into animanga from overseas markets than from domestic (i.e., Japanese) markets. Companies are aware that for something to get really financially successful, it has to appeal to international audiences.
And most of that overseas money comes from subscriptions to streaming services. Merch / purchase of physical copies / etc make up only a small % of revenue.
Shonen and isekai outperform everything else to a huge extent. So there continue to be lots of these produced.
About half of all recent/current anime views are going to just a few (like, a single digit # of) series. I believe it was: Solo Leveling, Sakamoto Days, Dan Da Dan, Gachiakuta, MHA, and (I think) JJK. Also Solo Leveling by itself gets far more than any other series.
Quote: "Statistically, if your favorite anime from the last year wasn’t one of these, then no one watched your favorite anime"
Note that these are all shonen (except technically Solo Leveling since the original material is manhwa, not manga, but close enough)
Don’t be surprised that these are the series winning awards, even if you don’t think they hold a candle to [insert your favorite anime here] — there’s just so many more people watching these that it’s virtually impossible for any other series to win.
The only series in the recent top 20 that wasn’t shonen demographic or isekai genre was Apothecary Diaries.
Quote: "Thank god for Apothecary Diaries." lol
Crunchyroll has by far the biggest market share of overseas anime viewership, followed by Netflix to a lesser extent. No other providers come close.
The perception among production companies is that Netflix is where people are getting converted from non-anime viewers into anime viewers, and CR is where established anime viewers go.
Average anime watch time among anime viewers on Netflix is 1.5 hours per month, whereas on CR it’s 1.5 hours per day (?!)
Discovery on Netflix is heavily determined by what the Netflix promotes / actively surfaces to users, and that tends to skew towards particular series — likely reinforces that views are going to already-popular series and that new anime viewers are getting funnelled into certain genres.
Netflix doesn't license all that much anime compared to what they could be licensing, so that further skews things. Also, even if a series is licensed to Netflix, if the Netflix algorithm doesn't actively push it to users, no one on Netflix will watch it.
Rating sites such as MyAnimeList tend to be skewed towards a particular type of fan that is not representative of the actual market, and these ratings are meaningless when it comes to actual success metrics. IIRC he said only a few% of very frequent anime watchers actually rate/review things.
He phrased it as "rating things on MAL is not normal behavior" which made me lol
Anime adapted from light novels tends to perform the best compared to anime adapted from other sources (manga, webcomic, games) and original anime. Adaptations from manga is #2; everything else is wayy behind.
Solo Leveling seems like quite an outlier in this regard since anime adaptations from webcomics tend to be among the least popular
The single feature most correlated with success of an isekai was whether the main female character has big breasts and that’s not a joke.
Quote: "If the main female character has big breasts your anime will likely overperform, and if the main female character is a monster girl your anime will likely underperform. Because things aren’t fair."
At one point he was like yes I really do have to go into serious business meetings and present this anime breast data to client companies.
There’s a perception among audiences that pirating animanga that isn’t legally available in your country will prove there’s a demand for it, and lead to it getting licensed in your country, but this isn’t true. Pirating stats don’t actually have much effect on whether stuff gets licensed — because there’s no reliable conversion from people who pirate -> people who will pay to view legally.
Studios get booked for projects 3-4 years out, so stuff for 2029-2030 is getting booked now. There are a lot of reboots/sequels/franchises/reusing-IPs type projects getting booked, just like what western media studios have been doing, because (as with western media) companies want the reliability of IP that is known to be successful rather than the risk of something new.
He concluded that the quality of storytelling in animanga is completely unrelated to whether it is popular, and that, at the current time, the popularity of a series essentially just comes down to 1. is it a shonen, 2. sheer luck. rip
To say not wanting to have sex with someone fat is fatphobic is to deny attraction based on physical features. Which is to deny sexuality exists at all and everyone is secretly pan or demisexual. Which is a position that exists, but isn’t mainstream.
Realistically, if someone is defensively going on a podcast defensively talking about how they’re demonized for not wanting to fuck fat people, they’re probably some flavor of fatphobic. But that’s based on many other factors than “is this a real belief someone can have”
The demo of The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere's VN adaption has been released!
Oh no! My life and my relationship to the story got kinda stressful and weird for a bit, and I fell off posting updates here. But that's not important today, because the visual novel demo is finally out!
Thank you so much to Benedict and Zerovirus for their help with the project, and also to Xeecee, who has done some of the music! (Though only three of their tracks made it into the demo; the rest will be later.) It's been a real learning experience so far, but hopefully this is just the start! Please give it a try and let us know what you think.
And if you have no idea what this is, The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere is a slow paced mystery novel centered around a class of mages visiting an organization trying to reach immortality, originally posted on somewhat-inappropriately on Royal Road. If you like this and haven't read it... well, it's a little sloppy in comparison, but consider taking a look at it too.
Anyway, I'll try to be more active on here promoing the project going forward and reblogging art/posting chapter updates. Thanks for reading!
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