turn to ash then live again

Given the audience for this essay, I'll start by explaining Shiboyugi's premise, though its full translated title offers some hints. Shiboyugi tells the story of Yuki, a shut-in loner who competes in death games as a full-time job. Rather than a single game, the show depicts a series of them, arranged in non-chronologic order. The games vary in scope and rules. Some are escape rooms filled with deadly traps, while others are glorified battle royales. Rather than react with terror or panic, Yuki approaches these challenges in a detached, professional manner, doing what is pragmatic to win without being excessively cruel to her fellow competitors (usually).

I have a theory—perhaps it applies only to me, but I believe I've seen it in others, too—that the most important determiner of whether someone likes or dislikes something is based on whether its premise innately appeals to them. (Or, similarly, that they find a major character relatable.) A work's technical quality, uniqueness, narrative consistency, and so on are secondary factors in comparison, and when a reviewer brings up these elements to explain why a work is good or bad, they are typically dancing around the core issue.

For instance, someone who is personally interested in robotics, transhumanism, and speculating about the future—or even a more general interest in science and technology—will find a cyberpunk dystopia an innately appealing concept for a story. Upon a viewer being "hooked" by the premise, the work's technical qualities will enhance its appeal, while its technical flaws will be acceptable or even ignorable. Whereas someone like me, without much interest in robots, might find the work boring even if it is well-made, and its few technical flaws will stand out more glaringly.

Despite this, I find that a lot of criticism is often rooted in these secondary details. It makes sense, since "I like Cyberpunk Edgerunners because I think cyberpunk is cool" is not a particularly interesting argument, whereas analyzing technical details lends a sense of objective nuance to an opinion. But I find this type of review disingenuous, which is a big reason why I don't typically write about whether I liked a work or not.

With that preamble out of the way, Shiboyugi is, at its core, combining three things that strongly appeal to me:

Death Games. I love death games. To me, they are similar to slasher horror stories, where the core tension is the question of who will live and who will die, a question that more conventional narratives—even ignoring the question of the protagonist—often resolve with predictable tropes (i.e., the likeable comic relief character lives, the old mentor dies). A death game has an element of unpredictability to it, combined with clear and immediate stakes (win or die), that immediately piques my interest.

Ennui. I wrote a whole novel about this one. I find works about the existential emptiness of contemporary life compelling and relatable. The question of how people create meaning for themselves in a fundamentally meaningless environment is one that matters a lot to me.

Liminal Spaces. Shiboyugi's death games take place in surreal locations that are often uncanny and unsettling in their layout and presentation. As someone with a strong interest in geography, I've always found strange permutations of space—including the internet itself—to have a fascinating pull. The popularity of liminal spaces in independent internet fiction has only magnified my interest.

Simply by being about these things, Shiboyugi already "hooked" me before it really even lifted a finger. If none of these appeal to you, you might not have as powerful a reaction as I did, and that's something I intend to be upfront about, rather than present a bunch of excellent technical details (of which there are many) to claim they make Shiboyugi "objectively" good or some nonsense like that.

But while I said technical excellence is a secondary factor in whether one finds a work good or bad, it is a factor. A shot that looks good will look better than a shot that looks bad, even if you're more interested in what the bad shot depicts. My love of death games and slasher horror has put me into contact with a lot of low-quality works that are "doing the thing" I want, but that I am forced to admit flub the execution. In fact, sometimes my most hated works are those that are something I should ostensibly like, but which are such an unmitigated disaster that I am more personally offended than by a worse work I had a neutral interest in. A work I particularly dislike is The Hunger Games, which takes a death game premise and does everything in its power to cram it into the shape of a conventional, predictable narrative that goes against what I find so exciting about the genre to begin with. (A death game with deemphasized death game, if you will.)

As such, when I first started watching Shiboyugi—knowing nothing about it beyond it being a death game story—I felt my stomach sink in dread as the first few minutes played out. Shiboyugi's tone and visual style is one of quiet detachment. It is, in a word, "artistic," established via very pretty backgrounds and an unexpressive protagonist (whose silence, surely, means she is ponderous and profound!), which frankly suggested to me that Shiboyugi would do everything in its power to distance itself from the chaotic brutality that makes the premise so appealing.

I was afraid it was going to be pretentious.

I don't like using the word pretentious. It's a word that gets thrown around often, and in an online milieu where people like to think they are smart but do not like to think, I tend to worry that "pretentious" is shorthand for "I didn't understand it and don't care to try, secure as I am in all the facts I already know."

Even so, there is stuff I do find "pretentious," especially in anime, a medium primarily targeted toward teenagers. Stuff that presents a lofty tone, but when it comes to substance seems to express almost comedically childish concepts. (Do you think the light, will defeat the darkness? No, I think the darkness, will defeat the light.) More generally, if a work's tone doesn't appropriately complement the content, the work starts to feel emotionally manipulative. How well, I wondered, would an elevated tone complement a death game?

The answer to that question came about 20 minutes into Shiboyugi's first episode. After a lot of meandering, a lot of pretty backgrounds, a lot of atmospheric music, a quaint and bloodless blowgun trap, and most of all plenty of silent thoughtfulness, suddenly the lights go out. The ceiling opens. The players, chained to the wall, look up. Eighteen buzzsaws start descending. Everyone has to fight among themselves for the key to escape before they are gruesomely ripped to shreds.

It's essentially a trap from the Saw franchise—it even features saws—and despite the elegant if increasingly surreal setting in which it takes place, it is every bit as savage. What's more, the tone of the preceding 20 minutes emphasizes, rather than detracts from, the savagery. The opening produced a false sense of security, a feeling that despite this being a death game, it would adhere to a sort of sporting propriety, a PG-13 distance from its own concept, and the reality crashing down from the ceiling is such a stark juxtaposition that the emotional impact is phenomenally potent despite the short amount of time spent getting to know the characters beforehand. The airy, atmospheric music of before continues to play, layered with the loser's horrific screams as they are diminished into pulp over a period of several excruciating seconds. For almost a minute afterward, stillness and silence reigns as the survivors stare at the unrecognizable remains, broken only by one—the last to escape, dooming the loser to their fate—softly repeating, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

This was the moment when Shiboyugi gripped me. The "pretentious" tone was, in fact, being employed for a reason, one that generated an impressive amount of power regardless of its intellectual content. Shiboyugi is punctuated by many more examples of sudden horror movie brutality that is made more impactful by the refinement on display everywhere else, and any punches it seems to pull are only the setup for a harder punch somewhere unexpected. For example, it's established that the participants of the death game are injected with something called the "Preservation Treatment," which causes their blood to turn to a cotton-like material when it leaves the body. While this at first seems to be a Danganronpa-esque blood substitution censorship, it ultimately leads to even more extreme dismemberment and body horror, as players are able to survive grievous wounds without bleeding to death. Despite the lack of blood, the show doesn't shy away from showing exposed bone and internal organs after a character is disemboweled.

Not to mention, the cottony blood creates the unmistakable impression that these bodies are doll bodies, that these players are something less than human.

This is where the second aspect of Shiboyugi that innately interests me appears: ennui. The elevated tone and impressive visual framing doesn't only enhance the impact of the death game formula, it also feeds into the protagonist Yuki's unsettling and sometimes sociopathic emptiness.

Yuki is Shiboyugi's second great surprise. My initial impression of her was that she was a fairly generic protagonist whose primary purpose was to provide a consistent, objective point of view. This isn't inherently a bad thing, as a neutral perspective character helps place the emphasis on the things they see, which in this case would be the death games. It does, however, diminish some of the surprise factor of the death game format to have a clearly defined protagonist who the audience can expect to survive. Though I theorize the ideal death game would have a fully ensemble cast with no protagonist, that's not an easy narrative for most authors to pull off, and honestly I've only seen it done once in a death game before (the second arc of Magical Girl Raising Project). Even a story like Battle Royale, which creates the feeling of an ensemble cast through its anonymizing uniforms, has a singular protagonist.

But even with the limitation of a protagonist, a death game story can still play to the strengths of the genre by showing the perspectives of other characters and emphasizing their importance, rather than leaving the non-protagonist cast as virtual nobodies who only exist as cannon fodder or challenges for the protagonist to overcome. Shiboyugi does a trick I enjoyed in Magical Girl Raising Project by stating upfront that several people are capable of surviving the game, not just one; this immediately invites the viewer to invest themselves in the side characters, as they have a legitimate chance to win too. Within this framework, Shiboyugi is quite good at making its survivors unexpected. Sometimes side characters who have a lot of emphasis survive, sometimes they die; sometimes minor supporting characters wind up being fodder, sometimes they unexpectedly crawl past the finish line. The show never falls into a pattern; I, at least, wasn't able to reliably pinpoint who would live or die.

(I watched with a friend of mine, and during one hectic death game we disagreed whether a certain inconsequential minor character had died; my friend said they had, while I said they hadn't. When said character showed up alive at the very end, I had a massive pop off. This is the stuff I live for.)

Nonetheless, that still leaves Yuki. As far as "plot armor" goes, she sometimes has the strongest of all: the non-chronological order of the games often means she is guaranteed to survive by default, since the viewer has already seen her in a future game. (Hence why I can bring this up, despite my statement I wouldn't include any spoilers.) What makes Yuki compelling despite this is the unexpected complexity of her character.

At the beginning of the first episode, Yuki introduces herself to the other players as someone who plays "altruistically," willing to help as many people survive the game as possible. Given she's already a 28-game veteran by this point, the newer players glom to her for help. But while her description of herself isn't a lie—at least from her perspective—it slowly becomes clear that her perspective is not, in fact, a neutral one aligned with the perspective of the audience. Yuki is startlingly sociopathic. Her emotionally detached pragmatism reaches extremes that come across as outright cruel. She is without scruple and also without hesitation. She truly will help as many people survive as possible—under the belief that doing so means a survivor might help her in a future game—but "as possible" does the heavy lifting in that statement. These games, despite their Saw-like brutality, lack Saw's twisted morality; they are often designed sadistically, and Yuki is perfectly willing to act sadistically as soon as it is required.

At the same time, though, the non-chronological nature of the games presents Yuki as a much more dynamic character than one so pragmatic would at first seem to be. She appears as both a hardened veteran and a more uncertain rookie; she is shown both strong and vulnerable, in control and out of it. In one game she taunts a girl with a knife just for fun, while in another she risks her own life to save others. Similar to Memento, there is a somewhat erratic nature to her personality that only makes complete sense once the games are rearranged into chronological order, at which point it becomes clear that her actions are a reaction to whatever happened in the game previous.

That begs the question of why the games are non-chronological to begin with. To an extent it enables a more logical drip-feed of information, but in depicting Yuki disjointedly it emphasizes her sense of disassociation.

Yuki is viewing herself from outside herself. At times she slips into third person, or else her voice is layered, with one track using first person while the other uses third. She is unclear what day of the week it is. She lives in a squalid apartment overflowing with trash and seems to do nothing but rot in bed during the day. At night she goes for aimless long walks to nowhere. She walks to the same spot on a highway overpass and stares down at the cars passing, which leads to a brilliant fridge realization I won't elaborate on.

Yuki cannot clearly communicate why she competes in death games. The show's title, Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table, is kind of a lie. Yuki lives in squalor by choice, not circumstance, unlike many of the other competitors who are in debt or similar dire straits. Yuki doesn't need money.

The Japanese title, Shibou Yuugi de Meshi wo Kuu, is a bit more ambiguous, with "Meshi wo Kuu" translating more directly to "Eat Food." The ambiguity of what "food" Yuki is actually eating correlates to her aimless attempt to create meaning out of her meaningless existence. If anything, she is "eating" the people she meets in the games themselves, taking on bits of their personality from game to game. Even her stated goal of completing 99 games is stolen from someone else.

This is where the show's liminal spaces come in. Yuki constantly refers to the "world" of the death games as its own distinct environment, divided from the real world. It's akin to an escapist fantasy: a gamer transported to a video game world where their exact skillset allows them to thrive. Yuki is a permanent zombie in the real world, a skilled and successful elite in the world of death games. But unlike Sword Art Online, which presents its game environment with an uncritical allure, Shiboyugi's games take place in unsettling, uncanny, and twisted realms, disquieting structures that seem subtly impossible. The calming and peaceful music, the pretty visuals, the serene pace lure the viewer into Yuki's perspective, suggesting the beauty that she sees, but the lurking menace always remains, and when the buzzsaws descend, the disconnect between the viewer and Yuki is severe and uncomfortable. The space itself is the threat, as unlike most death game stories Shiboyugi almost never shows any host or gamemaster, and its uncanny presentation is similar to the presentation of Yuki herself. It is a hole made only for her, though what comes out the other side is increasingly nonhuman.

I've said all of this while only barely touching on the actual directing, which is some of the strongest and most unique I've ever seen in anime. Most anime that look good—including this season's many juggernauts, like Jujutsu Kaisen and Frieren, but also more historically respected works, like those of Studio Ghibli—look good because the director understands animation, and is able to bring out the stunning details of movement that allow anime characters to really impress. Shiboyugi, the directorial debut of Souta Ueno, generates its stunning visuals less through animation than through an eye for framing and composition more reminiscent of western live action auteurs like Kubrick. Every episode has five or more shots that wow, not just by looking aesthetically pleasing but by weaponizing that aesthetic into emotional impact.

Similarly, the director leans on the visuals, rather than dialogue, to communicate meaning, a technique that massively revolutionizes the show's pacing. In 11 episodes, Shiboyugi adapts four different death games, each with their own characters, rises, falls, and climaxes. On paper, it's a blisteringly fast pace—fewer than 3 episodes per game on average. Because of the effective visual storytelling, however, the games unfold at a calm, quiet pace, establishing the tone necessary for every brutal rug pull. The visuals are aided in this regard by the story's sharp focus on the games themselves. Shiboyugi went to the Battle Royale school of justifying its death game; other than a single card of text ("This is a story about a deranged world," with the world in question as ambiguous as the "food" being eaten in the title) and a few offhanded statements here and there, there is no emphasis on why the games are being hosted, who hosts them, or any other ancillary details that would detract from what Shiboyugi is actually about. Minimalism in some areas is paid back with depth and complexity elsewhere.

Studio Deen, who produced the show, lacks the budget of Mappa or Madhouse, but manages to create something equally if not more visually impressive on the back of the fundamentals of cinematography. I probably would have enjoyed this show even if it looked like any other anime, but the incredible filmmaking is what pushes it into the territory of masterpiece.