SHIBOYUGI: Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table

Episode 10

To live in any modern capitalist society is to constantly be forced into the same dreadful epiphany over and over: Just imagine how well off you'd be if you shed those petty morals and stopped giving a damn about being a decent person. Think of all the cash that would come flowing in if you decided to cheat on those taxes, invest in some munitions stock, and maybe even quit that dead-end job so you can move out to Silicon Valley and hawk some A.I. slop or, at the very least, get in on a decent MLM scam. These days you don't even have to leave the comfort of your own home to sell your soul and rake in a few quick bucks. If you've got a decent camera and some hot takes about how minorities and women are ruining whatever random hobby is trending on social media this week, I'm sure it wouldn't take more than a few minutes to get a sponsorship offer from BetterHelp, BetMGM, or whatever godforsaken company is responsible for Raid: Shadow Legends.

While us folk with moral qualms and a sense of basic decency struggle to thrive in such a wasteland of infinitely monetizable content-slop forged in the fires of human suffering, the New Social Contract (Platinum Tier Black Label Edition)™ works out just great for assholes and sociopaths. The grand joke of SHIBOYUGI's satire is that our real world has basically stopped even trying to mask its obsession with reducing every part of the human body and experience into something that can be extracted and consumed under the thin veneer of quasi-acceptable loopholes. I'm looking at the front-page of Kalshi.com as I write this, and I cannot for the life of me understand the difference between SHIBOYUGI's death games and the fact that a “prediction market” exists for the outcomes of the military crisis breaking out in Iran. In one world, Kyara is running around in a bunny suit and reveling in a cotton-soaked rampage of death and murder for a live-viewing audience's pleasure. In another, she's shilling VPN sponsorships on Twitch and ranting about how much she hates transgender people and immigrants.

All of this is to say that poor, poor Moegi may just be the most relatable character that SHIBOYUGI has ever dragged kicking and screaming to the chopping block. Yes, she is a broken thrall to a deranged spree killer who is guilty of many terrible crimes herself - including, we learn, the murder of her own unsuspecting parents - but Moegi was never really made for this world in the way that a sociopath like Kyara clearly was. Sure, Moegi has put on a brave face and shot plenty of other young women in the face for fame and profit, but it's never managed to get her any farther up the ladder of success than the measly bottom rung labeled “A Better Killer's Plaything.” Her heart isn't in it. She's bitter, and ashamed, and furious that all of her suffering didn't even amount to making it through an entire SHIBOYUGI mini-arc before getting casually gunned down by that terrifying ghost of a girl. Honestly, if I been stuck living in Moegi's shoes, I'm not so sure I could have done much better.

Yuki can do better, clearly, but she's not the same flavor of psycho that Kyara is, by a long shot. If I had to put any kind of label onto Yuki, I think the closest comparison we've got is to a career soldier. She doesn't like to kill, necessarily, but she's clearly very good at it, and she has been taught by the likes of Hakushi to tamp down her feelings just enough to stay sane and survive in each game and earn another notch in her belt. This allows Yuki to retain enough of her humanity to be a viable protagonist for our story, but we've also seen what toll this path will take on the woman in the future. She loses her mentor this week; she's bound to lose that eye, before too long. Some time after that, she's going to find herself standing in that cold and lonely phone booth, staring at the pill that might be the key to ending the games for good.

As always, SHIBOYUGI isn't offering any easy answers to its characters' conundrums, nor is it even interested in making a traditionally satisfying story out of their misadventures. It is, instead, a gilded carnival mirror that has been set in the most luxurious of handcrafted frames. The show's storyboarding and sense of visual flair are in top form, this week, which makes it that much easier to look into this grotesque reflection of reality and soak in all of the perfectly framed corpses. So much cotton strewn about, this week. When Yuki reaches into the one girl's rib-cage and tenderly grasps the stuff that used to be blood and meat, we can practically feel the awful softness of it, ourselves. She muses on how much it hurts to know that a ghost like her can still stand on her own two feet while Moegi lies in tatters amongst the rest of the ruined competitors. Yuki can still recognize the awful waste of this violence for what it is, even as she participates in the system that set it all in motion. Even as she profits from it. Even as she Survives within it.

The Yuki of the show's present must surely be wondering if that really is the best she can hope for, in the end. Is that the best that any of us can hope for, on either side of the screen? I wish I could tell you that I knew the answer to that question.

SHIBOYUGI: Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.