SHIBOYUGI: Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table

Episode 9

There is something clearly broken about the world of SHIBOYUGI. The show itself has been telling us from the very beginning, of course. It is true that these death games are operating with some nebulous degree of clandestine authority that seems removed from the lives of the kinds of people who would even need to worry about putting food on the table at all; I think it is safe to assume that the audience watching on the other side of all those cameras is pretty exclusive. The fact remains, though, that these games are merely a symptom of a deeper sickness, a rot that courses through everything and everyone. Only a truly deranged world would allow such madness to run rampant and unchecked. Thank goodness such a place could only exist in the far-out realm of science-fiction anime. Cue laugh track. Roll on snare drum.

The whole paradigm is perfectly summed up by the darkly funny tickle-torture that the Rabbits use to force information from their Stump opponents. As Yuki remarks, a group that big is (presumably) composed mostly of normal people who need to maintain at least a pretense of morality to function as a group. The Rabbits don't have to kill to survive, unlike the Stumps, so a seemingly innocuous method of enhanced interrogation will go down a lot easier than jumping straight to more brutal methods…even if it is still torture, at the end of the day. In the bigger picture, then, we have the games, dressed in the robes of theater and ritual. All of the theatrical parlor tricks, thematic flourishes, and systems of rules and win-conditions must be there to allow the audience to pretend that they are engaging with art, instead of indulging in craven sadism.

Or, maybe, the artistic trappings just give the murder that ever-important flair of novelty, like back when the Romans would turn their mass executions in the Coliseum into an all-day carnival of bloody spectacle. Animals from foreign lands would be shipped to the city to tear gladiators apart. Naval battles would be recreated with entire fleets filled with real, burning victims. The worst possible outcome would be for the crowds to walk away feeling cheated or, gods forbid, bored. Thankfully (for us, anyway), this episode is chock-full of so much deliciously toxic yuri-drama and psychological tension that I doubt “boring” is a word anyone would use to describe the experience.

What makes these games function as such effective examples of postmodern blood-pageantry is their calculated emotional cruelty. It used to be that you could feed some slaves or foreign prisoners to a pride of starving lions and keep the crowds in their seats long enough to sell more concessions, but we've become too savvy for all that. The rich clientele that is funding SHIBOYUGI's games could get their fill of base murder just about whenever they wanted, I reckon. Their more refined tastes demand more refined methods of extracting that sweet catharsis from the girls in the games. This is why the Stumps may have the advantage in terms of weaponry, but most of them aren't groomed killers like Moegi — it seems like the game-makers went out of their way to ensure that the Stumps would be mostly comprised of gentler, weaker souls. How else would you craft such perfectly tense morsels of human drama like the scene where one poor Stump nearly gets her throat slashed by an especially bold Rabbit?

Or, how do you figure that Moegi's psychotic murderer of a mentor just so happened to be slotted in amongst the rabbits? The beautiful and haunting extended flashback to Moegi's time with this woman reveals a killer with lavish tastes and a most casual approach to going out and fetching a new victim to disembowel. She's an utterly cartoonish caricature of a madwoman, yes, but I can accept that because this deranged world of SHIBOYUGI is so clearly incentivized to produce this kind of crackpot. Moegi compares her mentor's addiction to “the thirst of a sailor who cannot stop drinking seawater.” She targets girls based on nothing more than whim and carnal craving. This isn't the kind of creature that is going to skate by unseen by the system in charge of this world. She's been manufactured by the system, hand-picked, and placed directly into the Candle Woods game with exacting malice of forethought.

That these games can be won and repeated by veteran players has nothing to do with the powers-that-be actually caring about whether girls like Yuki survive. The rules and the prizes exist to make the slaughter less predictable, and therefore more interesting for the folks watching safely from the comfort of their dens. I'd say that I'm glad that we don't live in such a deranged world ourselves, but let's not be naïve. We've already got people using their smartphones to place bets on the death tolls in Gaza and Iran as they prep their morning smoothies and get ready to drop their kids off at some private academy for Apocalyptic Evangelicals. At this point, I'm mostly envious of Yuki and the other competitors, because at least they get to live in a nightmarish dystopia that has been crafted by artists with genuine taste.

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.