[ SECRET POST #180 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #180 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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13. [ Not a secret. ]

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 56 secrets from Secret Submission Post #026.
Secrets Not Posted: 0 broken links, [ 1 2 ] not!secrets, [ 1 ] not!fandom/repeat.
Next Secret Post: Tomorrow, Thursday, July 5th, 2007.
Current Secret Submission Post: Here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: 14

[sevendials.livejournal.com]

I read the first volume in a bookstore out of curiosity and had much the same problem.

Don't get me wrong, I can put my shallow fangirl aside if needs be and (since most of us are average-looking: I know I certainly am) I'm all for the idea of manga and anime with more average-looking protagonists. I'm pretty sure that was what Battle Royale was trying to do, but for me the artist just pushed it a little too far in the other direction. The end result struck me as just as unrealistic as the average bishie-filled manga, only far less visually appealing, which struck me at least as the worst of both worlds.

There's a big difference between average and ugly, and I find it kind of disconcerting when characters who are clearly intended to look only ordinary in fact look so dramatically plain that they again become outstanding. With a few exceptions the cast, to me, looked more like a gallery of grotesques than the kind of average kids you might see on the street. I also thought some of the cast looked far too mature for middle-schoolers. Yeah, some kids do grow up fast, but a number of the characters looked like adults going to Schoolgirl Night at their local club. I suspect that what troubled me about the characters was the lack of any real middle ground between noticeably attractive and OMGWHATISIT, never mind that most of the population fall quite neatly into precisely that middle ground.

If the art had been a little more to my taste I might have been able to get into this series. But the bad art and the lack (to my mind) of any really sympathetic characters and the fact that, despite how much the premise of Battle Royale intrigued me, I'm not really that into gorefests in the first place all had me deciding that it was something I could reasonably give a miss.