No Response Required to the BR Troll
Newcomers to this board may possibly notice that 99% of all the posts are about a Japanese movie called Battle Royale (2001), based on the 1997 novel by Koushun Takami.
In this movie, a class of Japanese 9th graders is abducted on a school excursion and taken to an island where they are forced to fight to the death in a government sponsored competition.
Be warned that the vast majority of these posts are by a single individual (using a variety of extremely lame account names) who has apparently dedicated his/her life to swamping the Hunger Games boards with claims that Suzanne Collins plagiarised the BR book and movie in the Hunger Games trilogy.
By all means read all the posts, if you have absolutely nothing better to do for several days. You will soon get a strong sense of Deja vu. That’s because there are only about a dozen basic posts, started over and over again, all clearly written by the same person.
Do NOT waste any part of your life in responding to them.
The poster (henceforth to be known as the BRT) has no interest whatsoever in your opinion, or anyone else’s. He/she is fanatically dedicated to the plagiarism theory, and will summarily reject every argument you put forward to show that his/her posts are complete nonsense. The more logical your arguments are, the more aggressively BRT will dismiss them.
I’m not saying, by the way, that the theory is definitely wrong , because although I am personally sure of that, I can’t prove it. I’m saying that everything the BRT says in support of the theory is ridiculous.
If you really want to know how similar BR and THG are, then watch the movie and read the book…if you can track down copies. That way you can make your own decision…and realise just how many details BRT has invented to fill up his/her posts.
The BR movie isn’t bad. Although it has the usual complement of Japanese hams mugging wildly and screaming their lines at each other, they have hired some quality actors to play the major roles. If you like your gore, and endless scenes of teenagers killing each other with guns, knives, axes, poison and arrows, then you will almost certainly enjoy it. There is even some subtlety for those who like their movies to have a little depth.
The English version of the novel is fairly heavy going – every death is documented in detail, each one preceded by a rather drawn out confrontation between killer and victim, accompanied by their back story.
It is a very Japanese story, set very much in its time when resurgent Japanese nationalism was really taking hold. The debates between the various pairs of students (before they kill each other) are all in some way referencing this social transformation. Without some background knowledge of relations between Japan and the West, both before and after 1853, then it may be hard to see the point of Takami’s story (if you don’t know the significance of the year 1853, that’s a bad start.) Even if you do see the point, you may end up feeling that he hasn’t really made it.
Whether or not you get any sense of familiarity – the feeling that you are reading/watching a slightly different version of the same story – is entirely up to you. But, having made up your mind, don’t bother telling the BRT. Unless you agree with him/her, he/she doesn’t want to know!