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dlamp-dictator · 2 years ago

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Still Thinking About Tomodachi Game

Folks... I don’t really like Tomodachi Game. I know that’s probably not the best way to start this post, especially when I’m tagging it, but... I don’t like it, and it won’t leave my head even months after the anime finished and even longer since I’ve tried to distance myself from the manga after stopping around chapter 47. It’s a demon that keeps coming to me and I would very much like for it to go away. To that end I’m just going to start talking about it, discussing the points I didn’t like about, what ultimately turned me away, and try to mention a few of its good points. Ultimately, I just don’t think this anime is for me, but as someone that also enjoys a lot of the more psychological shows and non-battle battle series, this anime left me feeling a bit more disappointed than I thought it would due to some of the subject matters it discusses and the overall message I feel it was trying to convey.

But first, as always, that synopsis.

Tomodachi Game focuses on five four characters, the eternally broke and unlucky Yuuichi Katagiri, the sweet and innocent Yutori Kokorogi, the flirtatious and trouble-making Makoto Shibe, the straightforward and headstrong Shiho Sawaragi, and the intelligent and collected Tenji Mikasa. Due to an incident involving stolen funds for a field trip these friends find themselves forced to participate in a series of challenges known as the Tomodachi Game, with the stolen funds turning into a collective debt hanging over the group’s head and the only way to pay off that debt being to complete all the challenges laid before them by the Tomodachi Game, each challenge testing their friendship to the limit as they learn more about each other’s increasingly dark pasts and problematic elements that makes teamwork more and more difficult.

If I had to give the short version of why this anime/manga turned me off I would break it down into three points:

The overseers are extremely annoying characters and ruin most of the story by spouting out the author’s philosophy.

The overall theme and message of the fragility of friendship is extremely dour and feels dark for the sake of being dark.

The method the main cast use to get through some challenges feel like some of them have future vision and are sometimes bullshit.

So... shall we break that down a little?

The Overseers

Let’s start with the most painless part first. In a lot of these death-game-style anime/manga there are usually overseers of some kind to... well, oversee the games. To make sure everyone is following all or most of the rules, to keep everyone on something of an even playing field, things like that. These guys are often more function than actual characters and exist for the sake of showing that the powers that create these scenarios have the... well, manpower and resources to make all the near-magical things that happen come to be. Some of these overseers have personalities and even a story presence, but it’s more often than not as an outsider to comment on the situation while being somewhat above it.

For some examples, the angels in Though You May Burn to Ash are overseers and creators of the various games that contestants go through, and while they can differ in personalities they mostly exist to show that the events of each game and trial are in fact magical/impossible by human means and are powerful enough to not only throw the contestants in such a death game but do so sadistically, gleefully, and callously to watch the humans squirm. Despite this, the manga’s focus is on the mindset and situation of the main characters with the angels more so providing a mix of comic relief through dark humor and to show off the more horror-esque segments of the story.

The battle royale game Black Survival/Eternal Return has a lot of lore and even side material that shows us the scientists involved in the Island’s experiments, but like the angels they are more there as functions to show that the events in the game are under the backdrop of an experiment to create nearly immortal beings with superpowers and have them kill each other. They don’t have much presence aside from being literal announcers you can pay for in the cash shop. And even the one side manhau that focused on a scientist had her lose her memory and go through the battle royale as a test subject of sorts to keep the focus on the battle royale. I know I’m using death game examples rather than non-battle battle series, but given the stakes in Tomodachi Game this show might as well be one.

And the overseers of Tomodachi Game aren’t like the overseers of the above manga and game.

The main annoyance I have is that these overseers are both outsiders and commentators that have way too much of a voice in the series. We see them right in episode 1, namely the logical and calculative Tsukino and the energetic and sadistic Maria, both women discussing the games being played while explaining the philosophy of the individual games, their opinions of the contestants, and snidely remarking on how fragile and pathetically skin-deep friendship is.

And I... can’t stand them.

Not just in terms of them being antagonistic forces, but as functions of the story. Tsukino coldly comments on how each game is meant to tear apart a friendship with Maria wanting to revel in that friendship’s destruction just feel like them backseat gaming a VTuber playing Mario Party. For all their antagonistic nature they don’t have any direct contact with the main characters outside of very brief moments and feel more like something akin to a Greek Chorus actively commenting on a performance they frankly have no business talking about.

Actually no, at least a Greek Chorus sang and dance as they commented.

Yeah, they come off as an annoying distraction more than anything. Their analysis on the situation is mostly meant to explain the higher mind games and goal of each individual game to the audience, their biting critiques and comments are meant to show how dour both the world of this show and the things going on in the game are, but it ultimately turns them into backseat drivers constantly saying how right or wrong the characters are. If you removed them as an element, you’d get a much more mysterious setting that feels more like a force of nature than some labyrinthine setup.

Their existence also tries to explain the magic, which is always a stupid reason to have these sorts of overseer characters.

To keep this segment from trailing off, their existence and active third party involvement is meant to show that the organization of the Tomodachi Game has the money, power, and resources to pull this kind of stuff off, but in doing so this early it brings forth a lot of questions about the world-building, namely how all of this is able to go under everyone’s nose on both a social and government level when the Tomodachi Game has its tendrils in just about every faucet of daily life. Seriously, they have a hand in the main cast’s police force, healthcare, school system, and even the underground crime world, how is this not a well-known thing or at least rumored about, especially when one of the main cast members might have been involved in it since middle school? Honestly, it’s this last point that drives me up a wall and I’m moving on to my second point before this turns into an essay in and of itself.

The Theme and Message

The theme of a story is always a bit messy and can vary from person to person, but if you were to ask me the theme of Tomodachi Game would be that we as humans only come together when it is convenient for us. We make relationships and bonds for the sake of necessity and once those bonds start to become chains we’ll gladly break them even at the cost of someone losing a lifeline, or even break those bonds sadistically to watch someone who needed that lifeline crumble to dust. We see this several times both in the anime and manga. Several characters are willing to throw others under the bus for the sake of gaining even a small advantage of removing their debt, willing to destroy built trust for money or safety, and many people, especially past the anime, are manipulative and sadistic from the start. We see this immediately in the very first game as most of Yuuichi’s friend group is willing to all but destroy Kokorogi emotionally and financially, a girl that is very clearly the most emotionally fragile and physically weak among the group. The world of Tomodachi Game is a world of cruelty, manipulation, greed, and sacrifice, where you are the only person you can depend on and have to be able to throw away others at the drop of a hat.

And I really don’t agree with this mindset.

To spare you folks my thesis on human relationships I’ll keep it short. While a lot of bonds and friendships do start out as matters of convenience and shared interests they tend to evolve and grow stronger through trials, slowly building into truly unbreakable bonds that last for nearly a lifetime or otherwise quietly fade as you remain separated. These bonds take years to form into that kind of strength though, with constant contact and discussion being had in between that time.

And I’ll be frank, to throw 5 high schoolers in a room with about a year’s worth of engagement among themselves, outright telling them someone among the five screwed them over, and then expect them to not have suspicions or even push past those suspicions to play games with hundreds of thousands to even millions of dollars in debt hanging over their heads and not go into a fight-or-flight, self-preservation state is not only ludicrous, it’s idiocy. It’s even higher idiocy to have your overseers claim that there’s some higher, even noble purpose to doing all of this aside from sadism and entertainment, but that’s neither here nor there.

To be fair to Tomodachi Game there is a traitor among Yuuichi’s friend group that did screw them over for the sake of trapping someone among the five of them in debt to get some answers out of them. However, that reason starts to lose meaning after around the third game due to many other factors pushing that point to the wayside. I completely forgot about that initial reason until about chapter 47 when a certain character appeared, but by that point I was tapped out emotionally and couldn’t bear to read another page.

With that all said, the constant driving of how fragile and weak friendship and relationships are by the overseers is just too much for me to deal with, especially given the above statements of both their backseat gaming and the completely abnormal situation the main cast find themselves in this theme of fragility and weakness of bonds feels extremely forced and it’s tiring.

And thankfully my last issue with this story is much more brief.

Game Solutions

I’ll keep this brief since this is honestly a very minor issue compared to the above two points. In a nutshell, a lot of the ways the main cast, specifically Yuuichi, gets through these games successfully can feel a bit bullshit. The first two games had some clever plays done by Yuuichi, but a few games, namely the ones involving heavy teamwork, tend to have Yuuichi doing that anime thing of being five steps ahead of most characters with the audience only able to stay about two steps ahead, thus making Yuuichi’s victories feel a little hallow since a lot of it comes down to him just acting like he’s at a disadvantage until he can pull the rug out from under his opponent. This was done at least twice to my memory and both times felt a little nonsense due to us mostly being in the head of Yuuichi’s opponents for those games and unable to really figure out Yuuichi’s methods or thought process until the very end when he explains things himself. After reading some other manga like Kakegurui Twins where I could actively follow Mary Satome’s thought process and even figure out ahead of time how she could win a few of her gambles this annoyed me more than anything. This doesn’t hurt the narrative as much as the above points, but it was an annoyance when I came across it depending on the game.

Some Good Points

I know I spent the last while really railing into this series, but there are a lot of good points I enjoy about it. Not enough good points to change my opinion on it, but I feel like I can’t just rag on something without mentioning the few things it does right. A philosophy I’ve taken is that the bad is only bad because the good in it can’t save it, and while there is little good in this series to save it there is some good in it. For example...

Yuuichi: Yuuichi Katagiri is honestly the perfect character for a series about testing the limits of friendship and questioning the dark, unknown secrets a friend might have. He’s dark, depraved, manipulative, scummy, cruel, and can be the evilest character in the entire series, but he still cares deeply for his friends and all of his darkness and cruelty is for the sake of saving his friends and maintaining their friendship. Even if it costs him their trust and love for him, he’ll still fight to protect them no matter how dark a corner he’ll have to go. [Friend’s Sin Trial] and [The Weakest Wins the Game] were the perfect examples of this. If every game had the quality of those arcs I might have a higher opinion of this series.

Kei: Even if I personally think he’s here to be yaoi bait, Kei Shinomiya is an excellent rival for Yuuichi. Whereas Yuuichi is dark and depraved for the sake of maintaining friendship, Kei is warm and open for the sake of betraying them. For all their differences they are just a coin toss from being the same person in a way, and when the two work together under forced circumstances it’s amazing how fun and tense the situation gets as the two try to figure each other out.

The Games: While I said the team games can have some bullshit ends to them some were done fantastically. The previously mentioned [Friend’s Sin Trial] and [The Weakest Wins the Game] were some games that used all its elements of testing friendships and bonds very well, but also the [Kokkuri Game]. When the games aren’t focused on fighting in teams and are purely about trusting and manipulating bonds the games are great and tense.

But that’ll be it for me. I have about 3 more drafts of things to discuss and I’ll hopefully finish another this week. Until then I’ll see you folks later.

#your dictator is speaking #tomodachi game

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electric-eulogy · 11 days ago

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Thoughts on the Tomodachi Game Manga: Yutori Kokorogi

Wanted to put this out here because my friend told me that my thoughts were interesting, haha. Several months out from when I finished the manga itself, but my motivation to post things online isn't exactly great... Regardless, Tumblr is the only place to get my thoughts on the media I consume at the moment (as this is the site that I find has the friendliest UI for me).

Anyway, this is more like a character analysis for a few of the characters than any kind of story evaluation for the most part. I'll put the actual analysis under the cut for people who don't want to read it.

Keep in mind that I've only read the manga, so I don't know anything about anything that's (presumably) only in the anime.

I want to talk about the main cast here... Yuuichi Katagiri, Shiho Sawaragi, Tenji Mikasa, Makoto Shibe, Yutori Kokorogi, and Kei Shinomiya. I'll likely touch on Yuka Katagiri, Taizen Shiba, Masakazu Shibe, Yutaka Mikasa, and everyone else that comes to mind with that list more briefly… Not individually, but in their relation to the others and the parent/child parallel in the story.

This post is for Yutori, though.

Please note that there will be spoilers for Tomodachi Game below.

Yutori Kokorogi

Starting with Yutori, as she's one of the ones I found the most interesting by the end of the story....

Her character is rather... interesting, and feels similar to D'arce from Fear & Hunger to me. They're both... incredibly bold and opinionated individuals, but their whole world revolves around one man. For D'arce, it would be Le'garde, and for Yutori, it would be Yuuichi.

Yutori doesn't read to me as though she has a particularly cohesive sense of identity. From the beginning, her personality was an act (which I thank every star above for), but she's not actually that stable of a person once that facade falls. She's obsessed with Yuuichi.

But before we get to that, I want to talk about her beginning personality in the manga. The classic... moe air-headed klutz girl. Honestly, this is one of my least-liked tropes in the media. I don't like it. But I do think that it's worth mentioning as her facade of choice. I wonder if it's because that's the kind of personality that can be effectively utilized to elicit sympathy and pity points if not exasperation and/or a sense of protectiveness... if only because she acts so much younger than her age.

It'd be easy to get close to people that way, and she'd also be filling a niche in the group that they didn't have filled yet. In the most surface-level, distilled way of phrasing it: Shiho is the upright law keeper, Yuuichi is the glue that holds everyone together, Makoto is the rich kid who's... constantly wavering on the borderline between "normal guy" and "creepy pervert," and Tenji is basically the upright law keeper 2.0 (male edition). And Yutori can step in as the "cute nieve klutz that everyone steps in to protect."

It feels like she made the personality explicitly to target that protective instinct in people who have a concious. She's the sad, wet cat on the side of the road with the big eyes that everyone pities, but only a few will actually step in to help. And she's made it so that Shiho, Yuuichi, Tenji, and Makoto will all step up to help her.

But once that mask drops, it does get painfully apparent that she doesn't know what a real friendship looks like. She'll act out the fantasy of one, but I don't think she knows what it actually is. But it's not about the friendship to her; it's about Yuuichi.

Rounding back to my idea that her entire sense of identity is dependent on Yuucihi: When she talks about him, she talks as though he's a god, and she also quite literally refers to him as one (if memory serves). She sees him as a sort of arbiter of divine will-- if only because of how fucked up he and Taizen ended up making her family situation (although I'll talk about that more when I talk about Yuucihi. Because I'm not sure that Yuucihi is the one that should shoulder that blame).

Anyway, she has this... obsessive, perhaps religious, view of Yuucihi... And similar to how some people make things like Being a Christian (TM) their whole personality, her entire personality is dependent on her perception of Yuucihi and what he's done. I phrased it to my friend as follows: She spent so long pinning things on Yuuichi to the point that it's become a fanatical, cult-like obsession for her. Her sense of self is tied to that. Her sense of self is innately connected to her sense of "past" and not a (her) sense of "like/dislike" or "hobbies," so the idea of what she "knew" being wrong would naturally fundamentally shake her sense of self.

Her entire personality is based on her personal worship of, and eventual vengeance upon, Yuuichi. So it's only... normal that learning or realizing that things were at least a little different from the way that she initially pictured it would destroy her. The idea that Yuuichi isn't the sole incarnate of pure, true evil and that there were more factors to blame than a child no older than her would also be something that I think wouldn't be pretty for her.

Because that's her obsession. That it's Yuucihi who did it, it's Yuuichi who did it, it's Yuuichi who... well, you get the idea.

But, in the end, she's also aware that she's no better than he is. An eye for an eye makes for an endless cycle of vengeance; somewhere in there, you will eventually become that which you hate. In an attempt to constantly get the better of, or win the battle between, you will sink to their level and worse because there are just some things that you can't feel like you've won/been vindicated by if you don't throw away your morals. Fire can only be fought with fire sometimes, and sometimes that means being worse, or at least on the level of.

And it could be said that Yutori is worse, just like it could be said that Yuuichi is worse. That's all a matter of personal perspective. But they're both not good people. And she knows that. So, by the end of the story, when everyone decides whether or not they want Yuucihi to live, she doesn't say anything until Makoto does because she knows that she's sunk to his level, sort of like the idea that her horse in this race is weaker than the others.

She's almost on the level of Yuuichi when it comes to manipulating others or at least pulling an act in front of them. This can be seen in how long she's able to fool everyone, including the cult leader Saika Kamishiro. However, it could be debated whether or not Saika was actually that perceptive to begin with.

Doesn't change the fact that she manipulated him so successfully, though.

Regardless, I get where she's coming from, but I don't necessarily sympathize. I can't condone her decisions and behavior, especially towards her mother and friends in the story (even if that's rectified in the epilogue).

I also want to mention what her name means: 心木ゆとり... With 心 (kokoro), meaning "heart" in a sort of cutesy way (though it can also mean mind and soul). And 木 (ki/gi) meaning "tree/wood". ゆとり (yutori) all together can mean something like "space/affluence/time/reserve," and it'd be used as a noun that way, but broken up ゆ (yu) would mean "hot water" and とり (tori) would mean "bird".

I'm sure that I'll have more thoughts bite me later that I'll regret not expanding upon here, but this is it for now.

#tomodachi game #yutori kokorogi #character study #cesare.py

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