Bokurano

Boy of boy... This anime was a trip. I finished it like 3 weeks ago but I've been putting the review off for a bit because of life so the div will get murky. The main plot of the anime has been done before, a group of kids sign up for a "game" but oh! It's actually real life and they're all going to die one by one. However a lot of these kids lead really troubled and complicated lives. To sum it up better, a group of 15 troubled kids aged 14ish from all walks of life are in a summer camp together, and while bored they venture off into a cave where a mystery computer man resides. He offers them a chance to register for some kind of a mecha game and they all of course decide to play, aside from one kid that's 10. They have to defeat 15 monsters, and each time they fight the mecha is piloted by one kid while the others are spectating inside the mecha. After each fight the pilot kid dies and then a new one gets selected and so on. I heard the manga is a lot more bleak, especially the ending, and that some character arcs are totally different so it seems like the two differ a lot. The kids have no choice but to fight otherwise the earth gets destroyed. Deaths aren't really presented to us as surprising as the episode always begins with the kid that's about to get chosen, so you know what's about to happen. You get the enjoyable experience of watching the last few days or hours of the chosen kid's life, which is usually messed up with a few exceptions. Some politics drama is also woven into the story so the supernatural part of the story is nicely countered with a more realistic way of handling such situations which was a nice surprise. That's all I can say without spoiling things, but if you're interested in watching do read the next paragraph only.

As I mentioned in one of my earlier texts, despite the amount of disturbing manga I've read recently I knew that if I were to see the same stuff shown in anime form I wouldn't feel as indifferent about it. I'll stop beating around the bush, this anime has pedophilia in it. There's one graphical scene that's framed in a more negative light, but also a couple of depictions of pedophilia that are just... there. The latter I don't really mind considering the context but I felt it was worth bringing up. And the worst thing is it just hits you out of nowhere. I'm talking pretty graphic and not even super short scene of a teacher having sex with a 12? 13? year old student. Well technically you can't see any genitals or nipples but yeah. Now, I know teacher-student relationships are particularly common in japanese media (honestly western teen media from the early 00's had a surprising amount of it too though) especially when it concerns coming of age stories about troubled teens in particular. Student teacher relationships, sugardaddies all that. I know that it's almost to be expected for something like that to be a sidestory in an early 00's anime that's basically suffering porn as people like to call it. Yet... to me it really felt that it came out of left field because nothing too graphic happened by then (it was episode 6 or 7 I can't remember), the deaths weren't gruesome etc. But the scene had nudity, moaning, awkward facial expressions, it really felt out of place. And this was the one and only sex scene in the whole anime! Not sure about the manga. They could've just implied it but they really went at it. Anyway this is really the worst scene in the anime but it does have some other weird scenes that stuck out to me so I'll mention them later. If you're fine with watching the show knowing this shit exists in it, don't read the rest so you don't get everything spoiled. I'm not really the type to do content warnings but man, this was so unexpected I had to mention it lol.

Other pedoish scenes are as follows: a 14 yr old girl trying to prostitute herself but in the end it gets played for laughs as her dad is the one to "buy" her to protect her or whatever (she never met her dad before so she didnt know it was him), a 16 yr old girl marrying a yakuza boss while everyone in the show says how she's a brave, strong, mature woman which like?? Okay she's a child, and lastly a quick remark from a father being concerned about his daughter receiving a scar because she wouldn't be a "suitable" bride. The last scene in particular I found very interesting honestly because I read that scars were thought to ruin a womans worth as a bride and I didn't even know that was a thing in Japan, but I'm basing this off a comment on an anime streaming site so it might be bullshit, I'm too lazy to fact check at the moment. So yeah if that's the case I do think it's a really interesting comment, especially because all the other adults in the room skipped past it. Not surprising.

Something I think this anime does a good job at is painting this picture of despair for the young lives that are going to inevitably die, prematurely. I don't mean it in a typical way where you'd be crying each episode for the kid that's about to die. There's a couple of tear jerker episodes but most didn't really affect me much in that way. Instead it does the following: these kids are constantly surrounded by adults, a lot of shitty adults at that, yet we're constantly confronted with the fact the kids are the ones that have to die. All the shitty adults survive. The pedo teacher gets protected by none other but the sister of the girl that got raped by him (the sister was getting raped by the teacher too btw), the "good" father that made the weird bride comment cheated on his wife with a younger woman because hes a horny male etc. Pretty bleak. The kids get to experience this whole chaos unraveling around them, they get involved with politicans and people trying to kidnap them because they're the pilots, they're forced to get closure before their lives even began all because of some parallel world richies that wanted to.. reduce the amount of universes or something. Drain energy actually?

This brings me to the whole plot thing. The stuff that gets thrown at us near the end remains kind of unresolved and there's a lot of it to grasp in a short period of time. The last few episodes have a lot of infodumps and exposition actually. But basically these kids are just one of the many that get thrown in that situation, and the other mechas they have to defeat are also piloted by kids in the same situation. When they get defeated their earth and their whole universe gets destroyed. So the stakes are quite high. The reason why is because some super secret future elite wants something out of it, and they're basically indestrucible as far as the anime shows us. If the kids win, their Earth's energy gets sucked out, or actually maybe only if they try to defeat the future elite using some program that's actually a trap that ends up enslaving their world... So they're fucked either way.

The ending is thought to be disappointing by mangafags as it ends on quite the uplifting note, everyone died except for the little sister character and they managed to save the Earth by killing this little thing that serves as their.. instructor kind of. Speaking of, I haven't even mentioned this yet but each group of kids is assigned a creature that guides them through the whole process and that creature is just the kid that "won" the game in their own parallel world. Just another layer of "you're getting fucked no matter what" in the story. Anyway, I'm not one to be upset by disappointing endings and they usually don't make or break the show for me so this end didn't bother me much. After all their story is over, but it does give off an unfinished vibe. Nothing happened to the main villains and as far as we know this whole ordeal is just continuing on as normal, with parallel worlds getting wiped off and the suffering is neverending. Fits the theme of the show eh? But the last episode is more positive about it as it only focuses on the little sister character. Apparently the manga had a bigger downer ending, so I'm kind of thinking of reading it.

This show was quite the ride. I don't think I was shocked by many anime before, but this one did it ngl. It was realisticaly bleak at some moments, but sometimes it stumbled to tell a story and ended up pretty goofy and weird so it's hard for me to decide how much I liked it. But it definitely was a wild ride that's for sure.