primeideal

Death games, as a genre, require some suspension of disbelief. "This is a dystopia and this just happens sometimes." In Battle Royale, one middle school class is drafted. In Hunger Games, kids are drafted from across the country, but have the opportunity to volunteer in lieu of their loved ones. In Squid Game, people in financial stress are incentivized with a huge cash prize, then given the opportunity to drop out by majority vote. In all of these cases, the reader/viewer has to set aside some of their "oh, come on" reaction, and go with "this is not the way the world actually works, but what if..."

The writers have several strategies to try to get the viewers to buy in. They can worldbuild alternate-history details that emphasize how this world is not our current world, and thus make it more plausible that other things have changed, too. Hunger Games has the 12 Districts instead of 50 States. Some continuities of Battle Royale have a "Greater East Asia Republic" that emerged after WWII, implying that the second half of the 20th century was very different around the world. And yet, Bruce Springsteen still emerged at the same place and time to write "Born to Run." Curious.

Another strategy is to emphasize how brutal and cutthroat our current gameshows are already. If we're willing to watch people do stupid, embarrassing, dangerous things for a chance at lots of money, might we be willing to watch teenagers get murdered onscreen? Quoting liberally from actual gameshows in epigraphs tries to make this case, but there's a chance it backfires, if the answer is "no, actually."

This can easily bleed into "hey, the in-universe audience are terrible people for enjoying this spectacle, but guess what? You, the readers, are also terrible people for enjoying the fictional spectacle. You wanted your faves to live? Well, screw you." (This is one reason why I've only skimmed the first Hunger Games book and don't plan to read the others. It's more prominent in the manga adaptation of "Battle Royale" than the book or movie.) But there's also an obvious retort to this, namely: "you wrote the book, did you want us to pick it up or not?"

Stephen King's approach to "don't glamorize this, this is really disgusting actually" is to focus on the physicality of the horror. The premise is that a hundred boys are walking south from Maine, four miles an hour, or else; anyone who falls below the minimum speed limit gets eliminated (from life). There are plenty of chances to be grossed out by feet, legs, lungs, appendices, guts, faces, blood, sweat, tears, pus, urine, feces, vomit, erections, all that good stuff. (If you thought Abebe Bikila's feet were bad, he was only running for two hours and fifteen minutes.) For sixteen-year-old boys, the fear of publicly relieving themselves is worse than dying, the emasculation of being outearned by your girlfriend is sometimes worse than physical violence, there's a lot of talk about Oedipus complex and their girlfriends' breasts, etc. They also decide that a pair of brothers entering together (so one will have to watch the other die, at least) is gross and weird, but everyone else's participation is totally fine.

Like "Hunger Games," there's only one POV character, so we don't even have the potential "decoy protagonist"/insight into different possible winners and losers that Batle Royale allows. Ray Garraty's distinguishing feature is that...he's from Maine, which is where most of the "action" happens, so a lot of the local fans are cheering for him for reasons that he understands are arbitrary and a little creepy. Why else should we care about him? Does he like music like Shuya or have a sickly mother to support like Gi-hun or anything? Nah. He occasionally shows his comrades basic human decency and receives it in return, but there are a hundred guys, we expect a lot of that is going on even if some of them are jerks.

The two characters who sort of have interesting motivations for joining up (if you win, you can have basically anything you want for the rest of your life, hold that thought) are Scramm and Stebbins. Scramm, though just a teenager, is already married with a baby on the way. He's practiced walking eighty miles, which is apparently more than most people do! So he figures he's a favorite and will be able to financially support his family with the prize. Stebbins seems to know too much about past contests and the weird intimacy forged among the survivors. Is he like Il-nam, just trying to revel in the suffering of others, or Shogo, trying to bring down the system? No. We do learn something interesting about him towards the end, but it doesn't really make a difference in anything else. In fact, I feel like you could randomize the order of most of the scenes and it wouldn't make a great difference--characters don't evolve, they just die gruesomely and their bodies give out on them in different ways.

Okay, so the idea is, you accept a 99% chance of death for a 1% chance of unlimited riches, and people willingly do this because we're in a dystopia controlled by the evil military? Again, I could sort of go with the suspension of disbelief if that was just "this is the premise of the book, take it or leave it." Instead, the more King tries to worldbuild, the less plausible I find it. We still have all this name-dropping like Tonka Trucks and Dunkin Donuts and Hank Aaron's home run record, trying to tell us that "yes, this is still the USA, it's just evil now, or maybe the USA is already more evil than you like to think." Most of the characters couldn't tell you themselves why they joined other than "ehhhh I guess we must all have death wishes, huh?" And then we find out that there are pre-qualifying mental and physical exams: "most of the kids in the country over twelve take the tests but only one in fifty passes." (Does that include girls?) Why are people doing this other than they don't have frontal lobes yet?

King also namedrops lots of other influences in terms of horror and/or teenage male ennui (Shirley Jackson, JD Salinger). And like, the more namedropping you have to do in order to be like "look, these are good authors, you should all know about them!" the less I am invested in your story. (Battle Royale was not immune from this either. We get it, you like Springsteen, but advertising for the Boss is not why I'm reading your book.)

There are a couple flickers of "what if this is all purgatory, what if the ghosts of the other contestants are still there, what if when we die it's more of the same" which take the horror beyond the immediate. In that sense, the weirdness/ambiguity of the end, which I would otherwise have been probably frustrated by, sort of blended into the rest of the dark vagueness and was more intriguing than frustrating.

I'm not necessarily proud of enjoying "Battle Royale"--the prose can be mediocre, the musical allusions are a lot, maybe it makes me a terrible person for reveling in fictional violence. But in the context of these ludicrously violent death games, it's compelling to see moments of friendship or bravery or sacrifice emerge. Here, any flickers of purpose and agency are quickly swallowed up in poop and dick jokes. At least it keeps a fast pace, literally and figuratively.

Bingo: Survival.