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This Week in Anime - How Does the Kino's Journey Remake Compare to the Original Series?

Moonsaber wrote:

Gender pronouns started making me frown, I know there is a push these days for more androgynous use of pronouns for asexual folks, but the show uses the pronoun 'He' currently, as far as I can tell.

Actually, that was a subtitle error - the Japanese did not use any masculine pronouns.

"Without a king," Kino told them, "this land will have no order! So I will decide the new king! Here is my law: starting now, you will compete to decide the next ruler! Let any adult citizen who wishes to take the throne come forward and do battle for it. The last one left standing will be king or queen! Those of you who will not fight must leave this city and forfeit your rights of citizenship! This is now law!"

For a second, the coliseum fell totally silent as the crowd worked through the logic of Kino's Law. A few were quick to realize that if everyone fought to the death, there would eventually be a king or queen with no subjects but children, the aged, and infirm. And were everyone to choose not to fight, again, there would be a ruler without a kingdom. And among those few, some came to the conclusion that their city would remain intact only if they did not fight to the death.

Most did not think, however. They merely reacted with fear, or anger, or relief, or any one of a thousand emotions, all expressed loudly.

The renewed roar of the crowd in ...

I checked the volume right before doing the column, and there is an underclass in the book. They're referred to as "voluntary exiles" (in a less realistic but more clear line-drawing between classes, they revoked citizenship because they disagreed with the bloodshed it propagated; in the first anime adaptation, many of them are just born into poverty). Either way, they are not considered citizens and are basically included just to clarify that this is not a cartoonish country made purely out of evil slaughter-lovers. The only difference between the book and the first anime that I fudged a little to save text space was that in the book, Kino does not explicitly outlaw harming the voluntary exiles, she seems to assume they'll just leave because of her "get outta town" thing. The first anime fleshes out this detail more and adds the "harming exiles = disqualification" bit.

According to the history, there were enterprising souls who went mad and disappeared into the countryside; others ran away like the abject cowards they were.
Curiously, it was these self-exiles who prompted the creation of the contest.

A) The new murderbowl is limited to first-class citizens, i.e. people who won and/or benefited from this awful system in the first place. Slum denizens are not only exempt, but protected from this violence by the decree. If you harm any of them, you're disqualified.

"If you don't want to get killed, you should probably leave too," Hermes suggested.
"You think?"
"You have a family?" Hermes asked as Kino started his engine. The rumble echoed from the concrete walls.
The guard nodded.
"Then. I think you really ought to leave. Your family will thank you."
"He's pretty wise for a piece of machinery," said Kino, and put Hermes in gear.

Ah okay, I was mistaken then. Had to read through it in a hurry, and my brain just connected dots that weren't there when I saw those passages. It's a weaker story in the original novel to be sure, but it's still better than what they did in the new anime; even the added context of showing more nuanced aftermath to the decree or showing Kino's emotional progression would have helped it not be as shitty. I'd stand by my criticism that the episode stinks, whether or not the source material was any better, and the version in the 03 anime was a good story, even if they had to add elements to get it there.