Lucas and Chris tackle the next great vice in anime: gambling!
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Lucas
I don't know, Chris, as someone who took the under on that bet, things are looking pretty good from where I'm sitting. I mean, I'm still going to have to hit it big a few more times to get out of the red, but it's finally starting to all come together!
In an anime landscape where "cute girl doing X thing" is a successful enough formula to be a genre in and of itself, it shouldn't surprise anyone that there are multiple anime dedicated to one of mankind's oldest hobbies! As someone who is no stranger to this vice in all of its forms, I could not be more excited to chat with you today about how different anime tackle the exciting and varied world of gambling!
Dude, thanks to the very specific life I've lived, I very rarely run into anime that hit me where I live, but as a kid who started playing the stock market (which is also just gambling) when I was 13, FX Fighter Kurumi-chan HIT ME WHERE I LIVE!!!
And, as the show goes on, those accumulating narrow victories transform into a confidence and familiarity with stress that allows him to engage with games that are more akin to tests of will than games of chance, like the steel beam crossing.
Though other characters literally fall to their demise around him, the show really hammers home that not everyone can escape systemic inequality by getting lucky. While Kaiji is, ostensibly, about gambling, it's just as much about how people will destroy themselves for even a modicum of wealth and success. This show is even more brutal than FX Fighter Kurumi, and I find it even harder to look away as a result!
The show does a pretty neat trick where it shows characters seemingly in different strata of game strategy or has scrappy characters band with Kaiji to win against those stacked odds...only to make you pull back and realize "Oh right, all these people are here because they're broke, debt-ridden screw-ups on their last resort!"
So it's actually about the people at the top of the system pitting those at the lowest against each other for their own amusement and benefit. Society, live in, etc.
Kaiji really does hit you like a ton of bricks, and it's really easy to understand through these down-on-their-luck characters why the idea of gambling, and changing your life through an equal measure of skill and luck, is so appealing to so many. Especially considering (and once again I need to urge our readers to gamble responsibly if they choose to do so) gambling can be super cool!
You know, a part of me is bummed that we're doing this column before the Steel Ball Run anime reaches the storyline where Gyro and Johnny are, to their annoyance, the richest men in Milwaukee, but I'm having a pretty fun time regardless!
Don't worry, I'm sure we'll score the chance to tackle your personal pet topic of "Anime that mention Milwaukee" eventually.
Still, you can take it from someone who's killed a few cool evenings just breaking even at blackjack—gambling can be fun! Responsibly! In measured doses! Which means I've got to bring up one of the other big dedicated gambling anime and a personal favorite.
Okay, Kakegurui makes gambling "fun," but it also spares no illusions about how that's not a perspective any healthy person would have. So of course I'm going to love it and its cast of mentally ill-adjusted women who would sell my soul for a single poker chip.
These girls ain't right, and I pray nobody tries to fix them!
Blending high-stakes gambling with queer-coded eroticism all for the sake of allowing aristocratic young women to actually feel something in their deeply affluenza-addled lives, Kakegurui is my kind of trash TV and stuffed to the brim with super well-designed characters making some of the best faces you'll ever see in this medium!
Listen, if you're someone who believes that meritocracy is real on any level, you're going to find gambling appealing on some level or another. Gambling is one of the few vehicles we have in society today where you can beat someone outright with your wits alone! For much the same reason, I'll always hit up a blackjack table over a slot machine when I visit a casino, because knowing that my choices explicitly led to my victory feels WAY better than making money through random chance.
I'm not saying it's necessarily healthy that someone else's loss makes my win feel even better, but, well, you know how it goes sometimes.
Kakegurui also understands that the games and their rules and mechanics are half the fun in getting a feel for the characters manipulating them to their advantage. This was thus one of the many, many, many problems that Netflix's Bet adaptation had in fundamentally misunderstanding this.
The fact that we've got another season of this thing on the way while we're still indefinitely waiting on continuations of the original Kakegurui or Kakegurui twin anime really feels like we lost a...well, you know.
Yeah, there were a lot of conceptual issues in Netflix's Bet, but making it a soft-core Euphoria clone is probably one of the most egregious. Though, I guess it is longstanding tradition at this point for US adaptations of global media to just jam in formally popular cultural artifacts in the adaptation process to make something more palatable to American audiences.
And speaking of culture, gambling can be a fascinating window into another community's subcultures, and I am delighted every time one of these anime or another cultural artifact reminds me that horse racing is quietly big in Japan!
Showing up in anime that would never be mentioned in the same breath otherwise, like CITY The Animation, Golden Kamuy, and Jujutsu Kaisen, I attribute horse racing so completely to European and US culture, and seeing it show up in anime always reminds me of how we all have far more in common than we do separating us. Heck, I bet if folks combined horse racing with something like idols, the resulting franchise would have enough power to topple the current US political regime!
One losing bet now would be if we can actually get through a given month of columns without bringing up Uma Musume!
Though this is also the point where I have to bring up the fun fact that, canonically, there is no betting on races in the world of the horse girls! Everyone's into it purely for love of the game! Which does make it funny, given the origins and motivations of both its real-world inspiration and its predatory gacha ecosystem, but also goes to show how ingrained the institution of horse racing is in the culture.
It's to the point that, as you pointed out with your examples, if a "gambler" character pops up in a series, it's even odds they'll be a track addict!
I like how it can run the gamut, too. Like Cowboy Bebop's Faye Valentine isn't a gambler purely for thrill-seeking. She's doing it out of desperation because it's the only chance she can see to scrape together cash to pay off her crushing medical debt. Escapism!
I was literally just talking to a friend about how cool a character Faye Valentine is! Beyond the whole "being a very attractive anime woman" thing, I think her struggle to create a better life for herself despite her circumstances, and the culmination of her character arc being that she's worthy of love and celebration regardless of those circumstances, is something that everyone can learn from.
You should always bet on yourself, but you don't need to be chasing a better life and an idealized version of yourself to be happy. Faye's a great character because, through her, we see exactly how difficult it can be to reach that internal conclusion, and how doing so doesn't magically fix all of your external problems.
Oh Dead or Alive. You certainly were the "most" video game series of the 90s and 2000s!
Also, if folks are interested in an anime that is far more dead than alive and focuses on all manner of games of chance, I'd be remiss if we got through this column without highlighting Death Parade! An anime where the recently deceased play bar games, it is exactly as edgy and pseudo-intellectual as you'd expect a brooding anime from 2013 to be, and it's certainly a fun nostalgia romp for anyone who got into anime around that time!
Hey, gambling's only as fun as you make it and, as most of the series we've talked about in this column make clear, sometimes acquired tastes are the best ones! And, while I hope folks give some of these titles a chance, please remember, if any of them do inspire you to explore gambling, please do so cautiously and responsibly!
Gambling is quite a bit less fun if you don't respect your preferences and limits, after all!
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