The Battle Royale Slam Book by Nick Mamatas

And while they do spend the typical amount of time being catty and stealing each other’s boyfriends, the schoolgirls of Class 3-B don’t do it because they have nothing better to do. The bad kids have a couple of slasher psychopaths and one of the most vicious? She’s a girl, too. Sure, one the people who survives to the end is a boy, but the other one is a girl. We know how those end up… meaning that the girls in this tale must not have any power or agency at all, right?

See, this story is about teenagers, and half of the kids are girls, and they’re fighting and fucking and murdering each other, so doesn’t it have to be bad? It is a horror show. He ran down the list of subjects already taken, and I immediate noticed the big empty space where I could make myself comfortable: a review and refusal of the “anti-feminist” label so often applied to the film, and (less often) the print versions of Battle Royale. I’d been wanting to get back to academic writing for a while, I’ve been a fan of the story for years, I studied filmmaking and film criticism – particularly in regards to Japanese cinema – so when I heard that editor Nick Mamatas was looking for a few more essays, my hand shot up so fast you all probably heard the accompanying sonic boom.

My essay, “Girl Power”, is part of this collection and I am incredibly thrilled to be there. … See that bit in the blurb about “girl power”? Yeah, that’s me. Dick Award-nominated novelist Toh EnJoe, and an array of writers, scholars, and fans in discussing girl power, firepower, professional wrestling, bad movies, the survival chances of Hollywood’s leading teen icons in a battle royale, and so much more! (Table of Contents here.) Join New York Times best-selling author John Skipp, Batman screenwriter Sam Hamm, Philip K. And fifteen years after its initial release, Battle Royale remains a controversial pop culture phenomenon. Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale is an international best seller, the basis of the cult film, and the inspiration for a popular manga.

The Battle Royale Slam Book by Nick Mamatas