The Seven Deadly Sins (Review, sort of)

While this will start as a review, there are some insights that I think can directly apply to roleplaying games, in particular with adapting someone else's work (a module, for instance?) for your (gaming) purposes.  One of the reasons I enjoy both anime and manga (in the action/fantasy genres) are often more about the world in which these stories happen than the stories or characters.  That makes them excellent foundations for thinking about designing your own world (or adapting someone else's).

The Seven Deadly Sins is an anime, published by Kodansha, based on a manga currently serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump, one of the premier manga magazines in Japan.  What that boils down to is that the story Seven Deadly Sins is one of the most popular ones in Japan (at least, for this age bracket and set of genres) to the point where Kodansha felt it reasonable to adapt it for the television.

For those who are not habitual consumers of Japanese popular culture, anime and manga have a very strange relationship.  Usually, a mangaka (manga author) will see their work serialized in a weekly or monthly manga periodical, and each periodical has a very specific demographic.  At the back of each periodical is a review sheet whereby readers pick their favorite stories each issue.  If your work fails to garner enough approval ratings, it is dropped for someone else's work.  This creates intense pressure to keep building and mounting tensions within the story - while a couple chapters of your characters at rest, featuring character development or laying the groundwork for a later plot arc might serve your overall narrative and help you tell a better story, it will prove hellish for your ratings and so most authors don't do it.  What that means is that the storytelling in a manga is, usually, broken up into very distinct dramatic arcs with very little page time in between, but in-story time is compressed and expanded at will to heighten the drama (sound familiar?).  In order for something interesting to happen every chapter, a lot of spurious gags and inconsistencies will clog up most manga, especially if it is one that has been running for a while.  Also, because a manga can be cancelled at any time, mangakas have little control over how their story unfolds - if they start with a single epic story arc, they may have the opportunity to finish it the way they would like, they may need to compress it into three chapters (I can provide examples.  It's rough.), or they may need to suddenly find a new one when they finish telling it and must then produce more chapters.

What it also means is that exposition necessary to understand who new characters are or why a conflict was resolved in a specific way (manga and anime both love their Deus ex Machina) is saved until the last possible moment, when it is delivered with a flashback that transports the viewer completely out of the context of the very real, engaging conflict to some other point in the narrative, delivers the crucial information, and then returns to the fight.  Naruto, with one of the most popular manga and anime series' is especially prone to this.  In the manga format, because of the need to keep high ratings publishing after publishing, I can understand this strategy - as a reader, even if I'm less engaged with the flashback, I am invested enough in the outcome of the larger framing conflict to not downvote it until afterwards, at which point a new conflict or form of intrigue has begun that keeps me engaged.

That is not to say that all manga suffers from these problems - several series (I am especially thinking of Fullmetal Alchemist) are able to lay the exposition in small tidbits throughout the work, requiring very awkward, late-stage reveals, and are willing to end their story when it is over, instead of endlessly dragging it out. 

An anime adaptation of a manga (and not all anime are manga adaptations) is a different matter entirely.  Anime are purchased in approximately 12-episode chunks, which comprise a single season on Japanese television (many series opt for a 24-episode 'long season').  Unlike American television shows, where poor ratings can kill a new show before it really begins, the anime is bought and paid for and will show all of its episodes.  One of the complications of an anime adaptation is that it is supposed to tell the same story as the manga, embellishing the comic form with voice acting and animation, but it can't just retell the story the same way as the manga - the anime and manga will have roughly the same audience, and anime watchers are likely to be familiar with how the manga handled things.  Thus, at once the anime must both recreate the key moments from the manga yet also be distinct enough to garner fans who are not familiar with the manga.

Now, this contradictory function combined with the very different format means that anime adaptations vary widely in their faithfulness to the original product - the Fruits Basket anime features a much stronger supernatural element and includes the ancillary characters far more than the anime and the Escaflowne anime, mangas, and films are dissimilar enough that one wouldn't know they are telling the same story except that the titles and character names are the same (mostly), but the Naruto manga and anime are virtually identical, shot-for-shot.

What I think the best anime adaptations do is they use the advantages of the 24-episode format to massage the clunky exposition of their manga forebear and actually craft a story (as opposed to haphazardly slopping one together as mangakas typically do).

This, finally, brings me to my thoughts on Seven Deadly Sins.  I watched the series end-to-end after getting home from work Friday evening.  I finished around 5am.  For me, marathoning episodes like this helps emphasize whatever themes the work features (whether in character gags, writing choices, visual motifs, etc.) and prevents refrigerator logic from setting in and collapsing whatever trumped-up obstacles appear in the story to lengthen the overall conflict.

This was not enough for Seven Deadly Sins.  Normally, when I find an anime that is this poorly constructed (in editing, animation quality, and structure) I give up and find something better to watch.  The reason why I stuck with it is because the story, had it not been hindered by these problems, would have been very good.  The setting is excellent, albeit poorly explicated to the viewer.

It does not serve my purpose to go through the anime and point out where it went astray.  I do want to address a couple very common flaws the writing consistently exposed.

The first, and perhaps most egregious flaw of the series is that the world, as presented, is full of mysteries that are unexplained (good) and rendered, via the storytelling, completely unimportant.  The setting, familiar to most tabletop players, is a mythical Brittania before magic left the world (although geography is not a strong suit of anyone involved in this production), where there are multiple countries (indeterminately placed) whose strength comes from Holy Knights - martially-skilled individuals each with a unique magical power.  There are a number of different races - humans, fairies, demons, giants and goddess-somethings (which we find out later are somehow druids?).  Hundreds of years before, after the last demon invasion, the other races worked together to banish them from the world, which also led to the decline of the fairies and the practical extinction of the goddess-druid-things.  There are secret agendas, forbidden experiments with excavated demon corpses, more traditional magic, curses, and a band of quirky heroes who have been framed with treason and exiled.  In other words, a world very similar to the standard D&D setting with a couple of unique institutions (the various Holy Knight Orders), and plot hooks ready to go.  It is something that can be taken almost directly to your tabletop.

However, the mysteries of the world and of the characters (how did our chief hero gain the secret key no one knows about, who are our female lead's parents and why is she a princess, what happened to the druids/goddess people, why don't we get backstory on more than 1.5 characters, why does this character keep appearing to die and yet no one cares, etc.) are never answered.  What's more, despite their importance to the story, the narrative spends actually zero time discussing or considering any of them (also, for a group called the Seven Deadly Sins, Sin number 7 never appears in the story.  Ever.  The very last episode makes fun of it as the characters all realize that they've been talking about the Seven Deadly Sins the entire series, there have never been seven of them.).

What is perhaps more damning is that despite featuring very few reveals, only one of them is handled well - a well-placed flashback near the first climactic peak at the end of the story reveals a character, about whom we've received very mixed messages the entire time, has been secretly signaling our heroes that they are cursed.  It is one of the few mid-conflict breakaway sequences that I think has been worth it.  The others are delivered less well.  When enemy characters suddenly appear with powers that dwarf our heroes', the source of that power is revealed later in the same episode.  It is an anticlimactic reveal that, because our heroes are unaware of it, doesn't affect the story except to reiterate that the bad guys are, in fact, the bad guys.

In short, summarizing both of these problems together, the writers of this anime do not seem to understand how suspense works.  In my mind, and this is directly applicable to tabletop games, suspense (in a story context, not a dramatic ones), can work by presenting the audience/players with evidence that conflicts with how they understand the world - drawing an example from the anime, how does the pipsqueak one character knocked out with a single hit suddenly reappear and defeat the whole party?  The answer, this character drank demon blood and gained great power with a cost to be paid later, is then discovered, piecemeal as the players investigate.  In other words, the worldview of the players is shaken, creating cognitive dissonance and tension, and it is then resolved as the players learn new information and expand that worldview.

This became a great deal longer than I anticipated, so I'll call it for now.  I think what I'll do next is pull apart the story of Seven Sins and talk about how I might structure it as an anime (keeping the medium the same) and then taking the same story and translating it into a sequence of events happening in a tabletop world (I hesitate to call a linear narrative as a campaign because I run sandbox games.  But the events in this story can play out, and the action or inaction of my players would affect that.).  This is purely hypothetical, since the world presented in Seven Deadly Sins is very different from my world, but I think the exercise will do me some good at long-term structuring (something I definitely need to work on) and may prove useful to people running more standard D&D worlds.