Hello everyone! For this lesson, we are gonna get to the gore category with Deadman Wonderland. So the gore category is normally a story with a lot of blood scenes that come from really violent fights, murders, tortures, and things of that sort. Normally this type of story is thrillers or horror stories or mystery stories with action into it. So besides this, Deadman Wonderland is also a dystopia and a post-apocalyptic type of setting which adds certain mystery and really cool sceneries to the story as well.
So our story starts with an Earthquake somewhere in Japan that destroys a Big part of that City and then, ten years later, we have one of the survivors from that earthquake Ganta Igarashi who is our protagonist just with a normal life, going to high-school and… All of a sudden a person in red armor appears by the window and kills all his classmates except him. So after this, he is incriminated for committing the crime and sent to the prison that is called "Deadman Wonderland."
So this prison is kind of Special. One of the things and the one everybody knows is that is a prison and an amusement park at the same time. So the Prisoners run the amusement Park and participate in games. Now let's get to the part that is not known by the general public.
First Prisoners here get a collar that injects poison into them and if they don't take the antidote, they die in three days. They can obtain the antidote by earning points for participating in these games. But these games are deathly. Prisoners can get killed during the games.
So what happens to our protagonist? Ganta arrives at this prison only to be chased by a mysterious girl called Shiro who seems to know him but our protagonist doesn't seem to know her at all. Apart from that, he develops the ability to control his blood becoming what is called a "Deadman" which leads him to participate in special fights against other Deadman like him and where everyone tries to win no matter what, since losing means also losing parts of yourself.
So he is gonna try to survive as much as he can, try to discover who the red man is that killed his friends, and discover all the mysteries involving this prison and himself.
Now this story has an anime but even though is great and I have to say I loved the opening and its animation style and the song that is One Reason by DWB and Fade in a dark rock style, but the anime was too short for this story in the sense that nothing is solved at all and it got canceled because they decided to take out some characters from the original story and later on realized that without those characters they could not continue. Actually, an anime in most cases serves the purpose of just introducing the story of the manga unless it is so popular that the studio continues its production. So this anime is a great introduction to this wonderful story. I thought it was really good and that led me to read the manga and read the story which is amazing, is actually one of my favorite manga. Like it has so many things happening and it has great suspense, storyline, and action.
On the other hand, the characters are great, Ganta is basically like us "The viewers" in the sense that he knows nothing of what is happening to him and is just pushed to discover everything around him as the story progresses. And Shiro, our female protagonist, is this girl that follows him around in prison and she is also an excellent character. Super sweet and cute and is the one that actually is going to give a bright side to this story and also one of the characters that give more drama and mystery to it as well.
This is also a story where our secondary characters are amazing and have super important roles. Because of this, I think it is easy to connect with them actually one of my favorite characters is in this bunch of characters hahaha. And all of our characters have great character design and development. Also, the villains of the story are very well developed, full of surprises and they are the ones that make this story super dark and in the horror stuff.
And so, this story was created by Jinsei Kataoka and the anime was produced by Manglobe. The story has a good art style with nice proportions for our characters, well-developed fights, and cool sceneries with a post-apocalyptic feeling into them. It is a well-written story from beginning to end since everything is explained and solved?
Ok. So this was everything for this lesson, I hope you enjoyed it a lot and look forward to the next one. Thank you for listening and talk to you later.
