"What do you think of this scheme?": A story about watching "Dead Mount Death Play" at the end of the year
With the conclusion of both "May I Ask for One Final Thing?" and "Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill Season 2," I watched "Dead Mount Death Play" via streaming over the holidays to soothe my loneliness. Since I had already watched it once during its broadcast, this was my second time through, but because many of the details had faded from my memory, I was able to enjoy it again with high resolution. That led me to think about why it hits my personal preferences so hard. I have liked Ryohgo Narita's works since the days of "Baccano!" and "Durarara!!," but there must be some definitive element that makes this series of works resonate so perfectly with my tastes. After organizing my thoughts, I arrived at the following two points. I believe the second point, in particular, may even relate to the future of entertainment.
1: Names and terms that border on puns
Similar to Nisio Isin, Ryohgo Narita's naming sense seems like a prank, but it is actually extremely skillful. His linguistic sense, which attacks the boundaries of typos, misspellings, omissions, and puns—such as "Tan-doku-han" (Birth Poisoner/Solitary Offender) or "Kajin Solitaire" (Phantom Solitaire)—is brilliant. Furthermore, the character designs are packed with gimmicks that evoke not just the name but the visual, engraving even passing characters (who often end up involved in the story in unexpected ways later) into the reader's memory.
The naming, which uses Japanese "rhymes," even feels like the "Angel vs. Devil" stickers from Bikkuriman chocolate. The way mysterious names pop up one after another at a light tempo, backed by a vast amount of knowledge, is like rap music in the form of a novel. This comfortable machine-gun fire of words is sometimes like a typographic novel, and I never get tired of reading it. It might be an element that some people cannot accept, but for me, it is fresh, and reading the atmosphere drifting between the lines becomes a kind of pleasure.
2: Excessive listing of information
Related to the linguistic sense mentioned above, Narita's works are built with an overwhelming amount of information. Despite being called light novels, they have an unusually large number of characters, and it is no exaggeration to say that the introduction of new characters is the driving force of the story. In that technique, I think "Dead Mount Death Play" has reached a form of perfection.
The episodes on the otherworld side, which serve as the prologue to the story, are supplemented as short stories at the end of the volumes, and a vast number of proper nouns, including aliases, are listed there. This "flavor text" often relates deeply to the main story later on, and sometimes even acts as a smokescreen, saying, "That is how it is told, but the truth is..."
The vast number of characters and character explanations do not necessarily match the manga main story. By digging deeper into characters mentioned in fragments, new mysteries and stories emerge. When I thought about what this sense of déjà vu was, I realized it had something in common with Gunpla's MSV and "The Five Star Stories."
In Eiji Otsuka's "Character Maker," techniques for building stories through TRPG character creation are introduced, and "Dead Mount Death Play" is exactly practicing that. While Otsuka's method creates characters through combinations of dice rolls and cards, Ryohgo Narita stands out in how he expands the branches of his imagination starting from character names (or aliases) and incorporates them into the story.
Come to think of it, the direction of the project for "Invincible Steel Man Daitarn 3" was also decided because the name of the protagonist, Banjo Haran, came to mind. If you get stuck in story creation, it might be good to break down the structure like a "sandai-banashi" (three-topic story), or perhaps it might even be interesting to create fragmentary characters using a three-topic story.
"A gal on a luxury cruise ship eating dry ice"
"A heavy and hard toy poodle"
"A philosopher pigeon capable of calculations on par with a quantum computer"
Such combinations of unrelated words could also become an engine for spinning a story.
There seem to be those who dislike flavor text or setting things in stone because they fear it will restrict their ideas, but for me, I believe that setting rules actually creates unique story developments. American comics, known for being absurd, actually have bibles that set strict rules. Based on that, how to deviate from or break those rules is where each writer's skill is shown.
3: In conclusion
What I want to say in the end is that perhaps an era is coming where new stories are born from the "layering of lists of compressed information."
In Japanese cinema of the 60s and 70s, there was a genre called "kayo-eiga" (pop song movies). It was a bold method where if there was a hit song, they would make a movie based on it. They were by no means all masterpieces, but if you think of it as replacing the "topics" of a three-topic story with hit songs, it might not be a bad approach.
The difficulty of "creating one from zero" is often discussed, but I think the act of spitting out fragmentary information itself leads to the act of "creating one from zero." In an era where you can freely choose your publication medium, such as "Narou"-style sites or social media, shouldn't stories born from such lists of information become more mainstream? If they are already mainstream and I just don't know about it, then that's my mistake.