Alice in Borderland and Balancing Death with Hope
When I first read Aso Haro’s Alice in Borderland, I absolutely loved it, but I was also way too young to really get it. This was back in my early high school days, when mangafox was green and had forum discussions at the top of each info page. I’d gotten heavily into psychological manga, and browsed every listing under the genre. I’d choose them purely by title, then description, trying to find something I’d like (this was also how I found One Outs, a topic for a later day).
Like any edgy adolescent, I was looking for something dark, something that showcased the cruelty of humans. But Alice in Borderland surprised me by not doing that, at least, not entirely. Alice in Borderland’s core message is hope, about healing and learning how to find joy in the world around us.
I recently reread Alice in Borderland a few months ago, around the time the trailer for the live action Netflix adaptation. It was also around the time I found myself at a low point in my life, one that was mentally crushing but also gave me a newfound understanding of the manga.
I’m wary of the Netflix series. I’m already inherently biased against Netflix adaptations, and I already have worries based on the articles I’ve read about the trailer.
But this article’s not about the Netflix adaptation.
This article is about why I like Alice in Borderland, and why I think it’s a great story.
(Spoiler warning for Alice in Borderland and bits of As the Gods Will.)
What is Alice in Borderland?
Alice in Borderland (今際の国のアリス; Imawa no Kuni no Arisu) is a manga written by Asou Haro. It ran from 2010 to 2016, finishing with a total of 65 chapters and 18 volumes. Asou later wrote a spin-off series Alice on Border Road and, most recently, a sequel series Alice in Borderland Retry (a nice surprise, considering he intended to retire from drawing). There’s also an OVA, released in 2014 with only 3 episodes.
The story focuses on Arisu Ryōhei, a high schooler who wishes to go to a faraway country to avoid thinking about his future. While hanging out with his friends Chouta and Karube, the trio sees a flash of fireworks, and find themselves alone in a dusty, overgrown Japan.
Though it feels like a reprieve from their average, unsatisfying life, they soon realize that it’s anything but. They have arrived at Borderland, a strange world where those who enter must participate in deadly games in order to live. With a newfound determination, Arisu struggles to survive Borderland and return home, enduring pain and loss along the way.
Games (But Deadly)
Games, in general, are common in manga. Kakegurui’s popularity skyrocketed in recent years, Yu-Gi-Oh!’s still somehow running, and I’m not quite sure how Chihayafuru got so big. Within that category are death games, which are basically the same as the aforementioned titles but with the risk of death more overt (and present). They aren’t new in manga, nor are they particularly unique. People who aren’t into Japanese media probably know Battle Royale, and those who are probably also know titles like Danganronpa, As the Gods Will, and Doubt. They’re very similar to the Saw franchise.
I like the games in Alice in Borderland, for much of the same reason I like (most) of the games from As the Gods Will. They’re interesting and unique, and deceptively, devastatingly simple.
Each game is designed and supervised by dealers (people who’ve also been transported to Borderland, but who must kill players through games to keep living). They’re also based on a playing card, with the number representing the difficulty (the higher the harder the game) and the suit the category. Spades represent physical-based games, testing player strength and endurance. Diamonds are intelligence-based games, focusing on mental calculation, rationality, and logic. Clubs are interpersonal, a balance between Spades and Diamonds but also requiring cooperation between the players to succeed. Last but not least are hearts, the most terrifying of all. These are psychological games, meant to trap the players into corners and manipulate them accordingly.
Of course, none of the games are simple. The Three of Clubs, Arisu’s first game played with his friends and a stranger named Shibuki Saori, is basically a quiz game: draw a fortune and answer the question that’s written. Wrong answers, however, result in flaming arrows being shot at the group, with the number of arrows being the difference between the given answer and the correct one. In the first question, Chouta incorrectly solves a math problem, declaring 18 rather than the correct 15. In the second question, Shibuki says that 1 liter of milk requires 30 liters of a cow’s blood. The correct number is 450.
If that seems extreme for a level 3 game, it only goes to show the intensity of Borderland. The 3 of Clubs is the lowest level game we see in the series, and by far the most forgiving. It’s the only game in the whole series where everyone lives.
The games are brutal, and frequently give the players a disadvantage, but there is always a chance to win. Everything the game gives the players is all the information they need to know how to win, if they can figure out how exactly to use it.
Of course, that’s harder than it sounds. That the players always have a chance to win, no matter how small, is perhaps the hardest part of the games. The most direct path to clearing the game typically involves going against the other players, and whatever hints provided take time to understand. Even then, the sheer terror and stress of death affects the characters’ behavior and how they think, and understandably so. Panic and desperation can make fools of us all.
Take the Four of Clubs game, Runaway. It’s set in a road tunnel, and to clear it, the players must endure the four trials and reach the goal. The game provides timers until the trials start, and quickly, the players race forward to reach the goal.
But one of the players gets injured at the very beginning of the game, and the weak attempt at working together is quickly abandoned when the players find a graffiti-covered bus. Although the engine can start, the bus doesn’t move, and all but one of the players decide to leave the injured man there and continue onwards.
The trials are incredibly deadly. After ten minutes, a cheetah is released to chase after the players; after 20, a flood of alligators swarm the tunnel. After 30 minutes, there’s a snowstorm, and once 50 minutes pass, a huge explosion makes its way down the tunnel. Only one person, Yamane Kaito, manages to live past all of them, through sheer force of will. We’re shown why he refuses to die: he’s determined to make it back to the side of the woman he loves. A woman who asked him to never change, for the simple fact that he didn’t abandon her. To make it back to her, Yamane Kaito forces himself all the way through to the end of the tunnel.
What he finds there is a dead end.
It’s a devastating moment, made worse when he realizes he’s been running away from the goal the entire time, and that the bus near the start of the game was not only at the goal but a safe haven from all 4 trials. Had the players stayed together in the bus, all of them would have survived. Instead, only the first two who were left behind live.
Genre-savvy readers could easily predict the direction of the story. It’s a fairly simple trick, one used often in stories with games. But it’s a realistic depiction of how these games corner the players: the terror of death, the deep desire to survive, and the history of other games forcing people to make cruel choices make them do things they’d never consider in better circumstances. It changes them, for better or worse.
It’s a moment that sums up so much of what Alice in Borderland is about. It’s not just a struggle for survival. It’s an exploration of how we define ourselves, how we redefine ourselves.
Characters First
Exploring those questions is the fundamental basis of Alice in Borderland. It’s got some of the best games in the genre (subjectively), but first and foremost it’s a character driven story. Each of the games are more interesting, more emotional thanks to the development Asou puts into the characters. They’re engaging in deep, personal ways that make it all the more emotional to watch them go through the games.
Take Usagi Yuzuha, a tenant of the Borderlands who has and in turn becomes Arisu’s support. Her specialty, Spades, comes from a lifetime of climbing mountains with her father, her only refuge from a world that rejected her. She’s been an outlier her entire life, all her feelings thrown away by the majority as part of the minority.
Or take Kuina Hikari. She’s introduced as a stores clerk, intent on returning home to her sick mother. But she was born the heir of a karate dojo, and left when she couldn’t be the son her abusive father wanted her to be.
Or take Doudou Hayato. He’s a regular, if slightly lethargic, middle schooler (at 15 years old, that’s the American equivalent to a high school freshman or sophomore), with all the teenage problems that come with: a lack of direction in life and love-friendship problems, a hospitalized mother and an absent father.
With all the characters in Alice in Borderland, every reader can find someone they identify with, and they’re all authentic such that we can at least relate to bits and pieces of other characters. Each character in the series has been hurt somehow, has gone through pain and loss, just like I have, like everyone in the world has. We see ourselves in these characters, in their lack of faith in the world, in the people around them.
It’s that connection that makes watching these characters struggle and overcome and grow so satisfying. It’s as if these characters are looking at us and teaching us lessons. To live, we need to strengthen ourselves, to change, to support and in turn be supported by others. We see characters grow past being scared, grow past insecurity and despair to move forward, no matter what the future holds.
Asou brilliantly ties the games into that development, too. Most of the characters’ specialities are tied into their backstory, and it’s through how they use them in the games that pushes their character development forward.
For instance, Kuina’s specialty, Spades, is unlocked when she’s attacked during the Ten of Hearts game, Witch Hunt. It’s a game of mistrust, where a so-called witch has infiltrated the players and must be found to clear the game. Last Boss, a particularly violent player who was a recluse before coming to Borderland, refuses to wait for clues that would help find the witch, and instead chooses to kill the other players until the witch is found. It’s during their fight that Kuina realizes how similar they are: they both hate their past, and that disgusts Kuina. She refuses to be the same as him, and so Kuina finds her determination to win, confronting her past in order to use her karate training to fight back. It’s a resolve that carries her through the rest of the games.
I could go on, listing characters and all their stories and how the games break through their anxieties and fears to become stronger. And that’s not an exaggeration, either; Alice in Borderland focuses primarily on Arisu (as the titular Alice), but several characters star in side stories to show their perspective of Borderland. In one memorable game, the Jack of Hearts, none of the characters have a relationship with Arisu or anyone else we’ve met in the story, but they are multifaceted and intriguing on their own anyway.
It’s thanks to those side stories that Alice in Borderland gets to explore so many characters. In other manga, they might feel like filler, unnecessary diversions from the main plot, but here, Asou uses them to explore the world of Borderland and the myriad of people who come through it. It’s not just people who’ve come here unwillingly and want to leave, it’s also people who’ve arrived here and want to stay, who have stayed, and why. All these different people have made their own decisions, and they get the space in the story for us to understand why.
The dealers don’t get a lot of focus. In fact, they’re not revealed until the Ten of Hearts, and they’re quickly killed afterwards as the ‘losing’ side. But what little we do see of them is entirely in line with Borderland. All the characters, to survive, have to make hard, cruel things in order to survive. To live, the dealers must kill the players through the games they oversee.
Being a dealer has several practical advantages. They don’t need to go through the games, and they get to stay in a nice building with food and magazines. They don’t need to worry so much about surviving, so long as players die. But psychologically, it’s just as devastating. We see glimpses of dealers who learn to enjoy the deaths they create, but our biggest insight into them are Inoue Momoka and Kujou Asahi, the two dealers who oversee Witch Hunt.
They’re normal high school girls, and not at all equipped to deal with the vast amount of death that’s normal in Borderland. Nor are they prepared to be the cause of it. It wears down on the two, watching the other dealers’ humanity dissolve as death becomes more and more meaningless to them. It’s too much for Momoka, who volunteers to be the witch and therefore must kill herself at the start of the game. It’s not any easier to be a dealer than a player.
The completion of the Witch Hunt is not only the end of the first stage of the Borderland games, it’s also the death of all the dealers. It’s another solemn moment, calling back to when we first find out that players die when their visas expire. In a beam of bright light, dozens more people die.
But it’s not the end of the other side. The second stage of the games involves residents of Borderlands, former players who chose to stay at their end of their player, a choice directly opposite to all of the main characters. These people are represented by a face card, and Asou doesn’t neglect to show their side of the story too.
It’s an ingenious choice: given all the cruelty, all the brutality and death, why stay? What motivates someone to stay in Borderland?
As it turns out, these people have also gone through loss and pain in their previous life, but where other characters found a renewed desire to live, a purpose to life, they found significance in Borderland.
The 4 such characters the manga spotlights get their own side story, showcasing their respective games. It’s here we get to know them and why they stay in Borderland.
The King of Spades, for example, was a mercenary in his previous life, and has taken upon himself the burden of killing others to save the players from suffering. It’s the same reason he killed his fellow mercenary friend: to save him from the pain of dying. But it’s a choice that haunts him, that he seeks his own salvation for.
In a similar vein, the King of Diamonds was an international lawyer, whose belief in the equality amongst people vanished among the indifference of his colleagues and wealthy clients. To him, it doesn’t matter where he is, so he stays in Borderland, searching desperately for what he’s lost.
They’re dark, sobering reasons to stay in Borderland, but no less compelling. The games expose the depths of the human spirit. If an answer was to be found, surely it would be here in Borderland, where death is common and kindness discouraged.
That’s the side of the dealers, at least. There’s less savory reasons to stay in Borderland too: to enjoy the violence.
It’s this idea that pushes the completion of the Jack of Hearts game, Solitary Confinement. 20 people are confined in a building, and hidden among them is the game’s supervisor, the Jack of Hearts themself. Each of them must wear a collar, the back of which shows a suit. At certain intervals, the players go into solitary cells and declare the symbol on their neck. Get it wrong, and they die instantly. The victory condition is to kill the Jack.
Like all other Hearts games, it’s set up to incite doubt and chaos amongst the players. People quickly start manipulating others, and the number of players slowly dwindle down.
Partnership clears the game, but it’s an awful, twisted interpretation of it. The two survivors, Banda Sunato and Yaba Ouki, are honestly terrible people. Yaba was an institutional investor, with fame and wealth and a god complex. Banda’s a serial killer and rapist, sentenced to death row before coming to Borderland. It’s unsurprising that they find Borderland wonderful: to Yaba, it’s a place where he can destroy the weak and rule over the strong. To Banda, it’s a beautiful world where fear and corruption, despair and chaos mingle together, where murderers are common and blood flows everywhere. They can be partners because of that equality: the ideal of becoming Borderland citizens.
It’s a viewpoint we don’t see until the Jack of Hearts game, and it’s no coincidence that all of the characters are new. Had Arisu or his friends been involved, it wouldn’t have ended so decisively. But it fits in with the story all the same: just as some people find strength within themselves to survive the games, others revel in their sadism. It’s a loathsome feature of Borderland, but one that demonstrates the dimensionality of humans. Not everyone’s likable. Not everyone’s moral. But that just makes the people who are all that more poignant.
Enduring Hope
A lot of what I’ve discussed so far isn’t unique to Alice in Borderland. It’s common in these types of stories to have games meant to corner the main characters psychologically, to get readers attached to the characters through their struggles. In fact, just a year after Alice in Borderland began, As the Gods Will released its first chapter.
Just from the first chapter, it’s obvious that the two have a lot in common. The first chapter (of part 1, though part 2’s also similar) shows our disinterested protagonist, who’s forced into absurd games and who must win them or die (or die trying). There’s a wide array of side characters, several of whom we get to know in depth, and who we see grow as a result of going through the games. We even have the supervisors of the games, who know about what’s going on and are crafting the games as they see fit.
The two manga seemed to get even more similar as I was writing this article. But at their core, the two are strikingly different. Whereas As the Gods Will ends with grief and mourning, Alice in Borderland is hope. Firm, enduring, persistent hope.
And actually, Alice in Borderland stands out from the genre for that very reason. It’s easy, for dark and serious manga, to end depressingly, with everyone dead or the games continuing or the people behind the games getting away with everything. Tragedy is, after all, one of the oldest genres.
Inherently, there’s nothing wrong with sad or dark endings. Life isn’t always happy, doesn’t always end well, and there’s something cathartic about stories that imitate that. That’s what Shakespeare tragedies were about; that’s why myths like Orpheus and Eurydice endure.
But at the same time, that type of story can be suffocating. Manga is entertainment, but also a form of escapism for us to relax from life’s hardships. We don’t always want to be reminded of such topics when we don’t need to.
Aside from that, continuously hurting characters becomes boring and deeply unsatisfying. It’s all too simple to give a character a tragic backstory, show their determination to win and live, then crush it within a few chapters, sometimes even a few pages. As the Gods Will did this often, to a point it became overplayed and almost exploitative. It’s not pleasant to feel as though the authors were preying on our attachment to the characters.
So while the ending of As the Gods Will might make sense from a character perspective, from a narrative one it’s a little unsatisfying. There’s no exit to the suffering, no light at the end of the tunnel. Everything just repeats, with a new overseer who knows first hand all the pain the characters went through, but who doesn’t care.
Alice in Borderland isn’t overwhelmingly bleak like that. The characters suffer, lose friends and hope repeatedly, but they still resolve to keep their ideals, to move forward and live, not by means of death, but of protection and trust. It’s a perseverance that’s incredibly admirable, and one that’s rewarded in the end.
One of the clearest showings of this is in the King of Spades game. The titular king, Shiirabi Isao, relentlessly hunts down the players to save them from the pain, and from a certain perspective, it’s not an outrageous thought. Staying in Borderland has brought pain to everyone, several times over, and at this point Arisu himself, our main character, has sworn off playing any more games so that he couldn’t hurt any more people.
But even in that environment, a family was made. Doudou (who I mentioned earlier), Heiya Akane, and Agni Morizono happen to meet as Shiirabi hunts down the players. It’s by chance that the King of Spades misses a shot at Doudou, and chance again that Doudou runs into Agni. Desperate to atone for his action earlier in the manga, Agni takes it upon himself to confront Shiirabi alone, giving Doudou a chance to escape. Ashamed, he runs right into one of Heiya’s traps, who brings him to safety. It’s a fateful encounter that brings the three together, and against all odds they form a powerful bond, to the point Doudou likens them to a family. In normal circumstances, they might not have bonded so well, or even met. But they share the trauma of the Borderland games, and beyond that each of them had fractured families: the common pain of being unloved.
And it’s that bond that saves all of them. When Agni leaves to fulfill the duties of a father and kill the King of Spades, Doudou finally discovers his reason to fight: to not let Agni or Heiya die. Heiya, too, arrives just in time to help. Each of them refuses to let the other two die, will face danger just to protect them. That determination gives them the strength to defeat Shiirabi. Agni even gives him peace, having realized that the two share the regret of killing a friend. The entire resolution to the game is a mirror to Shiirabi’s past: where he sought to protect others by giving them early death, Doudou, Agni, and Heiya protect each other by giving life.
It’s a theme reinforced throughout Alice in Borderland: to protect rather than destroy, to be kind to others no matter what. Again and again, characters are forced to near impossible circumstances and pressured to fight against each other, and still they try best to stay true to themselves, their ideals, and their reason for living.
It’s repeated again in the King of Diamonds game. It’s a contest of foresight and rationality: each player chooses a number between 0 and 100, and the player who chose the number closest to 80% of the average wins the round. Everyone else loses one point. Once 10 points are lost, that player dies. The goal is to be the last person remaining.
Towards the end of the game, only Kuzuryuu Keiichi, jaded attorney and current King of Diamonds, and Chishiya Shuntarou, apathetic medical student, are left. Kuzuryuu cared about life so much that he found himself unable to deal with the corruption of his peers, the disregard his colleagues had for the people they ruined in return for wealth. On the other hand, Chishiya has never cared about life, and he’s keenly aware of that. They’re two sides of a coin, and Chishiya doesn’t hesitate to use that to his advantage. With Chishiya one round to death, he puts his life in Kuzuryuu’s hands.
The King of Diamonds is immediately thrown off as he’s confronted with the question that’s plagued him for years: what is the value of a life? Or more precisely, does Chishiya’s life have value?
It’s a devastating question, one that paralyzes Kuzuryuu until both of them have -9 points. But as the King thinks furiously about what he should do, what he should decide, he remembers the people he’s met through Borderlands, people who were determined to help others, to believe that life was precious, even if it cost them their own. We see flashbacks of Momoka, just before the Ten of Hearts game starts, of the other survivor in the Four of Clubs game, of the organizer of the beach haven. People who were determined to uphold their ideals, even if they died for it.
In the end, he decides that he can’t decide the worth of a life. He loses the game and dies, but in return he finally decided how he wanted to live his life. Chishiya lives, but it feels like a loss.
The encounter affects Chishiya immensely, envious as he is of Kuzuryuu. It’s in this state that he meets Arisu again, and in that state that he uncharacteristically takes a gunshot for Usagi. Before, he was a perfect example of an empty human, but now, he doesn’t mind the idea of changing and living to see the future ahead.
It’s this, and a push from Usagi, that Arisu needs to fight once more, to see things through to the end. His resolve brings us to the resolution of the manga, the endgame that’s been building since the very first chapter.
The endgame is the Queen of Hearts, the representative of which is the lovely Kano Mira. It’s perhaps the simplest game of the entire series, too. It’s creatively named “Croquet,” and the clear condition is to play 3 sets of croquet without any player retiring from the game.
But it’s a Hearts game, and so it’s nowhere near as straightforward as that. Mira was a psychiatrist in her previous life, and has, throughout the story, been interested mainly in having fun. She frequently has hearts in her speech bubbles, and stayed in Borderland just because she found observing the people in the games interesting. She’s whimsical and incredibly manipulative.
She thoroughly enjoys playing croquet, and it’s that carefree attitude that gets to Arisu, who’s looking for an answer to Borderland. She outright plays with him over tea, teasing Arisu over what Borderland really is only to say moments later it was all a lie. She even reveals that she was the one who engineered the game that killed his friends. And just when Arisu thinks he’s finally gotten her to speak truthfully about Borderland, he succumbs to the drug Mira put in his cup.
It’s psychological manipulation at its worst: Mira understood Arisu’s mentality and knew that rather than the answer to Borderland, Arisu was looking for his life purpose. It’s the same thing Arisu, in the very first chapter, was running from. Knowing that, it was simple enough to trap him back into that darkness, to suppress any and all survival instincts Borderland had laid bare.
But Arisu isn’t alone. Usagi is there with him, and it’s her voice that brings Arisu back. She believes in him, so, so much, that she risks death to bring him back. To Mira’s, and our, shock, Usagi cuts her wrist and awaits Arisu to come back.
That image, Usagi dying, brings Arisu to a revelation: it doesn’t matter what his reason to live should be, what purpose his life has, what the answer is. What matters is what he wants to do right now. And what he wants, is to live with Usagi. To hold her hand, laugh together. To protect her.
It’s one of several possible answers, but one that is fitting to the manga. All of the games have been absurd, wild beyond imagination, and so many people have died. And yet, people also live. There doesn’t need to be a grand meaning to life, so long as we live it to the fullest. As Mira says, life is a game. So we should enjoy it.
So for all of the suffering that the characters went through, they find their happy end. The completion of the Queen of Hearts means that all 52 games have been cleared, and every surviving player is given the choice to become a citizen of Borderland. Even though they don’t know what lies ahead, they want to return home, and so the characters staunchly refuse permanent citizenship. And home they return.
They wake up in Japan, all memories of Borderland forgotten. It’s that kind of cliche ending, where everything feels like a dream. But all of it is still imprinted on the characters, and we see them happy at the end, some even starting their bonds anew.
That’s why, though I’m not generally a fan of the “it was all a dream” trope, Alice in Borderland doesn’t bother me. It’s suggested that Borderland is, quite literally, the border between lands, of life and death, and that coming back was a miracle of sorts. Whatever it was, or wasn’t, it doesn’t change the fact that the way the characters changed sticks around. Arisu grieves his friends’ deaths after he’s told about them, but he knows that he’ll be able to move on with time. Doudou reunites with Heiya, and we see them laughing together at the end. Chishiya lives. Arisu even meets Usagi again. Two years later, they’re dating, and Arisu’s on his way to study clinical psychology. Borderland wasn’t for nothing.
Some would call this pretentious. Ten years ago, I might have too. But I’ve grown, went through hardships, and now have constant dread and anxiety about my future. I don’t want to watch characters get hurt with no escape anymore; I want to see them get a happy ending. It’s not healthy to indulge in darkness, to always believe in the worst. Life isn’t just darkness and sadness and despair. Even if it’s something as simple as a piece of chocolate, there’s good things in life. It’s okay to take our time to find them, but we mustn’t forget that they exist.
Conclusion
On December 10th, 2020, Netflix will release a live action series based on Alice in Borderland. I’ve seen the trailers, and I’ve read articles about the trailers. It looks pretty good, but I don’t really have high hopes for it. For one, I’m not a big fan of live action adaptations. There are good ones out there, and the series is directed by Sato Shinsuke, who also directed the 2018 adaptation of Bleach and the 2019 adaptation of Kingdom. But for something as violent as Alice in Borderland, it helps to have the distance of drawings when it comes to the gore. It’s easier to digest the violence when it’s not an actual body.
For another thing, I’m concerned about the direction of the series. Per the U.S. site’s official synopsis, “An aimless gamer and his two friends find themselves in a parallel Tokyo, where they’re forced to compete in a series of sadistic games to survive.”
Arisu can certainly be described as aimless, but the way he’s depicted in the trailers puts him more like a bored troublemaker. Making him a “gamer” also has certain implications, which I’m not going to get into here. Arisu isn’t some delinquent bored of his current life; he’s an average person struggling to figure out his future. Boredom is the product of his problems, not the cause of it. Alice in Borderland isn’t about appreciating what’s in our lives now; it’s about learning to make peace with our pasts and strive towards the future.
Still, it’s admittedly unfair of me to judge it like that. Adaptations, by nature, mean changes to the source material, and trailers are meant to pull interest. They don’t show what the series will actually be like, just the flashier parts. There’s lots in it that’s accurate to the series: that the first game Arisu goes through is the 3 of Clubs, the apartment building where the Five of Spades is set, and the beach all come from the manga. Granted, there’s other things in it that make me worried for the series, such as how the 3 of Clubs seems to be changed from paper fortunes to smartphones and that Arisu and Usagi seem to be the ones in the 4 of Clubs game, and I’ll miss the fireworks and bizarre transition into Borderland, but there’s a lot to be excited for. Even more so if the Netflix series pushes for an official English translation, and they casted an actual trans woman as Kuina (who’s already gotten the spotlight in the trailers for her swimsuit fight against Last Boss).
Netflix also went with a series, rather than a movie, which means there’s more time to do what the manga did: explore characters other than Arisu. That was in no small part why Borderland was so vivid, because we got a nuanced view of it through several different characters. In turn, we got to explore the theme of the manga in multiple different ways. It’s harder to do that in a single movie.
I haven’t decided yet if I’ll watch the series. I suspect I will at some point. In the meantime, I’ve been reading Asou’s sequel, Alice in Borderland Retry. It features Arisu, now 26 and married to Usagi with a child on the way, as he makes his way through Borderland once more. At the time of writing only a few chapters are out, and it’s quite good, starting off strong with the Nine of Hearts. I’m curious to see where Asou goes with it, if apprehensive. Sequels are hit or miss, and I’d really like this one to be a hit.
Regardless, Alice in Borderland by itself is an incredible manga, and I hope it gets more attention. What I’ve written here only covers so much. It’s a deeply touching story about loss and recovery, of hope and connection. Of understanding. And we all need that in our lives.
