Mugen Monday - 31st Edition

You may have come upon the word ‘adaptation’ in your life. And without the foreboding assumption that you are a literature student, the word may have some common sensical meaning to you.

You do understand that a piece of art can be ‘adapted’ into some different medium. So a comic can be turned into a series (The Invincible, The Boys, Marvel Series’, etc), a book turned into a film (John Green The Fault in Our Stars, Dune, etc) or a Manga into Anime, Manhwa into Anime, vice versa and so on and so forth.

However as literature students, one may understand the nuances behind such adaptation. Literary critics are quite, well, critical about what is an adaptation and what is not.

One theory is that the adaptation has to be creatively new enough so that it is not a dot-to-dot copy of the source, and yet faithful to the original enough so that it is still an adaptation and not an inspiration.

Sure, when Manga are turned into anime adaptations, some aspects are inevitably added which were not previously possible, or plausible even.

Attack on Titan Manga was given a magnificent life when Hiroyuki Sawano added his maestro level music genius compositions into the Anime adaptations. Haikyuu found new life when animated with robust animating sequences, flickering back and forth into a horizon of edge-of-your-seat capturing of the human attention.

All these raise one question: what about inspirations?

For example, we do know that Mushoku Tensei Jobless Reincarnation, the classic deemed to be one of the first Isekai light novels ever produced, has some cultural significance. For our context, you may, if you have at all, read The Beginning After The End, realized the stark similarities between the two.

The Beginning After The End apparently shares tremendous familarities with Mushoku Tensei. While the former is a Korean-American endeavor, the latter is Japanese, by all means.

Obviously TBATE came much after the original Mushoku Tensei source. And the author pen-nammed AFAIK has once or twice noted how MT inspired him.

I scroll reddit a lot, and few redditors had to use the term ‘edgy cousin’, and by some means I actually agree that to be the case.

In the off-chance you have not read The Beginning After The End, I heavily impose upon you to do so.

- From the Editor’s Desk

Rhytham Das, Editor-in-Chief, Spiel Anime