APADFTMOM Day 10: Kakegurui, and Making Contests Matter

Professional wrestling is really cool and absolutely worth your time to follow if you’re interested in the inner working of the writing process. At first glance it seems that pro wrestling is just a bunch of people pretending to hurt each other, but there’s a complicated psychological aspect behind that which starts way before the match. Pro wrestling is all about convincing the audience that everything matters, and I mean everything: The wrestlers need to look like they’re beating each other up, the story needs to be something that people will care about, and the fallout needs to have an impact that justifies the buildup and execution. Today we’re taking a look at the second part of that process and what better series to illustrate that than Kakegurui?






Kakegurui by Homura Kawamoto is a manga series that focuses on gambling. The story is told from the perspective of Ryota Suzui but follows the exploits of Yumeko Jabami, a recent transfer to an elite private academy that serves as the setting for the series. Everything within the academy revolves around gambling, which has divided the students into two social classes: The skilled gamblers who live comfortably, and the losers who are demoted to the status of housepets and are treated as such by their former peers. Above all of the students sit the student council, the president of which put this gambling system in place for her own personal yet simple reasons.




Ryota is an inconsequential existence almost constantly through the story. Calling him the main character would be a stretch. While he is the character who the story is told through, Ryota is more of a stand-in for the reader than a protagonist. Ryota exists to give the more knowledgeable characters a reason to explain the rules of games, give background on other characters, and tell the audience why things are important. In some series the no-nothing main character starts that way in order to build them up over time, but in Kakegurui the main character is Yumeko and she requires very little of that development.




Yumeko is an accomplished gambler who starts the series as a contender who can play with the best. Very little is known about Yumeko’s background, but she does have two key pieces of lore: She is incredibly rich, and she has a passion for gambling that surpasses simple passion. To say that Yumeko’s enjoyment of gambling toes the line between enjoyment and lustful desire is an understatement. Yumeko is firmly planted on the side of lustful desire and looks at gambling as the ultimate pleasure. She finds immeasurable thrills in both the psychological aspect behind a game and the raw luck involved.




Despite the depth of her love for gambling, Yumeko’s mind has transcended the idea of wins and losses. She does attempt to win every game and tries her hardest in that regard, but the idea of losing is not entirely unappealing either. Yumeko loves the chance aspect of a good gamble much more than the idea of winning. This can be seen as an acceptance of fate regardless of what fate may be. Well before the game has even started, Yumeko has prepared equally to enjoy her victory or suffer her defeat. Occasionally it could be said that Yumeko would rather lose than win just so she could suffer the punishment, but even in those situations she still gives the game her best with the idea that luck will sort it all out in the end.




Kakegurui introduces a variety of punishments for losing games throughout the series but they all fall into one of three categories: Monetary, status, or physical. Monetary punishments and status punishments and pretty tightly entwined as accumulating enough monetary debt will result in being demoted to a housepet or even being forced into one of the student council’s “life plans” where every detail of one’s life is meticulously planned out in a way to strip their freedom and individuality forever. Physical punishments are much simpler and are exactly as the name implies with the specific punishments consisting of shooting people or having fingers chopped off.




The addition of a status-based punishment helps give Kakegurui a special flair to call its own. Monetary and physical punishments are both standard when it comes to high-risk gambling, but a special set of punishments based around lowering the loser’s social ranking and stripping them of their freedom makes use of the setting while establishing the priorities of the characters. Money is a non-issue to the majority of students at a prestigious private school unless the sums get to be absurdly high and very few characters are dumb enough to engage in bets where they can be harmed, so the option of a stake that holds enough weight to humble most characters is a necessary inclusion. Status-related bets strip the loser of their humanity and the majority of the cast has too much pride to allow themselves to fall that far.




After establishing its high stakes as being meaningful to its characters, Kakegurui continues by following through with its promises. These stakes play out as intended in the vast majority of circumstances with only a couple of instances of needing to be tweaked in order for the plot to be continue. This is more of a product of the promises being too large to deliver on rather than the story weaseling its way out of a simple outcome. To its credit, Kakegurui does go out of its way to showcase the absurdity of the idea that these situations would ever play out as expected. Each punishment that is not delivered on is included to highlight how the danger of gambling within the series can push into pure stupidity, and the fallout from those punishments successfully happening would divert the plot practically into feeling like a different series.




Kakegurui does not shy away from the idea of cheating in gambling. Many games are rigged in some form or another, and Yumeko is usually quick to spot these schemes and occasionally even attempts to use them to her own advantage. Yumeko’s personal stance on cheating is a bit muddled. On the one hand she is generally fine with playing rigged games due to her observational skills allowing her to pick up on any shady business going on, but on the other hand she has a hardline stance against quitters. She views people who quit games as being weak, but quitting can be seen as a form of cheating in itself. When one quits a game, they essentially tilt that game’s odds in favor of the other player or players. Intentionally quitting to trigger that unbalance is a known cheating tactic throughout any competitive environment, but casually quitting with no ulterior motivation yields the same results.




From a writing perspective, the relationship between cheating and how impactful the stakes are is very close. The case can be made that cheating helps the protagonist in the long run by giving them another obstacle to overcome and helping them to shine brighter when the conflict is resolved. On the reverse side, there is much less shame in having the protagonist lose a fixed game than having them lose a fair game. Losing a fair game helps illustrate the character as being weak and unready, while losing a fixed game means the character lost to the situation and not their opponent. Each type of loss is a situational tool, of course, and as a general rule of thumb it is a bad idea to have a character lose too much in general because then the audience just views them as a loser.




As I said at the beginning, pro wrestling is a great tool to use when it comes to understanding how to keep an audience invested. New Japan Pro Wrestling does this very well with common sense storylines that are simple enough to follow along on the surface but also include layers upon layers of details for those who pay enough attention. For our series of the day, Kakegurui does indeed have a western release under the name Kakegurui - Compulsive Gambler. The art alone is worth picking up a volume, so give it a shot and let me know what you think.