Seriously, guys — what is up with our weirdo ninja fetish in this country? You know what ninjas actually were? Feudal-era Japanese spies. That’s it. They weren’t super-duper magical repositories of ancient wisdom and power. Here, this is what you sound like when you write dumb action cartoons about mystical ninjas or whatever. Take note.
Produced by Trigger, the animation studio responsible for Little Witch Academia and Kill La Kill, Ninja Slayer is based on a series of light novels by Honda Yu and Sugi Leika, who claim to have “translated” the books from the work of two American authors (named Bradley Bond and Philip “Ninj@” Morzez) they met at San Diego Comic Con in 1997. The newly launched Tokyo Otaku Mode website features the above dubbed trailer, as well as a passage from the English version of the first novel, Machine of Vengance– which, yes, is an English translation of a Japanese book that’s pretending to be a Japanese translation of an English book. It’s also a pitch-perfect parody of American Internet weeabooism, right down to the third-person present tense:
A man peers down lost in thought. Blood drips from both his arms. Most likely bathed in the blood of the five slain men surrounding him. One thing is evident: all five men are dead. Rain polluted by heavy metal washes the murky blood away clean.
Four corpses. Despite the demolished right half of one of their brains, they all looked like quadruplets with the same hair cut, the same face, all wearing the same dark suit; the telltale sign of yakuza clones. As for the other corpse? A ninja dressed in a ninja costume. Standing between the corpses, the figure of the man peering down is a ninja as well.
The whirring sound of an aircraft propulsion system drew near and suddenly the sky became bright. The red ninja glanced up to reveal decadent neon signs in an entertainment district. Beyond the violent, vivid colored signs that read: おなしやす (Onashiyasu),カボス (Kobosu), 良く犬 (Yoku Inu), and コケシマート(Kokeshi Maat), a blimp traversed the skies above. The ninja glared at the airship’s steel underbelly.
Dear God. Bradley Bond and Philip Ninj@ Morzez might not be real people, but I could swear I read a story just like this on a Geocities website in late 2003. Seriously, I’m having flashbacks of red font on blue backgrounds right now and I do not like it.
There doesn’t seem to be a release date for the show yet, but the Trigger-affiliated Ninja Slayer website says that it will have a showcase at Anime Expo 2014.
(via CrunchyRoll)
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