The manga world is already ablaze with memes about Kagura Bachi, which recently debuted in Shonen Jump. As our friend Kinky explained over on Doujins, the meme around the series involves hyping it up like its the greatest thing since sliced bread, much like we saw with the Jared Leto movie Morbius last year. But I'm here to tell you that they couldn't be any more different.
For context's sake, cast your minds back to the nineties. Before becoming a subsidiary of Disney, Marvel was struggling financially. They offered the film rights for every one of their characters to Sony, but Sony only went with Spider-Man, who they saw as more iconic than any of the others. Then they gave us the masterpiece that was the Raimi Trilogy. When Marvel created its own film studio, they were inspired to make adaptations of their own characters; Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and thus the MCU was born. By the time Disney bought Marvel, Sony were making use of their Spidey license with the Andrew Garfield movies. Once those were over, Sony eventually learned to cooperate with Disney and Marvel Studios, loaning out the Spidey license so Tom Holland can have his turn in the red and blue spandex.
But the Spider-Man license encompasses much more than just the webhead. In 2018, Sony released Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, an animated adaptation of a comic arc about a multitude of variations on the character, and a live-action movie based on Venom, one of his most famous adversaries, with a distinct lack of Spider-Man. In spite of the colossus that is the MCU, both these movies made Sony a bunch of money, and they started work on sequels to each of them. Venom: Let There Be Carnage followed up on the Natural Born Killers-esque post-credits scene in the first movie, and Across the Spider-Verse dropped fairly recently. Between both of them was Morbius.
In the comics, or any other Marvel adaptation for that matter, Micheal Morbius does not have the same appeal as Venom. Venom is an amorphous alien parasite that eats people alive who's plagued Peter Parker for decades. Morbius is a shitty vampire that gets beat up by Spider-Man now and then. To say nobody asked for that movie is an understatement, but then you throw in one of the most unlikeable leading men in Hollywood, iffy special effects, lazy writing and other odd creative decisions and you get a perfect storm of suckage. The "it's Morbin time" thing came from people who didn't see the movie acting as if it blew them away. And sure, some people got suckered into watching the movie for real because of the meme, and more embarrassingly, Sony thought they could cash in on the meme only for it to flop at the box office twice, but the meme could be boiled down to "bad thing = good."
On the other hand, the "Kagura Bachi glazing" meme began in Japan before its first chapter was even published, back when the only thing anyone kew about it was its general premise and that infamous promo image of the protagonist Chihiro brandishing a katana with a dull look on his face. Certainly not the most exciting image, and the premise of "guy with katana seeks revenge against people that killed his dad" isn't gonna win it any awards for its originality, but by then it hadn't even had the chance to suck yet. Why Japanese weebs thought it would be funny to ironically hype it up at that point is a mystery to me, and then it caught on in the west and people are comparing it to Morbius. But like I said, Morbius was a movie made for nobody, starring a douchebag, that looked like shit, and was trying to ride on the coattails of a movie that was itself riding on the coattails of a much larger property. Kagura Bachi is at least an original work, if not the most innovative one.
Now that the first chapter is out and people have started to form their own opinions on it, hopefully the meme will subside and it'll start to find its own identity and community. Who knows, maybe it really will go down in history for the right reasons. But for now it at least deserves a chance to find its feet.
Do you guys agree? What do you think of Kagura Bachi so far? Let us know below!
