Shitsurakuen

File:Shitsurakuen girls 7155.jpg

Think that group covers all the girl tropes...

Title translation: Paradise Lost.

Try mixing The Handmaid's Tale with Pokémon. Yeah, it’s one of those manga.

Our heroine, Himoto Sora, has just been accepted to the prestigious Utopia Gakuen. She meets one of her childhood friends and talks about her dream of becoming a knight who protects princesses. Upon getting to the highschool she sees two male students, each attended by a female student, engaged in some kind of duel. Upon losing, the defeated student breaks his dagger and the girl with him cries out in pain… and no one seems to care or notice.

This manga blatantly rips off draws inspiration from Utena but with the bride/dueling mechanic extended to the entire student body. The school financers have taken it upon themselves to use sophisticated virtual reality to create an environment where gender (in)equality has been pushed back a few thousand years and then cranked up to eleven. The duels are part of a game called “Exaclan” where the males students are contestants and the female students are weapons to be used, wagered, traded, abused and discarded. The female students have no protections or rights of any kind against the player who currently owns them, and any girl without a master has no protections or rights of any kind, period.

Seeing that the situation is fucked up beyond all possible belief unfair Sora starts about entering Exaclan and trying to start a one girl revolution that quickly turns to a one-girl-and-her-harem revolution.

Tropes used in Shitsurakuen include:

• Absurdly Powerful Student Council: The main antagonists.
• Action Girl: Even without an Empathic Weapon, Sora can fight two guys twice her size. This a good thing as she is outnumbered a few hundred to one.
• Adults Are Useless: We never see any adults. Utopia Gakuen may as well be a co-ed Lord of the Flies.
  • Actually, adults are visible in most of the scenes in the infirmary. Unfortunately, they're all female. Which likely means...
• All Men Are Perverts: This trope is zigzagged. It's heavily implied that several girls are sexually abused by their "owners", and then there's Akane, who is a pretty nice guy who's just terrified of being ostracized/not allowed to graduate. Sumita is also an exception; Reiko states that he never touched her, and he seems to genuinely care about her..
• Aloof Ally: Reiko, briefly. She was not permitted to remain aloof.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: In-universe. Sora sees the good in even Tougyu; he was just trying to protect Hiyo-chan by being an Ax Crazy monster. Let's just say that the fandom isn't as forgiving.
• The Atoner: Shoujou takes this role upon himself by the time the epilogue takes place.
• Attempted Rape: Frequently. And almost always targeted at those girls who try to buck the system.
  • And probably not-so-attempted several times both off-screen and before the story's beginning. Think about it. Or don't, you'll sleep better.
• Badass: Sora.

Sora: Knights even train their internal organs.

• Batman Gambit: After getting Tomoko into his custody, El arranges for her to be released back to Sora. Torture is involved.
  • Repeated with Reiko. El really wants Sora to get the six girls he's signed up for her harem, whether or not they want to be there.
• Beginner's Luck: Justified. X hacked the system to ensure that Sora has an advantage.
• Bi the Way: Sora.
• Black and White Morality: There are stories where even the darkest villain has complex motivations, and even the brightest hero must ask questions about the righteousness of his or her cause. This is not one of those stories. OR IS IT?
  • Grey and Gray Morality: What the series really is.
• Boarding School of Horrors
• Break the Cutie: After Sora wins Tomoko, the boys figure out that Exaclan only protects against physical harm, not threats or emotional abuse. A group of boys isolate Tomoko and proceed to terrorize her in the worst way. Tomoko doesn't handle it too well.
• Broken Bird: Yuki before Sora makes her believe that things can get better.
• Bully Hunter: Sora, a particularly overloaded one.
• Chained Heat: The cover of volume three features Sora and Reiko tied to each other by Reiko's flail weapon.
• Chekhov's Gun: Periodically we see snippets of a fairytale story involving a prince, a princess, and a demon king, with elements that parallel the actual plot. This just seems like a way of comparing the story with fairytales until its revealed that it's an actual in-universe story called "Paradise Story" and that El and X took their names from it and are deliberately causing the actual events of the series to mirror that story.
• Cosmic Chess Game: The whole plot is basically one huge chess game between two super-intelligent individuals (namely, Tsuki and Karin, who are gods within confines of Exaclan) trying to prove their points to each other. Sora is the only loose piece.
• Covert Pervert: Koharu has rather risque "bedtime fantasies" involving Sora...
• Deep Immersion Storytelling: How the Sadistic Choice situation is presented.
• Depraved Homosexual: Mitarai. Subverted, as he tells Tomoko: "Between a guy who you don't know what he's thinking, and an okama who you don't know what he's thinking, which would you prefer?"
• Despair Event Horizon: Lots, which is to be expected in a series where the girls are no more than slaves. Pretty much all of the girls have already crossed it, but the real kicker is when its shown that a number of the boys have crossed it too. Its the reason they follow the system instead of opposing it; they can do about as much about it as the girls, and so play along.
• Determinator: Sora again. She will protect all the girls.
• Dragon with an Agenda: Although he's initially presented as the Big Bad, El is this for the man in charge of Utopia Academy. His plots are unforgivably cruel but he has goals that others aren't privy to.
• Dying Like Animals: Sora quickly finds out that most of the girls are mice, and all of the boys are (forcefully) jackals.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The picture at the top is from the first chapter of the series, showing the (presumed) "harem" of the main character. After three volumes, the last of the characters in the picture finally appears, and not all of them are under Sora's protection or have even met her. One is The Mole (she eventually has a Heel Face Turn). Another is crossdressing to be a member of the all male student council.
• Ears as Hair: Inverted. Tomoko has hair which, according to Sora, looks like ears.
• Earn Your Happy Ending
• Empathic Weapon: Every female student has the ability to generate one, usable only by the male student she's bound to. Whatever happens to the weapon happens to the student.
• Enigmatic Minion: Tsuki. It's hard to tell at first if she's helping or manipulating Sora, but at the very least Tsuki seems to have genuine feelings of friendship (at least) for her.
  • El himself, for that matter. Although he's presented as the Big Bad.
• Expy: Sora is one for Utena Tenjou. Meanwhile, Yangire Shoujou has a strong resemblance to Rolo.
• Even the Girls Want Her: Completely and utterly justified.
• Every Scar Has a Story: Sora got her scar when saving a girl (actually from Tsuki, who went on a Psycho Lesbian Yandere war path) when she was little. She wears it as a badge of honor.
• Eye Scream: Tsuki cuts Karin's eye when he tried to "sway" Sora from being a her knight.
• Faceless Goons: Most male students are drawn with their faces partly obscured, especially their eyes — probably to emphasize their monstrosity and to further dehumanise them. Most of the guys who were drawn with full faces are either complex enough not to be a Complete Monster, have good motivations, or are actually decent people- Akane, who interestingly enough gets some Character Development when he takes off his glasses and reveals his eyes.
• Fairy Tale Motifs: Knights and princesses.
• Finger-Suck Healing: Koharu does this to Sora in chapter eight.
• Foe Yay: Reiko is (or claims to be, at first) quite happy to be attached to the males of the academy, and hates everything Sora stands for...and Sora can only think of what beautiful, strong eyes she has.
• Gainax Ending: Not so much that it's incomprehensible, but the story suddenly pulls a Shocking Swerve by revealing Tsuki was actually the Big Bad. After this sudden revelation, Sora doesn't fight either El or Tsuki (though that may be the point), but instead announces an ending to "Paradise Story" over the school's PA system — an ending that she just made up. And we don't even get to hear what that ending was (but again, that may be the point). Makes more sense when you realize the manga was Cut Short. To make things more confusing, an extra chapter was added at the end of the collected version.
• Gender Blender Name: There are a bunch of these --
  • Akane. He's a guy.
  • Karin. It is interesting to note that the only halfway "decent" guys introduced have Gender Blender Names.
  • Student council member Haruka Kuchinawa. Who you can see on that picture at the top of this page.
  • Sora, too.
• Hannibal Lecture: Subverted. the Big Bad / The Dragon calmly tells Tomoko that she really is brave and needn't call herself a coward. And then he kidnaps her.
• Happiness in Slavery: Averted, Subverted, and Deconstructed. The female students are not happy. They are hopeless and miserable. The only reason they don’t resist is because the past situation was even worse and after such a steady diet of oppression and abuse most of the girls have come to actually believe they're as worthless as they're told. Might easily have been played straight with Sora’s personal harem as they are one hundred percent okay with being in Sora's custody — but differentiated from the Utopia Academy norm in that Sora tells her girls that she (Sora) will serve them by protecting and sheltering them.
  • Reiko appears to play this straight, then admits that there is no way she or any girl could love her owner, and says that she only acts as such to exert power through him.
  • The real kicker? Many of the boys themselves HATED this trope but they could do nothing to change this and were forced to play their roles.
• Harem Seeker: Sora.
• Have You Told Anyone Else?: Said by the Big Bad / The Dragon, but the this trope is used to protect Sora and imply that he has some sort of goal beyond enslaving everyone with a second X chromosome.
• He-Man Woman Hater: All of the men. Well, maybe not Akane and Sumita.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: Yes Sora, challenging one of the Student Council's top members (let alone one who is fanatically loyal to the president) when you've barely started is such a great idea.
  • Shoujou admits to El later that the only reason he was able to win was that Sora was so lost in rage that she became very easy to read.
• How Do I Shot Web?: Averted. Exaclan has documentation, and Yuki has the foresight to make Sora sit down and read it.
  • And Inverted. Most the boys haven't read the documentation, which allows Sora to exploit a few loopholes to her advantage.
• Humans Are Bastards: This manga kind of makes you wonder how far the male characters can really go into bastard territory. And they themselves HATED it.
• Idiot Hero: Sora, though it's more naivete in a world like this than actual stupidity, and she wouldn't act any differently if she did know how screwed she was. (She'd be better at picking her allies, though. Or her best friends for that matter.)
  • This goes Up to Eleven when Chapter 22 reveals that El reveals himself to Sora and tells him what's going on. All of the information he gives her overloads her and she faints, forcing her mind to process everything and retell it in the form of her younger self.
• Incredibly Obvious Bug: Some of the boys plant one on Sora.
• Inherent in the System: Utopia Academy and the Exaclan game are designed to encourage the male student body to leap across the Moral Event Horizon (which they willingly do, the bastards — or maybe NOT), and to encourage the female students not to fight back. Sora is determined to save the boys just as much as the girls.
• Internal Reformist: Sora is the "become an icon" variety.
• Kick the Dog: Yuki starts the story as an abject demonstration of the abuses of Utopia Gakuen: hospitalized by her former master, abandoned by her then-current master, and then forcibly used against Sora.
• Knight in Shining Armor: Sora.
• Magic Contract Romance: Sora and her "Princesses."
• Magikarp Power: Yuki's weapon.
• Meaningful Name: Tsuki is the moon in Sora's sky.
• Double Standard Rape (Female on Female): Considering that the alternative of Sora's plan to free Reiko was beating her for thirty minutes straight, Sora's not-quite-consensual molestation of Reiko isn't really too bad as far as moral standards go.
• My Gender Doth Protest Too Much: Akane is a guy. He also happens to be (so far as we know) as sweet and kind as Sora, just lacking a bit in the courage department.
• Mysterious Protector: X. Though by all indications she's just as much of a victim as anyone else and she's forcibly working for El; it's all but outright stated she's Tsuki. Interestingly the series played with this trope when X was impersonated by a Villainous Crossdresser.
  • And it's revealed that El himself is protecting Sora... from Tsuki.
• Neutral No Longer: Tomoko.
• Not Just a Tournament: Whoever collects all six seals in Exaclan will... actually, never mind, the ending is too confusing to tell, but it's certainly not about rounding up a six-girl harem.
• No Woman's Land: ...Yeah, pretty obvious.
• Out-Gambitted: Upon learning that anyone she wins in a duel will be a target of even more extreme abuse than normal, Sora comes up with the simple expedient of recruiting a male accomplice. It works out badly.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: El is able to gain Sora's trust by ruffling his hair and putting on an eyepatch. Justified, because she had never met him before in the first place, and the disguise doesn't fool others who know his identity.
• Person of Holding: The female students.
• Pet the Dog: Yuki slaps Tomoko, calls her an idiot for abandoning Sora's protection and warns to her to stay away if her own skin means so much to her, but still comes to Tomoko's rescue later on.
• Plucky Girl: Sora.
• Poor Communication Kills: Tsuki.
• Power Tattoo: All the girls in the Exaclan game have one.
• Psycho Lesbian: Tsuki.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Tougyu and Shoujou.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: This could never really happen, could it? Well, look at this. Was posted on a Shitsurakuen forum.
• Redemption Equals Fate Worse Than Death: Tougyu gets "excommunicated" after Sora whacks him in the head. Apparently; the manga gets a bit confusing.
• Redheaded Hero: Sora.
• Revised Ending: Chapter 24, which was added in the collected edition.
• The Sadistic Choice: Although it doesn't actually happen, Yuki tells Sora to envison being forced to choose between her (Yuki) and Koharu; and no, Taking a Third Option is not a possibility. Sora has a Heroic BSOD at the mere thought.
  • By the end of the scene showing this choice, after first offering herself instead she takes the third option anyways.
• Serial Escalation: How much more fucked up can this story get? How many more girls can fall in love with Sora?
• Schoolgirl Lesbians: Started out heavily subtexted, but by now they're not even trying to hide their lesbians, with Hiyo openly proclaiming herself Sora's lover before kissing her. Oh wait, she was The Mole.
• Slasher Smile: Jesus christ, Shoujou. Every time he shows up.
• Straw Misogynist: This series is packed with viciously misogynistic characters. Almost as if the author really Does Not Like Men. Subverted later on because of Inherent in the System... although Your Mileage May Vary with the suggestion that "It's not their fault, it was the game!"
• Sweet Polly Oliver: Student council member Haruka Kuchinawa is one.
• Take a Third Option: Invoked in the epilogue, when Koharu is upset that Sora is marrying Tsuki; Yuki suggests bigamy.
• Tears of Remorse: Many of the male students shed these in the next to last chapter.
• The Glasses Come Off: When the nerd guy decides to start training. Sora thinks he's gorgeous without 'em.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: Yuki's life takes a sharp turn for the better once Sora wins her.
• Torture Technician: Tougyu.
• Triang Relations: It's complicated, okay?
• Tsundere: Reiko Date, like holy crap.
• Tsurime Eyes: Reiko. Sora even lampshades it in chapter 9.
• Unlucky Childhood Friend: Tsuki got rejected rather brutally by Sora. Reversed with chapter 24, where Sora marries Tsuki.
• Unwitting Pawn: Sora, dear, you are just a little too trusting.
• Whip It Good: Mitarai.
• Yandere: A male example, Shoujou seems to go frightening lengths for El (wanted or not), from listening in to conversations to holding Tsuki hostage. He actually doubles as a Cute Psycho as well to the girls.
  • And for a female example, we have Tsuki.
• X Marks the Hero: Sora's forehead. Marked by Tsuki off all people.
• Villainous Valour: The manga favorably compares Shoujou's faith in El to Yuki's faith in Sora. Doesn't make Shoujou any less of a creep.
• Yuri: Everyone in Sora's harem is happy to be there, thank you very much, but Koharu is just a tad happier than anyone else.
• Zettai Ryouiki: Practically a standard part of the high school girls' uniform. Even Sora sports the hotpants version.