nenena | Mahabharata games.

And I thought that the board game by Lotus Brands sounded cool (and not just because it's in English)...

Syncere Arts is making a computer game. And from the scant info available on their site, it looks like they know their stuff. You get to play as Arjuna.

Right, so, now we have the official "The Mahabharata has been remade as...!" checklist.

The Mahabharata has been remade as...

1. A board game slightly less complex than Arkham Horror. Check.
2. An epic computer-game RPG. In progress.
3. An animated Japanese television show about magical transforming girls. Check.
4. Homoerotic (porno?) comicbooks. Check. (Links courtesy of

jokersama. My first impression was that these were Japanese, but the page isn't written in Japanese and the domain name extension is from Tonga.)
5. Animated Disney musical co-starring Hanuman as the jive-talking comical monkey sidekick. THIS IS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME. Unless they decide to wimp out and do the Ramayana instead.

The world is still waiting for the Mahabharata-inspired X-Men character, the Mahabharata-inspired arcade fighting game, the Mahabharata-inspired Lego sets, and the Mahabharata-inspired Happy Meals. I mean, there have already been Mahabharata comic books and movies (many of them!) and, come on, you know it's only a matter of time before Vyasa completely sells out.

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Syncere Arts spells 'believe' wrong.

Board/ computer games. Good idea.

'Magical transforming girls'? Transforming girls in the Mahabharata? *coughcoughspluttersplutter* Is this another Rg Veda?

Plenty of homoerotic elements, yes. Prime suspects: Arjuna and his darling cousin. You should see the way they talk about each other. But nobody talks about them here in India.

Comic book/ serial/ movie/ animated series (e.g. The Pandavas)/ translation/ transcreation et al. Fine. They are usually terrible.

Animated Disney musical? Hanuman appears *once* in the entire epic! Can you see Krishna tolerating a comical minkey sidekick, god or no god?

Will Vyasa ever sell out? I feel more and more nowadays that the Mahabharata is *the* story, the *only* story. Nothing else is like it.

Oh, I didn't notice the spelling thing. And I'm working as an English teacher. ^^;; Fail!

For the magical transforming girls... Check out Chikyuu Shoujo Arjuna. I think it was made five or six years ago. But it turned out to be a really heavy-handed environmental fable with a magical transforming girl in it.

As for the homoerotic elements, of course there's Arjuna and God... Supposedly the Ganguli translation has the line "Arjuna deflowered Lord Krishna" somewhere in there, and although I have yet to find it and if it DOES exist I'm sure it's completely innocent (or a typo), it's still giggle-worthy. My other prime suspects would be Karna and Duryodhana. But really the whole thing is a sausagefest, so take your pick.

...There's an animated series? When was this? (And I really do like the "terribleness" of some of the adaptations. The cheese is half the fun.)

Animated Disney musical? Hanuman appears *once* in the entire epic! Can you see Krishna tolerating a comical minkey sidekick, god or no god?

No, but then I go back and watch Disney's Hercules, and... yes. ;)~

I feel more and more nowadays that the Mahabharata is *the* story, the *only* story. Nothing else is like it.

The more I learn about it the more that I agree.

(I hope you don't mind me replying here, I found your LJ through the mahabarata community.)

This gives me another incentive to re-read Ganguli, hehe. Along with the sausagefest, I believe there's also a little "episode" where Draupadi, Subhadra, and the rest of the "royal women" get thoroughly drunk and "sport" in front of Arjuna and Krishna (my eyebrows shot straight up when I read that part).

I believe that there is a cartoon series coming out in India about Krishna's childhood. The previews that I saw of it appear to be well-made (animation-wise), so hopefully the cheese factor won't be too great.

Was that "sport" in the same sense that Krishna would "sport" with the gopis, or "sport" in a more innocent sense ~~like bikini beach volleyball~~?

(In that case, I think there are also plenty of references of Arjuna and Krishna "sporting" together in Dwarka.)

I actually don't know, to tell you the truth. More than the sporting itself, it was the women getting drunk and Krishna and Arjuna watching them sport that sounded a bit odd to me.

I don't think there's a situation like this in the original. There is however, a situation where Arjuna and Krshna get drunk and Draupadi and Satyabhama are present with them in the same room (this is a few days before the war). The women are not mentioned as drunk, but Arjuna has one foot up on Draupadi's lap, and another on Satyabhama's lap, and Krshna has his feet up on Arjuna's lap. They do not *sport*, but solemnly lecture Sanjaya on dharma and the upcoming war. Cool, eh?

...So Arjuna's doing the splits?

Now I have this mental image of Arjuna drunk, doing the splits, and at the same time solemnly lecturing Sanjaya about dharma. That is cool.

Hehe, you just made my day with that mental picture.

Ahem... the words are 'drstavaan natanarttakaan' i.e. 'watched dancers and actors'. Also, 'mrgayaa' (hunting) was usually considered a sport and translated as such. I wonder though, what were the two doing before Vyasa decided to write about them?

who knows, maybe Vyasa had originally included all the drunk-and-ambiguous scenes, which were later "edited out" by all the male writers/authors/storytellers that must have disapproved of the notion of a drunk Arjuna doing the splits with his equally drunk cousin's feet in his lap. *grin*

you're a kid after my own heart! mind if i add you to my friends list?

hehe, not at all!

btw, do you need any more details? i'll be glad to look them up for you. best wishes :)

I'm fine right now, but as I keep writing I'm sure that things will come up. Thank you so much for the offer!

umm... nen? those pages are in japanese! :(

Really? All of the writing just shows up as boxes and question marks in my browser. I told my browser to read the page as Japanese, and I tried manually setting my browser to *only* read Japanese encoding, and the page still shows up as gibberish. I'm having the same problem whether I use Firefox or IE.

Maybe it's a problem with the charset on the page? Or maybe a problem with my Windows. I dunno. Anyway I can't/couldn't get the page to display proper Japanese characters for me, so I just assumed it wasn't in Japanese. ^^;;

earth girl arjuna? i watched it on animax. just two names (arjuna and chris) borrowed from mahabharata.

And Gandiva! Don't forget Gandiva!

But I agree, you're right. Only for the sake of me attempting to be funny does Chikyuu Shoujo Arjuna really count. I believe that there is yet to be a more sentai-style obviously-Mahabharata-based magical girl show, but maybe it's only a matter of time. Those Nakayoshi manga writers can't keep recycling the Greek pantheon and Chinese gods forever.

Ah, you're a JET person. An English grad too, I think? I did my graduation in English Lit. Had both Science Fiction and Translation Studies for courses, among others. :)

I wish I were an English grad. ^_^ I ended up with a double-major in Asian Studies and Education with a minor in Linguistics.

Those courses sound cool. I took a linguistics course which focused on section on Translation Studies and I ended up doing my final paper in that course about translating Japanese haiku. It was fun.

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