Hell's Paradise season 2 on the horizon, now is a better time than ever to pick it up.

Hell's Paradise is an adaptation of a manga by Yuji Kaku, a former assistant of Tatsuki Fujimoto, mangaka of Chainsaw Man. It s Chainsaw Man and Jujutsu Kaisen as part of shonen's "Dark Trio". While it might be fair to call Hell's Paradise dark, it's dark precisely because it's a brutally honest inquest into the foundational idealism of Naruto.

Hell's Paradise Is a Beautiful Inquiry Into a Broken Society

Hell's Paradise Is an Underrated Masterpiece

Gabimaru the Hollow is a prodigal assassin brought up in the ruthless shinobi village of Iwagakure. His village turns on him when he expresses his desire to leave the profession and settle down with his wife. He's subsequently sentenced to death, but Yamada Asaemon Sagiri intervenes, inviting him instead to take part in a contest called by the shogun.

The competition calls on selected death row convicts to instead seek out the Elixir of Life on an island commonly known as Shinsenkyou—in English, "divine paradise". As Gabimaru and Sagiri intersect and interact with other competitors and gradually try to track down the Elixir, viewers get a glimpse into Gabimaru's inner turmoil, a deep sense of conflict, and total longing for his wife.

In the meantime, they also get to see what it means to be an elite shinobi in Hell's Paradise's world. Gabimaru, it's revealed, is a product of complete and total brainwashing by his shinobi village. His memories and perception of himself have been manipulated to protect the village's interests and his role as an asset thereof. Shinobi instincts linger deep within him, waiting to be tapped into. Gabimaru's jutsu abilities are truly impressive, and the visuals are no less stunning, rendered beautifully by MAPPA.

Hell's Paradise Has Clear Ties to Naruto

The Connection Between the Two Battle Shonen Is Undeniable

While the concept of shinobi alone obviously doesn't indicate a link between Naruto and Hell's Paradise, they occupy the same cultural space and share a vernacular in a genre (battle shōnen) where one could just as easily not do that. It would be easy enough to come up with a new set of and a brand new conceptual toolkit that doesn't so clearly mirror Naruto, and Hell's Paradise might have been better off for it.

Chainsaw Man and Jujutsu Kaisen, for example, have far more uniquely identifiable concepts than Hell's Paradise, and it's likely no coincidence that Hell's Paradise has been the least appreciated of the trio. Its plot reeks of Hunter x Hunter, while its mechanics reek of Naruto—Gabimaru himself feels like an uneasy amalgam of Shippuden's Sai and Hunter x Hunter's Killua, burdened by a past he's forced to negotiate. If one could levy an accusation of derivation toward any of the Dark Trio, Hell's Paradise would be the first target.

While Chainsaw Man and Jujutsu Kaisen marinate in their own unique array of concepts, though, Hell's Paradise uses whatever might be seen as derivative in its own conceptual toolkit to its advantage. It's from this exact vantage that Hell's Paradise is able to tackle concepts in a way that Naruto couldn't. Hell's Paradise is a dark, horrifying answer to the things Naruto wouldn't face.

Hell's Paradise Asks Questions Naruto Wouldn't Ask Itself

Hell's Paradise Wonders What Happens When Naruto's Ideal World Gets Messy

Perhaps a logical line could be drawn between Hell's Paradise and Naruto here. Naruto's Jiraiya revealed at his death the overwhelming way that shinobi society had penetrated his very concept of himself, his idea of a valuable life, and his barometer of right and wrong. As he dies to children Konoha left orphaned, who he took in and later abandoned again, it doesn't occur to him to question that society.

Hell's Paradise is an honest assessment of this type of ideological programming. What happens when the "Will of Fire"—or any ideology that a shinobi society comes up with to protect itself—has to deal with a world on the outside, where others don't hold to that ideal? Worse yet, what happens when one system of authority comes in with others?

Naruto's world was, for the most part, neat and tidy in that respect. The shinobi system only really had a few choice outliers like the Akatsuki standing in opposition to it, and the whole world stood in opposition to them. In Hell's Paradise, the shinobi system and its unique viewpoints, norms, and values come in conflict with other regimes. The central conflict comes from Gabimaru's willingness to defy his own shinobi regime—but that leads in turn to the regime cooperating with the shogunate authorities, against whom it would normally stand in opposition.

Naruto dogmatically asserts that love, rather than violence, must be the path to peace; it has very fixed ideas of what peace even means, and especially what peace should look like. Hell's Paradise is a rare example of true moral ambiguity, on the other hand. It shows how ideas like justice, peace, and criminality are subject to things far bigger than a hopeful Talk no Jutsu can aspire to. They're often arbitrary and, more importantly, they're often painful.

Hell's Paradise isn't a perfect anime, but after Naruto, it's a real palate cleanser. It asks what happens when somebody is born by circumstance into a set of beliefs as arbitrary as the Will of Fire is for the citizens of Konoha. It follows up by investigating the truly grueling ways in which these beliefs can be forced onto people, embedded in their very being—and how, even once one escapes the society, outpacing their circumstances can be a much taller order.

Gabimaru cuts through to the heart of what it means to be good or bad, lawful or unlawful—and he does so with the stylistic flair only an artist like Yuji Kaku and a studio like MAPPA could afford. Demon Slayer can't be Naruto's successor; Hell's Paradise is already Demon Slayer's own successor, anyway. Hell's Paradise: Jigokuraku is the first, and the only, true answer to Naruto—however uncomfortable it may be.