You have 8 options to choose from:
- Ring (1991 Japanese novel),
- Ring (1995 Japanese manga),
- Ring (1995 Japanese TV movie),
- Ring (1996 Japanese TBS radio drama),
- Ring (1998 Japanese theatrical movie),
- Ring (1998 Japanese movie tie-in manga),
- Ring ~Saishuushou~ (1999 Japanese TV series),
- The Ring Virus (1999 South Korean remake),
- The Ring (2002 American remake),
- The Ring (2015 British BBC radio drama).
OK, I'll go first.
Ring (1991 Japanese novel)
I'll make a few points, why I prefer it.
- Storyline: The best of all. This is the original, so it reflects the intentions of the author (Koji Suzuki). The build-up is much better, as we see Tomoko's death, then Iwata's death, then Asakawa being told about Iwata's death a month later. No urban legend, so other than Tomoko saying a vague "maybe this is that" when she feels fear shortly before she died, we have no idea what's going on until Asakawa finally watches the video. A much more interesting backstory as well. And the video itself makes the most sense - it's literally all the important events in Sadako's life being shown to us, one by one. And in this one, the story of the kid, on holiday in South Hakone Pacific Land with his parents, who wanted to record his favorite TV show, because he didn't want to miss it although he went out, and accidentally recorded Sadako's psychic broadcast, is actually how the video came to be.
- The characters:
- Asakawa Kazuyuki: Every reader complains about him but, as we see, he does care about his loved ones. To the point that his motivation basically changes from "investigating the four mysterious deaths and saving my own arse" to basically "fuck it, this is a declaration of war against my family so war it is" after he discovers that his wife and daughter have watched the video. A lot of readers think he doesn't participate at Tomoko's wake but they don't seem to realize that unlike literally every subsequent version of the story, here, Asakawa is first introduced to us a month after the four deaths, so the wake is long over.
- Takayama Ryuji: Boy is he an eccentric in this one. Claimed (as it later turns out, falsely) to Asakawa in high school that he had raped a female university student. Also says that he "wants a front row at the end of the world so he can ejaculate into a bucket while watching it". But it's precisely because of this that he's instrumental in the investigations of the video's origins. We eventually find out from Takano Mai that he actually died a virgin and was really just a normal, insecure guy, hiding behind a heavily eccentric personality.
- Yamamura Shizuko: This is the only version of the story where she has any sort of personality or motivations of her own. Is daring enough to go out to sea at night with her friend Genji and literally throws into the sea naked to retrieve the statuette of medieval ascetic En no Ozunu that the allies threw into the sea after World War II, and said she was drawn by it. That then proceeds to give her the ESP powers. Here, she actually fails the ESP experiment (so the reporters at least appear to be justified in their accusations, rather than in the 1998 movie), and we're also given a reasonable explanation as for why.
- Yamamura Sadako: For one, she has this entire complexity here in that she's in fact biologically male - her choromomes are XY but she has a female appearance because she has full Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, which also means she can not, in fact, give birth (which gives the old lady's "You, next year, are going to give birth to a child" from the video a much eerier meaning), and this plays a huge part in the story. Her death is the most tragic out of all the versions of the story. - The cursed videotape:
The cursed videotape in the novel is the best. It's literally the most important events in Sadako's life, being shown to us one by one, preceded by a warning that we should watch until the end and we shall be consumed by the dead, and followed by a warning that whoever has seen these images, is destined to die in one week at that time, unless they do as follows... which has been recorded over with a mosquito net commercial as a prank by the first four victims. And yes, the video lasts a whopping 20 minutes according to Ryuji's scenes breakdown list.
FINAL NOTICE: I didn't make this thread to criticize anyone, I just made it to see what people like and dislike.
Feel free to post your opinions (and to vote in the poll, of course).
