The Spartan Way / Anime & Manga

• The military from Attack on Titan. Their 3-year program is completely optional and people are allowed to drop out, or may be kicked out... but it is also noted that serious accidents or deaths are perfectly normal. The general attitude seems to be that anyone killed during training wouldn't have survived battling the Titans anyway. The instructors are shown to force people to run until they collapse unconscious and during the induction ceremony, several recruits are struck for giving a wrong answer or not saluting properly. One trick used by instructors during 3-dimensional Maneuver Gear training is to randomly cut safety lines, killing anyone unable to remain calm and react quickly enough. The minimum age for enlistment is twelve, with society labeling anyone that doesn't enlist a coward. For many children, the military is their only option due to widespread poverty and food shortages.
  • Taken to a greater extreme by the Marleyan Warrior Program. Children between the ages of 5 and 7 are recruited from the ghettos and promised a better life for their families if they make the cut. Desperate families volunteer their children for military service, slowly whittling the candidates down to a handful of promising recruits. Children barely old enough to be attending school are forced to run marathons in the rain, carrying heavy military equipment while their instructors scream insults and threats at them. Besides the harsh physical training, their instructors also subject them to extensive indoctrination to mold them into fanatically-loyal soldiers. Should they step out of line or cause their superiors to doubt their loyalty, their entire family could be executed for treason. Those few that make it through the harsh selection process are expected to serve until their death, with the threat of being replaced always present. At one point, the audience is introduced to a batch of Candidates that are being tested....by being taken to the front lines and expected to serve as the vanguard of a major combat operation. The survivors get to return home with the dubious honor of being veterans at the tender age of 12.
• Burst Angel runs with this and then goes above and beyond by having only 3 surviving candidates of the supersoldier training program...and one would later go crazy and the other would betray the organization. Yeah, uh, not the most successful final training exercise... (and the one who remained loyal was the first of the final 3 to get beaten in the flashback by the other two, also the first major enemy encountered and defeated by the traitor early on, and the one who went crazy shares her name with another anime supersoldier who went crazy.) The fact 3 survive may be a subtle reference to Naked Weapon mentioned below, considering their final exam is similar and also they are wearing skintight "battlesuits".
• The Saiyans in Dragon Ball pretty much exemplify the Spartans to a T, as a warrior race that believed in constant training and one's strength as the ultimate virtue. They even sent their infants to conquer planets whose inhabitants are weak enough for a baby Saiyan to slaughter.
• In Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, Sousuke subjects his high school rugby team to this, in a not-so-subtle Shout-Out to Full Metal Jacket.
• Lyrical Nanoha: It's become a joke among fans that Nanoha Takamachi's method of parenting is all about the Spartan Way. And don't forget the actual training. Considering the fact that Subaru is a Hollywood Cyborg and Teana is a Badass Normal whose magic levels exceed that of the standard TSAB mooks, and they look like they can barely stand after training, fear for the lives of Nanoha's new pupils is understandable.
• Maken-ki!: At Tenbi Academy, everything is settled in battle and we mean every-thing.
  • Any guy that wants to date any of the female students better be prepared to fight for it, because they'll have to prove their worth first.
  • Lampshaded by Demitra in chapter 10, when Usui drafted a petition for co-ed swim classes and proposed they settle it with a water polo match.
    Demitra: [glasses pull] ...looks like everything has to be settled through competition]] in this school.
• Inverted in Mobile Suit Gundam 00 in that Setsuna and the other Krugis holy warriors were trained to go beyond Janissary levels of fanaticism (to the point they killed their own parents) and to fight to their own destruction by Ali al Saachez, a cynical rat bastard who had no faith in or love for anything or anyone except war for its own sake. When the trainer is that much of a hypocrite, the entire endeavor is a mockery. Setsuna himself goes from fanatic Muslim to frequently insisting there is no God in any of the situations he finds himself in.
• My Hero Academia: The hero license exam uses the "selection" variant. Every year, only fifty percent of applicants are expected to pass. They want only the best to become professional heroes. When the main characters take the test, due to All Might's recent retirement, requirements have been made even more strict—out of over a thousand applicants, only one hundred will be allowed to pass. Yes, less than ten percent. The first part of the test is a massive battle royale that pits all the applicants against each other, and the second part a simulated rescue test. The first is testing skill and speed, while the second is testing adaptability and teamwork. Out of the hundred who pass the first part, a number fail the second, though those people just have to take a remedial course.
• Ninja in Naruto begin their training at their village's ninja academy at a very young age; even during peacetime, ninja generally graduate and become active duty genin by age twelve. Not every genin survives the yearly examination/martial arts tournament needed to become a chunin, and only a small percentage actually passes the test each year.
  • At least in the Hidden Leaf Village, the academy is shown to be more of a basic skills course that focuses at least as much on academia as it does on combat skills. Though the main cast all decide to take the chunin exams early in their careers, the average genin will usually first spend at least a few more years building up his/her skills by performing low-risk missions and receiving personal instruction from an elite ninja assigned as his/her team's mentor. It's still worth noting, if Sakura is any indication, that even a newly-minted genin with comparatively poor combat ability is still capable of throwing kunai accurately enough to pin a falling person to a tree without drawing blood.
  • The Hidden Mist plays this straight; you graduate the academy by killing your classmates. It seems to be somewhat counterproductive; Mist's population is fairly small compared with the other great villages, and its ninja seem to have a tendency to be disloyal. The Leaf may be (relatively) soft, but it has the largest population, a highly-regarded shinobi corps, and its washouts survive to diversify the city's economic base....
    • In fact, it's implied that the Mist's training practices were deliberately meant to harm the village; the former Mizukage largely responsible for them (who is not remembered fondly) was actually under the control of the Big Bad. The current Mizukage, who wishes to distance the village from its reputation as "The Bloody Mist", has likely abolished such practices.
• This is the preferred training method of every single one of Tsuna's tutors in Reborn! (2004), most of whom are more rough than the person before them. Colonello is actually outright called "more Spartan than Reborn" in his training methods, and he's nothing compared to Lal Mirch (who trained Colonello) and Future Hibari, the latter of whom outright gambles Tsuna's life with no intention to save him if Tsuna can't get out of one of Hibari's tricks before the training even officially started. It Makes Sense in Context that they'd all be that way, since they're Mafiosi.
• The Saga of Tanya the Evil: This is how Tanya "trains" her personal battalion of elite mages. First day? She wakes them up in the early morning and subjects them to a 36-hour artillery bombardment with no time for preparation (with a few live rounds mixed in with the dummy shells to keep them on their toes), and immediately after orders them to hike several dozen kilometers within 48 hours while being hunted by military forces with air support and tracking dogs. Through the snowy mountains. With nothing but the clothes on their backs (and one shovel). What is waiting for them at the end of the hike? Counter-interrogation training, i.e., outright torture. Within a couple of months, her mages are among the most elite soldiers in the whole Empire. Of course, her real intent was not to produce super soldiers, but to scare the recruits into giving up... which failed utterly.
• Harsh training methods are common for all trying to become a warrior of Athena in Saint Seiya. Some aspiring Saints get off lucky, and get to train one-on-one with a benevolent (or, at worst, indifferent) master such as Libra Dohko, Eagle Marin, or the Crystal Saint. But the vast, vast majority are sent to training camps where they must compete for the right to don the sacred Cloth... if not for their very lives. Andromeda Island and especially Athena's Sanctuary have Death Courses where battalions of trainees must survive both daily combat as well as environmental hazards (and the occasional murderous master.) And even they are easily overshadowed by Death Queen Island training methods.
• Tiger's Cave pupils in Tiger Mask are trained to become highly capable and merciless wrestlers with such exercises as fighting lions, panthers (with only their legs, to learn how to fight with them) and gorillas, jumping from a rotating platform where a single error would mean landing on very deadly hazards including molten lead (the exercise is supposed to ensure the pupil learns how to decide fast), doing push-ups on the legs with weights attached to the head and a mat with poles under the butt (to strengthen the legs. There's a Real Life exercise that is exactly the same, only without the poles), being attached to a bridge head down (the series didn't specify the purpose), and being set on fire (more specifically, they are made wear sweaters drenched in fuel that are set on fire, and then they have to put the fire out by rolling on the ground. The exercise is to develop speed when forced to the ground), with the trainers ready to hit them with bullwhips if they slacked off. Many pupils die in the process, but the survivors can easily kill tigers and put in hospital the average wrestler, and out-foul heel wrestlers: Dick the Bruiser, an infamous Real Life wrestler, faced the protagonist twice, and the first time was downed by a single foul that the referee failed to notice before he could even think a decent foul, while the second time his fouls were neutralized and used on him improved (he started by throwing fuel and a lit cigar at Tiger Mask. Tiger Mask took the fuel and the cigar on his cloak, applied his training to put the fire down enough to take the cloak off, and hit Dick with the burning cloak while fanning the flames at the same time. At the end of the match, Dick was half-dead, strangled with the ring's rope).
• In Touch (1981), Coach Kashiwaba's training methods are cruel and even outright criminal. But they work, whether he likes it or not.
• The Karlstein Institute in Valvrave the Liberator trains agents this way from the time they're children. Their names are taken from them, and they are given letter-number code names (with German numbers) — L-elf, A-drei, X-eins, etc. In the second season, when the action is moved to the base of this institute, young trainees are shown to be willing and able to kill without hesitation, and flashbacks show that the main Anti-Villain team of graduates had to kill one of their friends when they were in training there, because he was loyal to the overthrown regime.

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