"I want to share my heart with people, but not with phantoms that play with the words and read the letters with slavering tongues."
"Captain Clavis Shepard, you are hereby sworn thus the testimony you are about to give before this committee, regarding Special Operations I Detachment and its missions, shall be the truth, the entire truth, and nothing but the truth, omitting nothing. Please begin by answering the question foremost on everyone's minds: Who is John Paul?"
Genocidal Organ (虐殺器官, Gyakusatsu Kikan) is the first novel written by Japanese author Project ITOH. It received an animated adaptation that came out in 2017, produced first by Manglobe, and then finished by Geno Studio.
In 2015, Sarajevo is obliterated by a nuclear bomb used by terrorists. As a result, democracies of the world clamp down hard on their populace, becoming surveillance states that have nearly eliminated all terrorism within their borders, at the cost of tracking their citizens with every step they take. However, developing nations around the world are suddenly becoming engulfed in mass murder. Within a matter of months, peaceful communities become embroiled in genocide and civil war. In response, US Special Forces Officer Clavis Shepherd is sent to track down and apprehend John Paul, the man suspected to be responsible for the atrocities.
But as Clavis's hunt for John Paul continues, he discovers a horrifying truth behind the source of the genocides, one that will destroy his faith in the system of the world.
This novel contains examples of:
- 20 Minutes into the Future: The story is set in 2022, albeit one with technology that's far more advanced than in real life.
- Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole: The last third of the story is altered compared to the original novel, which causes Clavis Shepherd's engineered genocide of the US to be far more obtuse in logic. In the novel it turns out the "grammar of genocide" was designed by developed nations in a conspiracy to create a new world order, and its implied they bombed Sarajevo to send out their subliminal messaging in the ensuing coverage, which better explains Shepherd's disillusionment. In the movie, the motivation became a more amorphous "America doesn't want uncomfortable truths like genocide told to it".
- Bad Guy Bar: Clavis visits a bar in Prague that provides an escape from the city's surveillance, including the use of paper money rather than online credit. Unfortunately, as he discovers later, this also makes it a convenient meeting place for criminals and terrorists who own the bar and use it to plot under the radar.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: John Paul usually gets hired by a country's government to act as their national PR advisor, and even became Georgia's culture minister. But within a year, his manipulations cause genocides to erupt.
- Bolivian Army Ending: Clavis Shepherd, disgusted by the US turning a blind eye to the genocides of the world in order to maintain its own status, uses his own senate hearing to give a speech that will create a civil war in the country. The movie ends just as his speech finishes. In the novel, he sits it out in a Comfy Catastrophe.
- Chekhov's Gun
- Clavis's special forces use a trick of hiding small objects in bags they hang down their throats. The first time, they use it to hide the ID chips they use to fool a checkpoint. at the end of the movie, Clavis uses the same trick to smuggle John Paul's research with him after the mission.
- The Evil Gloating of the Prague Uncounted about how to dodge surveillance eventually winds up cluing in Clavis on how to track down John Paul in the last act.
- Child Soldier: A number of them appear in the second act, when Clavis's unit storms a warlord's headquarters in India. None of them stand any chance against the US soldiers, and none of said soldiers hesitate to gun them down.
- Cool Plane: The Flying Seaweed, an enormous flying wing Airborne Aircraft Carrier which carries two Flying Pig helicopters, is capable of air-dropping supersoldiers in drop pods into hostile territory and carries ordnance capable of levelling an entire building.
- Crapsaccharine World: Developed nations enjoy high levels of affluence and peace, at the cost of personal liberty and constant surveillance that most people willfully ignore. They also ignore the fact that around the world developing nations are hellholes where people are being manipulated into killing each other. Clavis gets so fed up with this state of the world that he decides to destroy America to end this ignorance.
- Drop Pod: In their raid on India, Clavis's unit fall from the sky in biomechanical armoured pods (called Intruder Pods in the novel). They come equipped with leg-mounted machine guns that allow the troops to clear the area around them before they jump out of the pods, as well as dissolving themselves after their occupants have vacated and deploying Pathbreaker Unmanned Aerial Vehicle drones for aerial battlefield support.
- The Dulcinea Effect: Despite meeting a few times, Clavis becomes incredibly protective of Lucia Škroupova, John Paul's on-and-off lover. After she disappears, almost half of Clavis's motivation for tracking John down is to find out where she is.
- Eagleland: The movie eventually settles on a "boorish" interpretation of the US (and the novel extends that to all developed democracies as a whole), as a country preferring to live in ignorance, security, and the hopes that bad things will happen "somewhere else". Williams encapsulates this desire near the end rather succinctly:
"My wife doesn't need to know what a shithole this world is. I don't want my kid growing up thinking our world is teetering on the brink of hell! She's going to feel safe and happy, you got that, Clavis? I'm prepared to protect my world. A world where I can order a jalapeno pizza and pay for it with my ID thumbprint! Where I can throw away half my Big Mac just because I'm full and I want to!"
- Evil Gloating: When Clavis gets captured by the Prague criminals, they take a moment expositing how clever they are in subverting the country's biometric surveillance. The time they waste winds up allowing US commandos to rescue Clavis in the nick of time. Not only that, the gloating gives Clavis the info he needs to later track down John Paul.
- Hauled Before A Senate Subcommittee: One serves as the Book Ends of the movie, showing Clavis at the beginning of the movie about to give testimony about the events, and then returning to it to reveal that Clavis is using the media coverage to spread a genocide-causing speech in the US.
- Invisibility Cloak: One of the many cutting-edge technologies present in the setting. Clavis's unit use them, as well as the Eugene & Krupps mercenaries they fight in the second act.
- Kill the Cutie: Lucia, who is basically the least worst person in the story, winds up getting ventilated by Williams as part of his mission to also kill John Paul and keep the grammar of genocide covered up.
- The Lancer: Williams, who serves as Clavis's joking buddy and foil throughout the movie, which becomes more tragic when the two turn on each other at the end of the movie.
- More than Mind Control: This is how the thought process that enables genocide exhibits itself. When Clavis captures the Georgian Brigadier General responsible for the atrocities and grills him over his actions, the man insists what he was doing is justified in rooting out "terrorists", until he starts actually thinking it through and begins wondering why the peaceful country had to undertake such extreme methods. By the end, he's begging Clavis to explain why he suddenly started killing everyone.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: In the animated film version, the hearing is headed by someone who looks exactly like Nancy Pelosi.
- Off the Grid: With surveillance everywhere, some people, known as "Uncounted" go the extra effort to live disconnected, using fake fingerprints and even transplanted eyes from the deceased to spoof scanners, while memorizing the location of every scanner on the street and the path to avoid them.
- Organic Technology: Robotics in this setting got a boost by using artificially bred whales and dolphins that are harvested for their musculature and fitted into machinery.
- Popcultural Osmosis Failure: In Prague, Williams tries to make a Kafka reference, before Clavis corrects him by noting Waiting for Godot was written by Samuel Beckett. Later, Clavis himself says he hopes to read Kafka's works in "the original Czech", before Lucia notes Kafka wrote everything in German.
- The Power of Language: The mechanism behind how the "grammar of genocide" works: when civil unrest occurs, certain subconscious speech patterns and topics appear beforehand. John Paul, meanwhile, has reverse-engineered the linguistics so that by releasing the subliminal messages first, he can consequently create stress in a community and even shut-off their morals.
- Private Military Contractors: Eugene & Krupps is one that exists in the setting, and become the antagonists near the end of the second act, shooting down Clavis's escape helicopter in order to extract John Paul.
- Protagonist Journey to Villain: In the end, Clavis Shepherd decides to turn his back on the US and kickstarts a genocide in the country.
- Shout-Out: In the movie's English dub, when they finally get the Indian warlords at gunpoint, Williams can be heard quipping, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!". Later, Williams complains that no one else got the reference.
- In the Japanese version, Williams abruptly says he has an inquisition joke.
- Sinister Surveillance: Developed nations of the world push surveillance hard. Not only are people tracked by their ID-purchases, retinas and fingerprints, but sensors fill the streets, tracking even brainwaves and heart rate.
- Super-Soldier: A low-key version. Clavis's unit receive nanomachine treatments and psychological conditioning to remove pain and mental stress, allowing them to operate at peak efficiency. It's referred to as Battle Emotion Adaptive Regulation, or "B.E.A.R.". Nowhere else would you hear a soldier being ordered to take "Tactical Counselling" so that a shrink can give them the mental justification to kill people. At different points, the soldiers compare themselves to the drugged child soldiers they fight in India, while John Paul wryly notes that turning off one's emotions while killing is a short step from enabling further mass murder in genocide.
- Spared by the Adaptation: In the manga, the roomful of armed kids in front of Paul and the Hindi supremacist leaders are not present after Jaeger team blows the door.
- Sympathetic Adulterer: John Paul. He was noted to have an affair with Lucia behind his wife and daughter's back, but it turns out part of his motivation for causing genocides is because his family was killed by the Sarajevo bombing
- Take That!: The novel is a stealth jab at linguist Noam Chomsky, whose theory was discussed by Lucia and John; Chomsky has some infamy for justifying Serbian ethnic cleansing against other ethnic groups during The Yugoslav Wars.
- Technology Porn: Both cyberpunk and biopunk.
- Trigger Phrase: John Paul can cause genocides by speaking the right subliminal messages that can activate pre-historic logic processes in the human brain responsible for culling members of a population when faced with food shortages.
- Warrior Poet: Clavis Shepherd. Beyond being versed in music and literature, and even linguistics after Lucia's tutoring, he's also introspective and often ruminates on his duties as a soldier.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: John Paul, who decided that he'd protect the developed world at any cost, even if it means turning the would be terrorists of developing nations against each other through engineered genocide.
- The Senator who supported him did it for both this and money.
