The Unserious Satires of Siege Malvar

Most Filipinos imagine Philippine literature as required readings in school like José Rizal, Francisco Balagtas, Nick Joaquin, and Lualhati Bautista. For all their brilliance, they can come off as formal, dense, and uptight to today's reading generation. At the same time, frankly, today's TikTok generation struggles to read longer forms of literature. However, there is a growing movement of independent publishing that is breaking the mold of Filipino literature, going for brief yet bold writing via novellas rather than dense texts.

Among the figures of this movement is Siege Malvar, who has a particularly unserious voice. Though a professional writer for brands and companies, his literary works are more playful while blending Filipino popular culture and Western popular culture seamlessly.

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Among his most notable works was his debut stage play from last year's Virgin Labfest, Presidential Suite No. 2, which tells the story of adult children debating what to do with their bedridden senator mother after surveys showed they benefit from her death. Malvar personally describes it as a Filipino version of HBO's Succession. The premise is absurd while revealing the dark side of our own society. We Filipinos pride ourselves on being family-oriented, but what happens when that family inherits real political power?

The boldness of the play earned it another staging in the Revisited set of this year's Virgin Labfest.

Comedy in such extreme conditions becomes increasingly difficult. It requires a combination of skill, courage, and a hint of insanity. Siege Malvar provides this balanced mixture of qualities in his eskinita novellas, published under Avenida Press.

Below are reviews of two of his latest and hardest-hitting novellas.

A content creator posts about eating literal feces. Different kinds of observers weigh in: professors, researchers, journalists, gastronomists, other content creators. Each of them is initially disgusted, then begins to process and accept the disgusting phenomenon in real time. Each character occupies a page in their own voice, expertise, and perspective. It is similar to George R.R. Martin's POV chapters in the Game of Thrones novels. Yet Malvar spends only one page on each character. Its economic brevity is its strength in controlling the pace. Some transitions are abrupt, sometimes even one sentence, other chapters, a single word. This varies the pace from slow, to fast, to erratic. Then their perspectives slowly merge into resigned acceptance.

In this short volume, readers are given a sense of existential dread about how a supposedly unnatural act is slowly tolerated and integrated. This process of rationalization can be connected to our society's capacity to accept the most disgusting acts as normal, even laudable and worth emulation. Our society has accepted forms of genocide, the war on drugs, verbal and physical abuse, and cruelty through the same institutions that initially critique and gatekeep against them. Malvar understands that today's intellectual and media institutions lack the moral fortitude to guard against absurdity, without himself moralizing in our stead

Your employers often say, "We are family." To assert this, many corporations spend up to thousands, sometimes millions, of pesos on team-building activities where they transport whole departments to remote locations.

Here they play parlor games that range from physical activities such as paintball, tug-of-war, and three-legged races to creative games like drawing, building, and singing. This has become a meso-industry in the country.

Siege Malvar takes this rising industry and pushes it to its absurd conclusion. He places Filipino company employees from a fictional company into a deadly battle royale, complete with machine guns, bombs, and even fighting mechs. This feels like a definitive Filipino adaptation of Squid Game and The Hunger Games.

The characters are unashamedly unhinged. For 177 pages, they are either very angry or very horny, sometimes both. They speak like South Park characters if they were Filipino working millennials.

Somehow, they still capture the chaotic energy of an adult work barkada's group chat. Their conversations contain brazenly casual homophobia, classism, and misogyny, all of which are still present in unguarded conversations in our society.Overall, it reminds us how corporations see their employees as resources rather than human beings.

Their worth is measured in efficiency rather than inherent dignity. Even in the term "human resources," human is an adjective, a descriptor of resources. These activities claim to nourish teamwork and camaraderie only to sharpen competition. Like many stories in the death game genre, the prize may not be worth the price of blood spilled, no matter how hilarious and over-the-top the deaths.

The comedic meta-commentary Siege writes is difficult to properly accomplish. It is similar to trying to imitate Deadpool from Marvel or the late, great Robin Williams but ending up insufferable. What is the recipe throughout his work?

First, he uses naturalistic Taglish, the mixture of Tagalog and English, for his characters. In 2024, a study from Fourth Wall revealed that Taglish causes less anxiety, while straight English or Tagalog is often seen as intimidating. This logic can be applied to the books we read. Taglish also more closely resembles the way Filipinos talk and think today. Siege's characters resemble the readers, making them more relatable.Second, Siege borrows from popular culture appropriately.

Many satires tend to fill their text with maximum references. Here, he chooses the template that suits his observation and provides a Filipino voice to it.

Lastly, his satire is grounded in real social observation. All the jokes and references serve a clear core critique. For Team Building, it is the relatable obligation of workplace cooperation and competition.

For Oral Hystery, it is our capacity to accept anything. They do not provide answers but give us laughs that make us think afterward. Essentially, like the traditional satirists, he makes us laugh at ourselves while holding a mirror to us, but in today's world and language, showing authenticity in absurdity.

Malvar's books can be ordered online at the Avenida Press website and their Shopee and Lazada pages. The surviving characters of Team Building will return in its sequel, Strat-Planning, set to release at the upcoming Philippine Book Festival 2026 from March 12 to 15 at SM Megamall. They can be purchased at the Avenida Press booth.