A Painfully Honest Review of Platinum End

hey so this anime i'm about to spend oh what am i doing with my life minutes discussing centers its narrative heavily around the subject of self-harm and also it leans heavily on cheap shock value from lurid violence against women and children as a crutch to get through all the boring bits and i figure that deserves a content warning so this is that sugami oba and takeshi obata are a talented shonen manga make and writer artist duo perhaps best known for their shonen jump manga about making shonen jump manga bakumon but they also produced this somewhat obscure mystery horror series you might have heard of called death note about how there's this book that if you write a person's name in it they die and this japanese honor student decides he's going to use it to kill all the crime so of course a genius super detective starts gunning for him and he has to contrive situations where if that detective says hey got any death notes he can say nope go fish i am of course doing a bit here death note is insanely popular in fact before attack on titan it was the most popular anime of all time on my anime list which doesn't mean much actually since they really only accurately represent the tastes of the english-speaking parts of asia but anecdotally as someone who attended quite a few anime conventions in the mid to late 2000s i can attest that you could not go more than five feet without bumping into a death note cosplayer and only like eighty percent of those were guys in eyeliner with jeans and a white shirt death note was huge in north america bigger than the big three arguably and it's still big today its moody atmospheric style and intensely cerebral cat and mouse drama have yet to be successfully replicated by any other manga or anime and at 37 episodes it sits in a very accessible middle ground for anime newbies offering a satisfying binge watch without demanding anywhere near as much commitment as most other big shonen jump things thanks to this it's held the place of prominence as one of the premier gateway anime for the better part of two decades now and as such has become a core memory for at least two generations of english-speaking anime fans when a show's that important to that many people it's only natural for them to get excited about the people who made it making another thing that looks like it and it's equally natural after said show moves past the bit where an otherworldly creature gives its despondent student protagonist the power to kill or control anyone anywhere and tells him to do with it as he pleases and on to the bit where he uses that power to make his abusive aunt want to bang him so she'll admit to murdering his parents for their inheritance and then kill herself for those same people to say uh excuse me mr oba sir but um what the [ __ ] death note was never exactly subtle and it was always more than a little edgy but not hypno incest suicide edgy not mind control rape orgy edgy not torture and murder an actual child in front of a baseball stadium full of people edgy and that's just the first four episodes of platinum end this show seems almost desperate to grab and hold its audience's attention through sheer force of controversy yet somehow not one of those goofy-ass over-the-top scenes manages to be even half as entertaining or intense as a dude eating chips now part of that to be fair is a problem of adaptation that has nothing to do with oba or obata death notes tetsuro araki is one of the best directors working in anime today a master of narrative tension and creative camera work who can make even a complete dud of a story feel like a banger and when he gets his hands on something like death note or attack on titan turn it into the biggest thing ever in contrast platinum ends kazuchika kise has decades worth of credits as an animation director the guy who makes the show look good but his only experience actually setting the tone for and deciding the pace of a story prior to this was on the ghost and the shell arise movies which were okay i guess and okay simply doesn't cut it when you're drawing comparisons to death note any normal director trying to fill shoes as big as otakis is bound to end up looking like at least a bit of a clown even working with the best of source material but also kisay definitely was not working with the best of source material okay so for those of you who only clicked on this because of death note and don't know the first thing about what i'm talking about what's the deal with platinum and what's it all about to put it simply god is dying so he sends 13 angels of varying rank down to earth to select 13 humans as candidates for his replacement to aid them in this process these humans are all allowed to borrow abilities from the angels who picked them wings that let them fly faster than light and two arrows red and white that make their target fall in love with the shooter and instantly kill the target respectively the abilities they get are determined by the rank of their angel which is in turn determined by god's completely opaque and seemingly arbitrary value system second ranked angels can hand out either wings or a red arrow first rank angels get to do both and special rank angels get both plus a white arrow and they have 999 days to play around with these powers and figure out which one of them deserves to be god this premise really isn't all that different from your typical future diary style battle royale setup save for two small details that do make a pretty big difference the first difference is the selection process instead of being picked from all walks of life every god candidate is someone who has given up on life because god reasons those people have the most motivation to change the world additionally every candidate was chosen from within japan due to the country's unusually high suicide rate relative to its average standard of living there are other countries that fit that criteria better like south korea and since 2016 the united states but this has long been a topic of intense discussion in japan so i think that much at least makes sense the other bigger difference is this isn't technically speaking a battle royale at all all that's really required for god to be selected is for every living god candidate to agree on who it should be which makes sense it's a philosophical question that doesn't really have to and arguably shouldn't be solved with violence though it totally can because being the only living god candidate is one obvious way to fulfill all those conditions and considering that one of those arrows is just a diet death note and none of the candidates were in the best headspace to begin with it's a pretty sure bet that it will much to the chagrin of standard death battle softboy pacifist protag number 42069 mirai kakehashi literally bridged to the future whose only goal is to be happy and not just in the general sense that every character wants to be happy by achieving their other goals his mandate from his angel savior nase is to find out what happiness means in a philosophical sense and then acquire it and of course he can't do that if people die because people dying is always sad which is actually a very compelling argument for pacifism if you think about it despite its apparent simplicity even if you're driven entirely by a selfish desire to maximize your own happiness unless you're incapable of feeling empathy that happiness will inevitably be reduced by every human tragedy you become aware of especially if you had a hand in it when they kill even in self-defense most people feel intensely guilty over the life they took and especially over the people left behind by the victim mirai learns this firsthand when his aunt dies even though she was horrendously abusing him helped to murder his parents and chose to kill herself he's sad for her shitty spoiled kids and even his uncle not sad enough to not put the uncle in jail but still so he's got a real concrete philosophical motivation to avoid killing at all costs not just the innate naive aversion to violence that most teenage death game protags drop by the second dark he's kind of like an inverse light yagami driven by an opposite but equally strong conviction that all human life even pure evil life deserves to be preserved and at least on paper that could be pretty cool it's neat to see a hero really put those ideals to the test in a scenario where the violence is coherently character motivated instead of just being an unavoidable part of the game and if he kills there's no excuse for it of course by having mirai stick to those particular convictions that hard while being one of the few characters in the game with an insta-death arrow you do run the risk of fan backlash at the hero being a do-nothing pansy who forces his friends to do all the unpleasant stuff for him but so long as the antagonists are equally grounded in their motivations and actions and he's not letting some crazy anime atrocities slide was that he's gotta fight a reject metal gear solid boss who dual wields anti-tank guns and a psycho junkie bikini nurse whose hobby is making deadly viruses because she does so many drugs so much and she threatens to blanket tokyo with a virulent strain of genetically modified airborne skin melting super aids and they were both given their powers by a rich megalomaniacal emoto guy cosplaying as a superhero who also previously gave flight and brainwashing powers to a teenage lesbian serial killer so he could use her as bait to catch other god candidates with a massive bomb he planted in tokyo tower also before that he killed a bunch of other people including a child but only after making another guy with wings who was handcuffed to that child almost tear her arm out of its socket in front of an entire baseball stadium full of people and mirai still doesn't kill anyone what do you mean he kills the viru wait actually that's a really clever solution to that problem but what about the big bad how's he get got mirai and his girlfriend hold him down and make an old man with lung cancer do it and said old man specifically uses the last ounce of strength in his entire body before he dies from the lung cancer to pull the trigger also because his super speed wings are out the bad man experiences his death by high-powered anti-armor volley and super slow motion like it's the end of dread okay that's pretty metal and old man mukaido did have a pretty big murder boner for metropoli man at the end there so in context it is actually quite a nice final gesture on mirai and saki's part to let him do that but still in most other cases even as someone who fundamentally agrees with the protagonist's moral philosophy it is deeply [ __ ] frustrating to watch him repeatedly refuse to do the one thing that would definitely stop all the killing even when his own inaction directly causes other characters to die horribly like two seconds later by the midpoint of this show mirai is carrying more l's than a convention center in 2007 which we will talk about in greater depth but i just dropped three new names on you out of nowhere so i guess i better explain who they are first sake used to be mirai's childhood friend until his parents died and his aunt and uncle started like pouring alcohol on him and just really treating him like crap and then the kids at school made fun of him for that but he's still got a crush on her and he finds out that she's a god candidate too when she ambushes him with a red arrow what a spicy surprise except not really this causes him to immediately confess the feelings he'd had pent up for years which makes her really uncomfortable not as it would first seem because she doesn't reciprocate the feelings but rather because she acted as a bystander when the other middle schoolers bullied him in order to fit in and then when she went to apologize for that on graduation day she saw him jump off a skyscraper and that's why she met her angel so uh yeah a lot of baggage needs unpacking before they can enjoy that honeymoon but when that's done you better believe that their love affair is as hot and steamy as a raw carrot with the kind of scintillating romantic chemistry you can only get from the man who wrote misa misa [Music] saki and mirai have their issues big ones but at heart they're fundamentally nice straightforward kids who just want what's best for everyone if possible which for the narrative purposes of an edgy superhero death game type thing makes them extremely bland and predictable characters whose role is solely reactive they either try to stop bad guys from doing bad things or try to help good guys accomplish good things but rarely do they make choices for themselves it's only after a tired old former clothing industry guy with lung cancer named mukaido brainwashes a bunch of private eyes to help him track down other candidates that they do anything to move the central plot forward at all and that doesn't happen until episode five mukaido is a really interesting and unique character for this sort of story actually because he doesn't really want to be god and doesn't even think he'll make it to the end of the death game his only concern is making sure his family's okay after he's gone and that's what motivates him to proactively go after metropoli man he can't rest in peace as long as there's a possibility that the villainous superhero could become god and ruin the world for everyone uh think walter white if he got super powers instead of meth now metropoli man is in platinum ends canon actually the protagonist of a recent and popular sentai style superhero tv show whose secret identity is co-opted by a trust fund brat honor student named kanade uryu in order to get the public on his side for the whole god selection thing he's quick to throw that cloud away when his super heroics create an opportunity to kill some other candidates though because as much as he likes the public adoration what he really craves is the only kind of power he doesn't already have and he knows he's probably not gonna win that in a fair god election with his god platform of kill all the ugly peasants and enslave the attractive ones which is basically just a slightly more honest version of what kira wanted and in many respects uryu is just light yagami with the narcissism turned up to 11. and the sister complex turned up to 18 plus for in reality even this grand genocidal ambition is just a cover story for his true purely selfish desire to see his perfect emote one more time in angel form after he accidentally killed her on account as she was thinking about dating another guy so he pushed her off the castle parapet in their mansion's indoor botanical garden and then he had a plastic surgeon taxidermy her corpse so he could hang it up in his bat cave which he owns because he is literally bruce wayne rich also the super suit's not just a costume there's a bunch of cutting edge robotics in there but luckily mukaido's garment industry connections let him even the playing field by making this male spider gwen with bicycle padding type super suit made out of experimental polymers with carbon lacing that makes it totally stab proof which he gives to mirai while he flies around in a full-blown military-grade bomb suit that would normally be way too heavy to fight in but thanks to the wings it's completely trivial to carry that around mirai's hero suit is a bit far-fetched in concept but it is more within the realm of what feels possible in a modern day setting than what metro poly man's wearing and the actual design of it does feel neatly practical the armored bits are clearly placed to cover vital areas without compromising flexibility and it does a good job of hiding near eyes identity without affecting his vision so anyway mukaido also makes a hero suit for saki that is a robot cat girl costume with a form-fitting one hit and your sternum would shatter boob plate and a side skirt that doesn't cover her crotch or butt also the ears double as ar visors that can scan stuff and give her up to the minute information which she literally never uses and her tail which can move doubles as a heat sink for all the computing power that needs and mukaido explains all this before literally turning to the camera and declaring it's all very practical and the costume was clearly built for function over form what are you talking about don't worry about it and like in a vacuum that could be a pretty funny joke i guess but it sounds more than a bit rich coming from a writer who's never been able to write women for [ __ ] and also clearly hates them now that is a pretty strong accusation to make definitely gotta back that one up so uh source all of bakuman also misa misa or you could just look at this show platinum end does contain more prominent female characters than any of oba's previous work but those mainly consist of mirai's selfish abusive aunt who dies in her lingerie a little girl who says three lines and then gets murdered the aforementioned psychotic lesbian rapist serial killer and junkie titty ninja nurse one dead emoto popsicle and a lazy shiftless influencer bimbo who can barely even think for herself and also doesn't really want to and then her happy ending is she doesn't have to because a rich smart guy promises to take care of her forever there are also a few good ones among the show's females three to be exact including a cop's loving loyal wife who is his direct subordinate an unnamed cute girl they put next to this one guy who worships mirai as a god so we know he's not gay and sake who starts her arc is an insincere popular girl but then slowly embraces the simple joys of loving god and cooking for her husband while he watches tv now i'm not saying it's wrong for women to find happiness and things like that if they want to in fact one of the smartest things platinum end has to say in general is that happiness is something we must define for ourselves not something a higher authority can just hand down to us all i'm saying is it's a little telling that all of the surviving guys get happy endings where they're self-actualized within their careers and all of the women get happy endings where they land the good mans who becomes self-actualized within his career and they help remember this is the same mind that could only conceive of a lady fbi agent as the wife of a more successful male fbi agent and then she ended up being way too cool and good at her job anyway which made oba nervous so as soon as she started doing stuff he conveniently tossed her right in front of kira and killed her off like a coward and then nicio easing kind of sort of fixed that by making her the main character of a spin-off light novel in which she and elle investigate the graphically cryptographic serial murders of three la citizens named believe bridesmaid quarter queen and backyard bottom slash those are not nicknames that is simply what the guy who wrote monogatari thinks north american names sound like and who am i to argue with the man who ruined toothbrushes definitely not jeff though probably something like garfield thunder cheeks i don't know what was i talking about right misogyny there's a lot of it in general but also specifically in things that tsugumi oba writes and that doesn't invalidate all of the other things that his stories do exceptionally well or in some cases better than anything else out there but neither do those good points erase the multiple pages that chapter 2 of a manga ostensibly about how cool manga is chooses to dedicate to the semi-autobiographical protagonist who is canonically a genius ranting about how the really smart schoolgirls aren't the ones who get the best grades but the ones who know their place and set their ambitions accordingly [ __ ] yikes man yeah oba used to have a really bad writing habit of making his characters launch into out-of-place soapbox rants about whatever topics got him hot and bothered like that but with platinum end it got really really bad just so much worse and also all those good points i was talking about are kind of completely missing here which only makes the awkward insertion of his opinions and old-timey don draper level sexism stand out all the more which isn't to say that he's not also capable of writing equally terrible male characters hajime sokotani's sole defining trait is that he was the world's ugliest poor kid so poor that he was born in a shed under a bridge and so ugly that literally not even his mother could love his face and eventually she sayoried herself just to get away from it after he meets his angel for what should be self-explanatory reasons hajime uses his red arrows to brainwash a plastic surgeon into turning him into a jojo villain but then every time he tries to talk to a girl his face spontaneously turns into a horse's face so he realizes the rich charismatic metropoli man is just inherently better than him and decides to worship that guy and also try to be his servant and luckily the plastic surgeon that he brainwashed just coincidentally happens to be the same one who told metropoli man how to taxidermy his emote so hajime is able to track him down at his rich kids school and then somehow remodel the dance studio there without anyone noticing to show him his foolproof plan for catching god candidates which is to trap them in a tiny room with a one-way mirror where you can shoot them with the arrow and they can't fly away the pair puts this brilliant plan into action by changing the locks on the local abandoned theme park's giant one-way mirror ball which as we all know is a very common and popular and real fairground attraction because everyone loves being stared at by a public square full of strangers that they can't see that's more fun than roller coasters and hajime also coincidentally managed to torture mukaido's identity out of one of his private detectives so his wife and daughter get tossed inside the mirror ball as bait and because you can only ever carry one other person per set of wings regardless of weight both the old guy and mirai end up trapped in there flying in faster than light circles all night long while hajime stands look out and metropoli man goes back to his house for a beauty nap saki can't join the fight yet because she doesn't have her wings so while all this is going on her angel revel starts applying bubbles of heavenly knowledge directly to his forehead for a rank up which is apparently way harder than it looks because eventually he just gets too tired to do it so he cries and then because apparently that's the first time that an angel has ever cried for a human being in all of history he gets a promotion anyway from angel of trickery to angel of emotion and saki finally gets her wings just in time to sneak up on hajime and hit him with a red arrow and that makes him instantly change sides of course not just because he's suddenly simping for her because his metropoli simping totally cancels that out but also because this is the first time that he's ever felt love in his entire life and that causes him to spontaneously develop an appreciation for the innate value of all human life like when mukaido first put his life on the line for his family hajime was all like ew gross that's dumb and makes me mad but now he totally gets it just in time to smash up the mirror ball and then after metro poly man arrives with the aforementioned metal gear solid reject and titty nurse in tow he ends up taking a poison syringe bullet for sake that she was trying to take for hajime and dies completely unnecessarily since hajime is covered head to toe in high-tech stab proof future fabric that i guess oba forgot about for a second there but at least he takes the titty nurse terrorist out with him by accidentally dropping his sword between her titties which she doesn't even notice for a second there because she's just so aroused at the sight of his body turning into chicken mcnugget paste now obviously there's a lot of problems with the character arc i just outlined one might go so far as to say that the whole thing is made of problems but don't let that dog [ __ ] character writing distract you from how even more dog [ __ ] the action scene you just saw was it is wild to me that a fight of that quality could ever make it into a jump magazine even a spin-off like jump square but i guess that's what clout gets you no matter how you actually earn it [Music] oba and obada made a name for themselves in the world's most popular paper-based wrestling promotion for children by crafting interpersonal interactions between edgy smart asses that felt exactly as intense as a kid whose dad just died bumping laser dicks with the cyborg cockroach who exploderized him and with bakuman they cemented their place as the undisputed kings of that sort of non-battle battle anime that's their brand as a creative team the thing their audience shows up for and as an artist i can certainly respect the desire to move outside a comfort zone like that and grow as creators but no offense fellas nobody wanted to see you do superheroes also you're not good at it well obata is but he can draw anything and even with his highly detailed art the pacing posing and flow of the fights themselves and both the anime and the manga leaves a lot to be desired his intricate subtly expressive style is just better suited to dialogue driven drama than action but that is at least 10 times more true for oba's verbose writing style which does not work for this genre at all battle anime holds our interest because dynamic action makes the fight-or-flight part of our marginally upgraded monkey brains go burr non-battle battle anime lacking the action part of that equation can only achieve the same effect of life or death tension by putting their characters on a razor's edge where failure comes swiftly and decisively and one mistake can cost them everything if mom finds out about the escape plan we're all dead if i lose at rock paper scissors now i'll be sold into slavery oh god if i ask for his phone number wrong the president will know i like him and of course it's elle versus kira whoever's true identity is revealed first will die by removing all margin for error from the actual action non-battle battle anime effectively transplant all the tension and excitement you'd normally find there to the planning and shit-talking phases of your typical shonen fight encounter the character's ability to anticipate each other's moves and their efforts to mislead each other become the most important part of the who will win push and pull equation of the fight oba's talent for writing multi-layered information-dense conversations really shines under these conditions and of course that talent does still have value in a regular old battle anime too but it's not the main thing people want to see and if you use it too much they call that talk no jutsu when you put on jujutsu kaizen or demon slayer you do it not because you want to see people have like a meaningful conversation about their thoughts and feelings on politics but because you want to enjoy the blow by blow back and forth of a good old-fashioned brawl you want to see characters get beat down and get back up again overcoming seemingly impossible odds through sheer force of will and skill to prove their values not just through what they say but what they do which can't really happen when there's a book that you write people's names in it and then they die immediately for obvious reasons or for that matter when there's an arrow that you shoot at someone and then the fight's over because they are either brainwashed or dead that also leaves you with only two defensive options either block the arrow with another arrow or [Music] with the wings which are the only thing faster than an arrow and a good artist can certainly make the execution of both of those types of moves look really cool and skillful you know do a last-minute deflection like or have the characters zip around dogfighting each other like it's an extra jesusy episode of dragon ball z only in dragon ball z they can also take a hit from an energy blast and then keep going even though they're injured and that's pretty dramatic or they can throw a bigger energy blast or lots of energy blasts or an energy wave or just a punch it is probably impossible to create good fight choreography out of a combat system that gives your characters only one attack option and two responses so naturally platinum end has to fall back on strategy and mind games to make up that difference which on paper is a pretty good creative strategy that is what oba's best at writing after all but there's a huge problem baked into this premise which is that platinum ends characters still have super human physical abilities that make it almost impossible to kill or capture them through most conventional means which renders them immune to pretty much every regular human sort of mind game they can only play superhero mind games and unfortunately for oba there are only three kinds of superhero mind game let's settle this in person as equals no tricks but then there are tricks i figured something out about your secret identity and do what i say or the hostage gets it okay technically there are four if you differentiate between holding lots of randos in a city hostage and holding the hero's specific loved ones hostage but really the second case is just a hybrid hostage secret identity play across platinum ends for big drawn out fights there are four different moments where a bad guy uses someone else's leverage to make the hero stand still and await their death only for something unexpected to happen at the last second and save them it happens twice in the finale and on top of that metropoli man uses the threat of killing civilians to draw the heroes out for a confrontation twice first with the lesbian serial killer and her victims then with mukaido's family he only uses let's settle this as equals once to pull in the other god candidates for the slaughter at the baseball stadium which ends up being the most entertaining action scene in the show actually solely by virtue of the fact that the main characters don't get involved because it's such an obvious trap and the idiots who do show up are under no narrative obligation to use optimal tactics or survive the battle mirai also uses the let's settle this on even ground no tricks trick to capture the villain at the end of that arc but that doesn't really count as a mind game because after the fight it's revealed that metro poly man had already been brainwashed and ordered to fall for that specific trick by a kid we've never met before who discovered his true identity off-screen what satisfying storytelling that is they then learn that kid's true identity his name is susamu and he likes to play games when he reveals it to the world on national television along with his power of flight and the existence of the god candidates which starts a global debate on the topic and finally pulls the story into the realm of geopolitical and inter-factional maneuvering where oba's most comfortable as a writer shamey doesn't really take advantage of that speaking of geopolitics it's kind of hard to tell what with the quality level of the anime's art but in the manga it's very clear that susamu is hiding his identity with a donald trump mask also his thing is that he's extremely immature and has no real sense of responsibility or actions having consequences and he thinks that the world would be better off if everyone had a white arrow which seems like it might be a satirical pot shot at the american gun rights lobby but a very weird and kind of subtweety one for an author who typically just has his characters say exactly what he thinks about things if that is the point of this character then his ultimate fate is kind of ironic i guess i honestly just don't know what oba was going for with susamu and also he'll be gone soon so it doesn't really matter but also it's just way way too obvious of a symbol not to mention especially considering they also made a one-shot where trump buys a death note and turns it into a metaphor for american foreign policy and also maybe nuclear weapons i just couldn't not mention it and since susumu will die within moments i had to cram it in somewhere anywho with metropoli man gone the gang can finally start gathering up god candidates to end the selection on a more peaceful note but now that the world's governments know what they can do they've got japanese cops trying to track them down and recruit them to be assassins and american assassins trying to take them out and they actually do manage to take out susamu by sniping him from behind even though he had his wings out at the time and i was pretty sure that made bullets move in slow motion but i guess you have to turn that power on separately so that means that metro poly man willingly experienced his own death in slow motion i don't know feels a bit inconsistent but there's much bigger problems to talk about here mainly the talking which is almost all that happens for the rest of the show after metropoli man's gone [Music] this arc takes up like the last third of the series but all it's about is introducing the last three god candidates who haven't done anything or died yet having them state what their policies as god would be and then deciding when to have a final vote on the topic this process is periodically interrupted by cops and snipers and helicopters showing up and forcing the conversation to change locations but that's just a pacing trick the actual story progression is just a straight line through this one big protracted argument well okay there is one pretty cool action scene mixed in there where they gotta break the influencer lady out of witness protection without compromising the cops who were secretly on their side by making it seem like they've all just been brainwashed by her red arrow but that's pretty much the only time in the entire story that that arrows used as anything other than a non-lethal alternative to the white arrow or an excuse to make a character do something the plot needs them to do so in the end that taste of more creativity only makes you miss what could have been all the more when i first heard the limitations on that power that you can only control 14 people at once they only fall in love for 33 days and you can only make them do something that they would normally do for love the gears in my brain immediately started turning trying to figure out how one of oba's brilliant schemer characters might work around those limitations armed with just 14 or maybe 28 arrows what pressure points would someone have to hit to effectively take control of say the local police force or the government and use that against the other god candidates how would the other candidates fight back we never find out the arrows are eventually used that way but only to open the way to a final televised confrontation between all the god candidates which the government then stays out of completely and the double nobel prize winning super genius who does that doesn't even put in the work to figure out how to control the government he just hands the prime minister a red arrow and says hey shoot the 14 people you think would be most useful which is actually a very efficient solution to that problem that a character like that would totally come up with so i can't call it bad writing but that doesn't make it any less disappointing that we don't get to see the whole political manipulation process play out i guess there just wasn't time for that with all the talking that had to happen though in addition to the influencer lady who would just make everyone rich if she was god we have two last candidates left to meet shuji nakami is a middle school age shut-in whose whole darn recently divorced family was miserable enough to end it all around the time he met his angel and then did thanks to his red arrow encouragement and if he became god he'd make suicide easier and more socially acceptable to help people like him and his family even with his angelic powers nakumi's not all that keen on living but as the candidates begin to realize that whoever becomes god will have to spend hundreds maybe thousands of years alone in the spirit world separated from their loved ones that actually makes him the least disagreeable candidate since saki would really miss mirai and nobody else wants to do it so before they even have their final meetings pretty much everyone's on board to give the kid the job but there is one last guy who still has to sign off on it and unfortunately that guy is professor gaku yoneda the aforementioned genius winner of nobel prizes in both literature and physics as an ardent atheist yonero believes that god and his angels are actually just parasitic alien entities that feed on the energy of human belief and the whole selection process is just a trick to keep their power going so the best thing to do is make sure that no one fuses with the creature called god and the cycle ends and that argument ends up carrying a lot of weight in part because gaku's a very respected scholar who lots of terminally online people look up to including nakaumi but it also holds weight because he's the final candidate backed by a special ranked angel the insanely creepy angel of destruction mooney which means that he has a white arrow and while he does go through the trouble of mind controlling the government so everyone can talk things through on tv in a big football stadium that's actually just an elaborate ruse to make the other candidates let their guards down so he can kill them with that white arrow and then do a simultaneous murder-suicide with nakaumi thus ensuring that there will never be just one surviving god candidate who would obviously otherwise automatically become god the second they were the only survivor and mirai actually goes into this encounter anticipating the professor's betrayal finally willing to kill if he's left with no other option even but that doesn't actually matter because then saki gets tied up with duct tape and held hostage so he has to just stand still and wait to get eated for the third time in the show then at the last second his angel nase saves him just like she did at the start when he jumped which she's able to do even though normally the real and spirit worlds can't touch each other because she was born from a single-celled life-form that infected a scrape on god's foot when he first came to earth but surprise yoneda already knew all of that because his angel pulled them and it was all part of his master plan all along to make her break the rule that angels can't interfere in the selection so she gets demoted to rank two and mirai loses his wings which allows the professor to blackmail him with sake's life in the exact same way again only this time it's saki who swoops in to save him at the last second because it turns out that nakami doesn't have it in him to kill someone else who doesn't want to die after all not even when his favorite influencer tells him to do it also the other influencer tricked him into giving her his white arrow which she then uses to ambush the professor but then nase swoops in to save him at the last minute and that causes her to immediately get her powers back literally within the same episode where she lost them because logically helping another candidate is the opposite of helping her candidate that is one of the only two times in the entire story that any of the rules surrounding the angels in the ranking system actually matters and it doesn't actually matter it's just padding for this encounter come to think of it i haven't really talked about the angels much have i well the reason for that is they're not actually that important to the story and the most interesting thing about them is their butts except in the mango where obata's art is really nice obviously he uses this cool screen tone effect for their outlines that makes them look like they're part of the backgrounds and really sells the otherworldly feel of them but obviously the anime doesn't capture that at all so there it's just the butts of course they also have personalities called detached vaguely sociopathic ones that clearly come from the same mind that wrote the shinigami and that can be kind of entertaining but all they ever really use them for is dumping exposition and providing color commentary on whatever the humans are doing the metaphysical questions the angels raised just by existing are honestly infinitely more interesting than they are as characters that said nasa does make a difference right at the end here and being saved from the brink of death by angels twice now does finally give the professor cause to reconsider how pushy he's being with his particular religious views so instead of ending the death game with even more death the candidates are finally able to talk things through and reach a solution that kinda sorta works for everyone the same solution that everyone agreed on seven episodes ago where nakayumi takes the gig because no one else wants it only now he also makes a promise to look for answers to the true nature of god and send them back to the professor somehow to help state his scientific curiosity and the professor in turn promises to financially take care of the influencer girl who has no other marketable skills and is very concerned that she won't be able to influence so good once she loses her red arrow there are many many things about how this whole battle royale shakes out that feel forced and silly but i do really like that they found a non-violent solution to this conflict even if it's a kind of contrived one it shows a real commitment to the theme of pacifism on the part of the authors it's the one conversation in the show where all the philosophical naval gazing feels properly justified because it's actually taking the plot somewhere and most importantly it takes yoneda's character in a really interesting direction oba has always had a penchant for writing geniuses and there's a good reason to believe that's because he sees a lot of himself in those sorts of characters elle's habit of sitting barefoot and folding up into himself on a chair as he thinks about investigations is purportedly based on the posture that oba himself adopts while he's thinking about his stories elle says multiple times that light reminds him of himself so that connection's obvious and bakuman's takagi is the writer half of a writer artist duo pretty self-explanatory and it's easy to look at that trend in oba's writing and come to the conclusion that the dude's pretty full of himself an impression that yonira doesn't really do much to help at first although the character's design doesn't exactly scream self-aggrandizing self-insert goku is one ugly [ __ ] looking basically like a human version of ryuk with a bit more nose and slightly narrower walleyes on top of that he's got many of the same mannerisms as l like constantly being barefoot and fiddling with his feet and talking down to everyone he meets which instantly become a lot less quirky and charming and a lot more off-putting and weird when the quiet shut-in guy who's doing them isn't hot also when we finally get to the true ending it proves definitively that the god hypothesis the professor was literally willing to stake his life on is completely and objectively wrong writing so many characters like this may well be a sign of oba's arrogance but gakku's tragic flaw is that he's arrogant convinced that every conclusion he's ever reached about reality is correct solely on the basis of his own strong logic because he doesn't want to ask anyone else's input he despises his own fame and wants nothing more than to be left alone with his own thoughts and research another reflection of the notoriously reclusive and still anonymous oba because other people are a distraction or at least that's how he rationalizes it though really it's because gaku doesn't understand others and they kind of scare him his brain is just geared for scientific logic to the detriment of his emotional intelligence and while he tries to make up for that by studying psychology which apparently lets him write a pretty good book using that in an actual social situation is like trying to learn how to drive by studying engineering ultimately all of his plans are undone by his own failure to understand the feelings of the other god candidates even the one who bought all of his books and in the wake of that he ends up deconstructing the entire model of genius that both death note and bakuman are built on after some soul searching he concludes that no one person is innately better than another some are just built different in ways that happen to leave them more motivated than others to achieve certain things even if it comes at a detriment to other parts of their lives he argues that only those achievements in and of themselves not the people who achieved them can truly be called genius and deserve the respect that we give that word this is an incredibly based take and what's especially based about it is that even if you hate platinum end and think oba and obata have totally lost their mojo since death note that only serves as further evidence of yeoneda's point which in a world where many people seriously see characters like rick sanchez and white yagami is aspirational figures where sad lonely kids like naka umi really do hang on the words of academic ideologues peddling questionable self-help advice even as their own mental health fades and the benzos take over that's an extremely important point for writers like oba in particular to make it's also far from the only base take in this series i already discussed the strong case it makes for pacifism which this end thing reinforces kanade uryu is despite how poorly the story itself uses him a hilariously savage caricature of japan's spoiled capitalist elite that also functions as a deconstruction of light yagami's entire archetype and the show's atheistic model of gods and angels is a sort of symbiotic parasite that feeds on human belief while allowing for the creation of more improbably complex life forms and civilizations is genuinely fascinating and kind of an apt metaphor for how human belief can reshape our reality i should probably expand on that now obviously whatever god or gods you the viewers specifically believe in are totally real don't worry about it but you do got to admit all the other phony religions that are just larping their gods have still done a ton to shape the development of the societies around them so in the sense that they really do have a direct impact on how the world works and how people think you could say that these gods are real solely because a large number of people believe in them this is also true of things like borders and money and if we could channel that power of collective belief more deliberately we really could build a much brighter future for ourselves just the way that yoneda theorizes albeit probably without the happy science style spirit technology angle that a more literal reading of this literary device implies speaking of science and happiness though platinum end also offers a logically rigorous examination of happiness and suicide as sort of dualistic philosophical themes on the former subject it makes the case that human happiness can only be maximized by giving as many people as possible as many opportunities as possible to find their own kind of happiness kind of a basic message by itself but consider how that ties in to the other theme the actual motivations for each of the individual 13 suicides that incite this whole story vary wildly but they all boil down to the god candidates being denied the opportunity to pursue happiness by forces outside their control be they abusive and controlling family a society that expects unfair things of them a fan base that won't leave them alone the world's ugliest face or the implacable realities of death and your emoteo ain't into incest that no amount of money or power can ever overcome platinum end concludes that suicide isn't really an individual choice unless you're born rich but rather a societal problem that we need societal scale change to effectively combat i deeply agree with so many of the things that oba is saying here and i find even more of the things i don't agree with to at least be thoroughly thought provoking on paper but at the end of the day i'm not out here reviewing a philosophy textbook i'm an anime critic and as an anime platinum end has bad fights a plot that is at once rushed and plotting main characters who are less interesting than everyone around them side characters who all feel like they belong in completely different genres one of which is grindhouse pornography too many meaningless cliffhangers and on the whole about 40 too much dialogue it is a very difficult show to enjoy anyway but ironically as i argued in my cowboy bebop video you shouldn't need to agree with a good piece of art to recognize it as good and by the same token i can't let the fact that i agree with something blind me to its many glaring faults that's not to say there's no narrative value in these themes platinum ends ending ends up being quite a bit stronger and more memorable than the rest of the show because it uses those ideas to drive the plot forward and focuses on tying them all together in a genuinely surprising way that really adds to them whereas death notes ending feels weak because it kind of disregards most of the story's themes in favor of showing us a too loud too long rendition of some people think they can outsmart me maybe maybe i've yet to meet one that can outsmart a bullet but the endings of stories unlike their intros don't get to exist in a vacuum in order for the audience to even care about what an ending is saying or what it does well the rest of the story has to make them care first and at that platinum end fails spectacularly at many points it feels like the only point of the story is to put one of oba's characters on a soapbox so they can say these things and that kind of shitty contrived storytelling only makes it less likely that the audience will take what's being said seriously or give the writer the benefit of the doubt which is why i think many people will write off this show's genuinely audacious and clever ending as just edgy try hard [ __ ] i guess we should talk about what happens in that ending though platinum end already subverts the death game format in a way that meaningfully supports its pacifistic themes by having the big dumb final battle fizzle out part way through so everyone can talk things out but it doesn't stop there with god being chosen it keeps going the show cuts between scenes of the god candidates and other characters building new lives for themselves in the wake of everything that happened and naka umi as uh god elect i guess pondering over the true nature of his existence and the true purpose that he and the angels serve we learn many curious things about how heaven works in these chapters like the fact that all the spirits that we've been watching angels drag off throughout the series are actually just like save states of a person's condition in the moment before death not a true continuation of their consciousness though they can be used as templates for new angels that's all pretty neat neat enough for god to spend the next six years thinking about it though because time flows a lot slower in heaven it seems like a lot less than that to him when he checks back in with his friends professor yoneda seems a lot happier with a lady in his life now even though he's not really making much progress with understanding the red arrow that nakami left with him saki and mirai are blissfully married and have opened their own flower shop hoshi got a promotion to police chief and yumiki's still by his side and every 40 seconds someone somewhere commits suicide which nakaumi with his new omniscient perspective finally understands as something much bigger than an individual choice it's a big problem that needs to be solved but one whose solution is far beyond the capacity of any individual even one with the knowledge and power of god to solve now that his omniscient mind is aware of it nakamumi can't very well ignore this but to even begin addressing it he'd need to find a way to fundamentally reorganize our entire civilization from a pocket dimension where he can't directly communicate with anyone which would be hard enough for someone who actually cares like mirai to do so nakami doesn't he just says hey angels what's that and then eats himself the second they look away then with god gone all of the angels start disappearing followed by all life on earth starting with the humans and as our planet is reduced to a dull grey dust ball hanging in the void eternal beings of pure energy in the distant depths of space lament that this experiment has once again failed to provide them with a way to eat themselves and they contemplate sending down a new god seed to try the whole thing again the end unlike death notes one note conclusion this gives you a lot to chew on it's not even clear if it's a sad or happy ending that's ultimately up to your interpretation like yeah the candidates clearly picked the wrong guy to be god mirai would have done whatever he could to help and definitely kept going instead of just giving up but that would have left him and saki miserable and alone for the rest of their lives which in his case would have been centuries or millennia that's the exact opposite of what nase and his parents wanted for him and the six years of mortal happiness that he gets isn't much but it's far more than the suicidal kid we met at the start of this story ever could have hoped for platinum end makes a thorough case that persevering and clinging to life against the odds is the only way that any of us ever find happiness save for a lucky few who are born into it and don't even appreciate it till they lose it and that it's worth fighting for that possibility even in the face of the greater inevitability that one day it'll all just end likely without any fanfare or explanation in fact it is that very unpredictable certainty that makes those fleeting moments of joy as precious as they are even as it makes that case though it acknowledges how uncompelling that reasoning would be to the scores of people around the world who've spent their entire lives on the losing end of a competition they never signed up for and don't have the tools to play properly telling people to cheer up and look on the bright side will never solve this problem god's not going to do it for us and if we don't solve it ourselves which we probably won't considering how we act sooner or later the death drive will consume us all for the death drive this platinum ending posits is not just a quirk of human psychology but the animating force behind all sapient life in the universe literally the only reason we exist according to this story's cosmology is to help our unknowable creators find a way to stop existing now that their even more unknowable creators are gone because the prospect of closure is the only thing that can ever make their tedious eons of life bearable and give it a semblance of meaning you a fan of cosmic horror try some cosmic depression this ending is far from perfect but next to death notes and after the rest of this show it's like watching a dude take a homer simpson tumble all the way down a cliff then right at the end he does a willy wonka roll into a slightly shaky gymnast dismount it doesn't make what came before any less painful to watch but it does at least reframe it as a little more than pointless blind idiocy in fact if you pull back and look at the whole mess as a whole it's almost uncanny how close it comes to being the exact inverse of death note there a delicately tuned orchestra of human ambition and folly lost its antagonist conductor at the top of the third act and broke down into a cacophonous [ __ ] of contrived idiocy here a cacophonous [ __ ] of contrived idiocy kills off its incompetent villain maestro at the start of the third act and comes together for a single brief but brilliant moment into a beautifully poignant thought-provoking and unnerving piece of art a platinum end if you will that most people won't appreciate because the rest of it sucks so hard so if all that was intentional and this is your moriarty-esque subversive master stroke where everything we thought we knew gets turned on its head i'm sorry oba but i don't think most people will notice or care and that's fair because none of this magically makes the rest of it worth sitting through some beer and some buddies might but that's an entirely separate equation in aggregate the show's basically one colossal mistake but it's the kind of mistake that only people with an abundance of talent and the few genuinely great ideas just enough to be overconfident about all their bad ones could make the kind of mistake you can learn a lot from and write a way too long video essay about kind of a beautiful mistake from the right angle after it's had some work done when it's not flashing it's horse teeth and that might just be my favorite kind of mistake no no i i definitely prefer the messy loud kind close second though though real quick before i go speaking of mistakes if you want to know why a certain upcoming tv anime adaptation is going to be a huge one you should check out yazzy's new video on a certain manga about a dog lover that is definitely not for dog lovers it's one of her funniest videos yet and uh low-key it's probably gonna be a prequel to an upcoming hottest trash of the season i'm jeff though talk no jutsu master signing out from deep inside my own [ __ ] you

Channel: Mother's Basement

Views: 1,203,274

Keywords: Mother's Basement, Anime, Anime Analysis, anime review, painfully honest review, death note, platinum end, bakuman, takeshi obata, tsugumi ohba, shounen jump, death game, mirai nikki, light yagami, anime roast, mirai, saki, gaku yoneda, metropoliman, bad anime, platinum end manga, philosophy, god selection, battle royale, painfully honest, review, good anime, platinum end ending explained, death note philosophy, platinum end philosophy

Id: YAK01s80jus

Length: 64min 26sec (3866 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 29 2022