Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
Let’s get one thing clear straight away; suicide is not a funny topic. It’s a very serious mental health crisis that has been, and continues to be, a defining issue for the modern age. But that doesn’t mean that all fiction that deals with suicide necessarily treats it with due gravitas. Sometimes, the result is, if only in a deeply uncomfortable sort of way, unintentionally funny. Sometimes the result is Platinum End.
Toss any notions of a piece of art “earning it” or not out the window. Platinum End resoundingly does not. What we have here is a naked power / revenge fantasy about a suicidal, depressed teenager (that’d be Mirai, our lead) that goes in some truly weird directions in the meager 22 minutes of its opening episode. The very first thing that actually happens in the anime is that he tosses himself off a skyscraper. In a more serious story this would feel bad to watch. But Platinum End‘s opening minutes are so po-facedly stoic that they’re difficult to take seriously.
But those few minutes are not what we’re here to talk about. Because then, as Mirai falls, he is rescued by an angel, and everything goes topsy-turvy. Over the course of some amount of minutes, this angel, Nasse, quickly explains that she’s rescued Mirai in order to save him from depression by way of giving him superpowers; the ability to mind-control people and angel wings that let him fly super-quickly, respectively. Somewhere in here is an out of place but genuinely touching sequence where Mirai learns to fly. It is quickly brushed away by other things.
For example; Nasse is kind of incredibly evil.
Nonbinary people are presumably safe from its effects.
If Nasse were not part of this show, it would be unwatchable. If Mirai did everything he does in this episode–and trust me, we’ll get to that–of his own accord, he’d be an utterly wretched protagonist. But Nasse, an incarnation of a truly basic joke (“she looks all cute and such, but she’s actually horrible!”), makes Platinum End tick. At least on some level. Almost from the moment she and Mirai meet, she’s all bad suggestions all the time, like a reverse guilty conscience. She’s the devil on your shoulder disguised as an angel; and surprise, you don’t have an actual angel. She is, in the purest sense of the word, incredible.
Were the show solely Nasse encouraging Mirai to do awful things, it might be legitimately great. It’s unfortunately forced to settle for merely funny-bad because of what those awful things actually are, and because of Mirai’s motive for going along with them.
You see, Mirai’s backstory is that when he was seven years old, his entire family died because someone planted a bomb in their car. He was taken in by his aunt and uncle, who proceeded to abuse him all the time….And that’s basically all we get. This isn’t to say that there aren’t real people in situations this bad, because there certainly are, but it all feels so perfunctory that it’s hard to get any emotion out of it. Panic laughter, perhaps, but that’s all.
My life was Angel Beats! levels of sad so now I’m moping on a Mayan temple.
Nasse ends up informing Mirai that the bomb in said car was planted by his adoptive family. Understandably both suspicious and furious, he confronts his aunt, who he uses his “red arrow” of mind-control powers on. Things get out of hand; she tries to seduce him (ew), and when his uncle barges into the room, Mirai screams that the both of them should just die. Since his aunt is under his mind control spell, she promptly stabs herself in the neck and bleeds everywhere. It’s astoundingly tasteless and, in more than one sense, pretty gross!
The thing is, the episode more or less just ends there, but not without dropping one more twist. There’s a cut to a few days afterward where Mirai is hiding out in a hotel. And here is where we learn–in a setup shamelessly nicked from The Future Diary and, honestly, probably many other stories too–that twelve other people in Mirai’s situation have been chosen as “God candidates.” One of them will eventually replace God. Who is quite strongly implied to be The Christian God, based on what we see of him. Now we don’t get the rules for this particular contest just yet, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this is a death game setup, especially as Nasse cheerfully informs Mirai that he has “the White Arrow”, too. Essentially a beam of light that lets him kill anyone instantly.
Pshaw! Who’s ever heard of such a thing?
The very last thing we see is one of the other candidates, dressed up in an off-brand Kamen Rider outfit, scream that he’s a hero of justice while he impales a different candidate with his own white arrow. Perhaps this fellow (who has a full rainbow of the power-containing colored bands that Mirai has only three of) is our main antagonist. It’s too early to say for sure.
And with all of that finally out of the way, Platinum End‘s first episode, well, ends.
I don’t find myself at a genuine loss for words very often. What the hell do you say about this kind of thing? It certainly isn’t good, not in any traditional sense. And while the first episode is far better than, say, the 3D CG ten-car pileup of Tesla Note‘s, it really doesn’t mark this down as a must-watch.
But, I know myself, and I know the modern seasonal anime landscape. This is one of Those anime. Your Detectives, your High-Rise Invasions, your Gleipnirs and such. And here I go, marching right into Hell’s mouth yet again. I really, truly, do not know what’s good for me. Expect Platinum End to return on this blog, even though it probably doesn’t deserve to.
What a world!
Grade: D
The Takeaway: Unless you’re as fascinated with true schlock as I am, you should probably not watch this. But if you are, this is conversely almost a must-watch. Keep possible triggers in mind though, even this first episode has quite a bit of astoundingly insensitive material on self-harm, suicide, spousal and familial abuse, and depression. I understand the impulse to watch garbage better than most; but do so responsibly, friends!
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