Autumn 2021 First Impressions – Platinum End

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 24

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: Ever since the death of his family and his adoption by an unloving aunt and uncle, Mirai hasn’t felt happiness in his life. After his middle school graduation he walks to the roof of a tall building and leaps off its edge. However, before he hits the ground he’s rescued by an angel, glowing and clad in white, who claims to be his guardian angel. Her goal is to grant him happiness, and she provides him with the tools to do so – a red arrow that causes its targets to fall in love with him, and angel wings that grant him flight and super speed. Mirai doesn’t feel as though he’ll ever be happy, but his first flight is exhilarating and he begins to believe that his angel might be telling the truth.

The red arrow has the added benefit of its target doing whatever the caster asks, so Mirai uses it on his aunt to confirm a horrible truth – the accident that killed his other family members was actually a murder committed by his uncle and aunt. The magic of the arrow causes his aunt to atone for her sin through death and Mirai escapes into the night. Mirai’s guardian angel, called Nasse, fills him in on some other important details. There are 13 angel users around that are vying with one-another to become the next god – and now Mirai has become involved in this deadly quest.

Impressions: Life is full of hardship, but it can also be filled with happiness… on it surface, this series seems to introduce this message via the protagonist, Mirai. It’s a lesson that many of us need to hear from time-to-time, especially when the situation in our world has taken a down-turn. Yet, this doesn’t appear to be a story of a traumatized young man working toward some sort of inner peace; rather, it gives off the air of something much darker and misanthropic that seems to contradict a lot of the more inspirational messaging that occasionally pokes through the clouds.

I’m going to just reiterate once again that, while I can enjoy stories that focus on the darker parts of human nature, including really awful things like trauma and abuse, the caveat to that is that I can only really engage with it if there seems to be some semblance of reality at its core. Trauma is a complicated beast that manifests differently for every person, and its aftermath is often the sort of emotional struggle that’s really difficult to portray in a meaningful way except over an extended period or story arc. I don’t think it’s wrong for this story to start out with Mirai’s attempted suicide, because on paper his life experiences are really heavy and would have weighed on him to the point that suicide may have seemed like a better option. And yet… Mirai’s reactions and emotions are portrayed extremely melodramatically and over-the-top, his aunt and uncle are cartoonish in their villainy, and the camera seems to relish in the gore and violence as it happens. Combined, these other factors make it seem as though the creators didn’t have a good handle on how trauma actually looks; it seems more concerned with showing rivulets of blood dripping down a woman’s ass and thighs as she bleeds out from a self-inflicted knife wound.

I think that alone really sums up the grotesqueness of this episode. It takes a decent concept – a traumatized teen getting a second chance at happiness – and turns it into a death game dripping with misanthropy, melodrama, and weird ass shots. It’s just not very compelling to me.

Pros: I like that Mirai’s family continues to serve as a positive touch-point in his life. His memories of his family and especially his mother are the parts of the episode that I enjoyed the most, primarily because they served as a nice reprieve from the violence and abuse that filled much of the remainder of the episode.

I’ve always dreamed about flying; whenever someone poses the question about what super power I’d like to have, being able to fly is always the first one that comes to mind. I think this episode gives a sense of how amazing being able to fly freely might be.

Cons: Nasse is just such a strange character. She’s sort of divorced from certain concepts of human morality – she suggests that, in order to get money, Mirai should kill his uncle and cousins so that he could inherit back the ill-gotten inheritance they stole from Mirai. I’m having a difficult time figuring out whether this is meant to be funny or whether they’re truly trying to lend a sense of foreignness and unreality to her character (I suspect the latter) but it just feels kind of gross and creepy to me.

The tone of this episode is mostly serious and fairly dark, and yet many of the shots go out of their way to show women’s butts. Nasse is the character who most often falls victim to this weird leering camera, but Mirai’s aunt’s death scene becomes weirdly sexualized by the camera angles showing her from the back. It’s tacky and tasteless.

Content Warnings: Child abuse, partner abuse, murder, suicide (attempted), self-harm resulting in death, hypnotic manipulation, PTSD.

Would I Watch More? – This show feels like this season’s edgy pick and I’m just not really feeling that at the moment.