Is Platinum End the Successor of Death Note? – This Week in Anime

Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata captured anime and manga readers’ attention with the exploits of Light Yagami in Death Note as he tried to outwit his pursuers while dispensing his version of “justice.” Their new series Platinum End introduces a different type of death game and protagonist, but is it a worthy follow-up to the ultra hit series?

This series is streaming on Crunchyroll

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Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

Steve

Nick, a new year is supposed to be all about new beginnings. Or rather, that’s what I’d say if all of my optimism hadn’t been sapped dry by the last twelve months. And since I’m not about to let 2022 catch me off guard, let’s start the year right with an ongoing anime that has “End” in its title.


By the way, graphic design is my passion.

Nick

That’s right, we’re covering the new death game anime from the creators of DEATH NOTE. And this time, that daredevil duo have come to really show their stuff, daring to ask the important questions, like: What if Death Note was bad, but you could always see Ryuk’s ass?

Honestly I’d prefer seeing more of Ryuk’s spooky apple-bottom than this featureless angelic posterior, but alas.

And you know he’s rocking that Dafoe Dumpy. We were robbed.

Anyway, despite what some of the shot selection would have you think, this show isn’t actually about The Holy Pancake Ass. Though maybe it should be.

There are a lot of things it seems Platinum End should be about, yet it manages to swerve out of the way of anything fun or interesting with disappointing dexterity. Instead, it’s mostly about this sad sack and his valiant—if futile—efforts to weasel out of being the story’s protagonist.

It’s funny to me because, like, this should be a slam dunk right? Death Note was such a powerful 2000s-era edgelord hit that it’s still clogging up Hot Topic merch walls to this day. You’d think taking the brains behind that and making a death game – the most common of all edgelord anime premises – would be a license to print money. Yet this show (and the manga) have been about as exciting as competitive lawn mowing.

The premiere at least showed a little promise? Like, Mirai gets his angel powers and pseudo-accidentally makes his evil aunt stab herself in the neck to death, after which he watches another angel retrieve her soul from her bloody body while having this glowing revelatory moment in his own corner of the room. It’s disjointed and schlocky and messed up in the way I want these edgefests to be.

Unfortunately that scene is bookended by two lengthy scenes of Mirai’s literal guardian angel explaining in painful detail how the whole god competition and powers work. Which is really the show’s Achilles heel. For every hilarious, grimdark idea it has, there’s 10-20 minutes of boring dialogue separating them at minimum. And that really puts a damper on having an evil tokusatsu character kill a man in a parking garage.

Seems like not a single episode can escape this seraphic minutiae that almost never amounts to anything. It’d be one thing if it were riffing on, say, the Bible’s predilection towards certain numbers, but I don’t think Jesus was out there multiplying 31.6 loaves of bread.

Oh man, can you imagine a version of this thing just stuffed to the gills with Da Vinci Code style numerology bullshit? Instead the only real biblical references we get are God giving his toughest battles to his least applicable soldiers. In that only the suicidally depressed can become God.

It’s wild that, for all the ways a story could take that conceit and use it to explore a wide gamut of tough, thorny topics, Platinum End only uses it as the explanation for why all the God candidates happen to be from Japan. Big yikes.

There’s a loooooot of weird baggage that just kinda gets put aside through this show’s exposition. Like the reasoning for only suicidal people being God candidates is that they are, in the show’s view, the people who would most want to change the world with unlimited power. Not necessarily change for the better, just…change it. Which is where this Big Bad Beetle Boy comes in:

Please, Nick, use his full name: Metropoliman. Because everyone else in the show uses it all the time, in the most serious lines of dialogue, and it never stops being funny.

He really is one of the precious few characters who add color to Platinum End. At first, it’s through his over-the-top tokusatsu hero schtick, but he’s also fun once he drops the metaphorical mask and goes full villain. And leave it to the Death Note creators to not shy away from murdering a child in broad daylight to mark that heel turn. That’s the caliber of malicious moxie I want from them.

He’s basically the only person having fun here, including the creators. You can just sense with every line that they wish he was the actual protagonist of this thing.

That’s exactly it! He’s basically just a shittier Light Yagami, but personality-wise, that’s still a cut above almost everybody else here.

Whom among us hasn’t frozen their imouto in carbonite and used her as pretense for taking over the world? This is just what normal boys do.


But I also love that Kanade is actually so bad at being a undetectably calculating villain that even his dumb normie friend catches on.

It’s funny, honestly. It’s like the creators realized they made this guy too smart and entertaining compared to the actual protags, so they immediately turn him into an idiot who also creeps on preteens just so we don’t get any funny ideas about rooting for Mr. Psycho Ranger.

It’s especially good when he just murders a classmate in the middle of lunchbreak. Doesn’t even wait five minutes to corner her, just arrows her through a door ten seconds after she annoys him. Just look at his face: he’s already bored of being in the show and ready to give up. Can’t blame him.

Look, he’s got a lot on his plate okay? Not only is he busy being a supervillain, he also has a whole team of subcontracted villains to supervise. You think it’s easy managing murderous homophobic stereotypes?

“Hey now those better not be predatory lesbian tropes I’m hearing in here.”

Now you might think a subplot about a crazed lesbian serial killer who abducts, rapes, and kills teenagers would be the kind of trash that’s at least like, interesting. But sadly this Future Diary reject gets blown up 20 minutes later and is never mentioned again. Like we just took a weird non sequitur into the creators’ pixiv bookmarks.

Yeah, it brings me no pleasure to report that Misurin, in spite of her quick exit, is one of the better parts of the show. Dumb, garish offensiveness is what Platinum End should be chock full of, but we are allowed neither nice things nor awful things here. Just bland things.

Now it may seem like we’re spending a lot of time talking about the villains here, and we are. That’s because the good guys in the show could suck the paint off the side of a boat just by monologuing at it.

A grown adult hands our two leads a pair of guns, no strings attached, and they turn him down. That’s all you need to know about them. They’re losers.

God bless Mukaido. He’s not enough to save this show from its worthless protagonist, but he’s at least trying.


“Couldn’t tell ya how that happened.”

I love Mukaido, because Mirai goes on this big spiel about not wanting to use his angel powers to acquire money, citing that it wouldn’t be “right.” And then Mukaido robs some rich folks to help support his family after he’s gone, and everyone agrees that he was correct and awesome to do so. Because he was.

One might say “hey, that’s kind of a weird, waffley, and inconsistent way to write your characters’ sense of morality” and buddy, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

I mean that is the big wobbly pillar going down the spine of the entire story. It is, ostensibly, an ongoing philosophical inquiry into tough ethical questions, but in practice, it’s Mirai looking at variations of the trolley problem and whining a lot.

Is it even really a trolley problem if the individual person tied to the track is also the person who built and started up the trolley, and explicitly wants to kill people with it, and has run over at least a dozen people with a trolley already?

That’s what I’d call a very easy variation of the trolley problem, but you wouldn’t know it if you asked Mirai.

Yeahhhhhh. So there’s a lot of ways to write a compelling character who doesn’t believe in killing people. Look at damn near any non-90’s superhero comic for an example. But to do that, you kinda have to actually believe in pacifism as a philosophy on some level. And Platinum End does not. Not even a little bit.

God, it owns that Mirai’s huge heroic speech at the end of the most recent episode boils down to “I’ll trust the criminal justice system.” It’s like Platinum End has active contempt for Mirai and what he stands for. However, it still stops short of channeling that resentment into anything poignant or worthwhile, which is why even a heavily ironic reading doesn’t do the show many favors.

It’s fucking stunning, honestly. Mirai is perhaps the most philosophically bankrupt anime protagonist I’ve ever seen. His whole philosophy comes down to “killing you myself would make me sad, thus ruining my life. So I will make someone else do it and ruin their life instead. I’m the good guy!”

It’s a moral code built entirely on empty platitudes his mom told him when he was six, because that’s the most a six-year-old can understand. When they grow up, people usually question those basic tenets and end up with a fuller and more fluid set of ethics that incorporate the innumerable nuances of the real world. Tho I suppose I can’t blame Mirai entirely for never maturing. It’s not his fault his parents bought a Tesla.

Yet he’s our hero, while beautiful, pure souls like hers are relegated to villainy. It ain’t fair.

I think Ohba was just salty he never pulled Whisperain in Arknights. So he made his own.

I certainly cannot cast a stone there. And I do also genuinely appreciate Fuyuko for bringing the bonkers back, however briefly, to Platinum End. Like, I don’t know why everyone is so concerned about white arrows and becoming God when she’s concocted a virus that can kill everyone on the planet. Seems like that would be pretty good for world domination!

It’s just one of her in-pack accessories that comes when you buy her at the Metal Gear Surplus Store. Though obviously this guy comes with the full kit:

Which aisle has the Definitely Not Donald Trump mask?

See that’s a problem from the adaptation. In the manga it is uncomfortably clear that’s a Trump Mask.


Why? You’ll have to kill me and take my wings and arrows to find out because only God knows the answer to that question.
Though I suspect it was practice for when they had Trump buy the Death Note in a special chapter. Which happened. This is real. It’s canon. There’s nothing we can do about it.

And man, I wish Platinum End had more batshit and tasteless stuff like that in it. I’m not going into this series expecting any deep philosophical or political commentary. I just want to have a good, gory time with a bunch of weirdos fighting to the death while wearing aesthetically inappropriate angel wings. Is that so much to ask?

What, you mean you weren’t charmed by our secondary villain’s motivation of uh, checks notes…being so ugly his mom died?

I admit I thought The Ugly Barnacle had a lot of pathos the first time I read it, but I didn’t care much for this reboot.


Jokes aside, this is a toddler’s grasp of what a tragic backstory is.

Honestly I kind of love Hajime, solely out of spite. He’s not a good character by any definition. He sucks ass and his is the worst kind of shaggy dog story. But the show has such barely contained contempt for him that I almost want to protect him like you want to save a puppy from an owner who yells at it too much.

Totally agree. Platinum End might not bother pretending to have empathy for him, but he has more concrete motivation and personality than our protagonist, so he surpasses the show’s extremely low bar nevertheless.
He also loses his mind over a catgirl, which is more relatable than anything Mirai does.

If only he weren’t so easily swayed by fetish techwear.

The only part of the show I respect is this gratuitous technical explanation for the ostentatious catgirl powersuit.

Mukaido better hope he dies in this big fight with Metropoliman, otherwise he’ll have to explain to his wife why he included boob armor when he made this teenage girl’s cat kigurumi.

While we’re on the subject, we may as well ask the current God the reason behind Revel’s wing placement. With the emphasis on behind.

Haven’t you ever heard the saying? Every time you clap your ass cheeks, an angel gets their wings.

Shoulda called this show Platinum Rear End.

God I do not get why this show is so focused on butts when every character looks like Hank Hill in profile.

Just another facet of the show I’ve given up trying to understand. Platinum End is brimming with so much contempt for itself and its characters that I can’t see much beyond an apparent atmosphere of resentment from its creators. I won’t pretend to know what Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata were thinking while making the manga, but this just does not seem like a series made by people who were invested in it.

It really doesn’t. Every element feels like it was made up entirely as they went along, every new character or element being slapped on top of the previous ones without any real consideration. It’s why in a single cour a ton of events happen yet almost none of it feels meaningful or important, and why it feels especially insulting when they try to retcon pathos into characters the story exclusively treated like garbage.


RIP Hajime. Cause of death: Cat Scratch Fever.

And for the sake of emphasis: I’m genuinely sad that it just plain sucks. It’s barely even ironically enjoyable. I thought if anyone could capture that Future Diary spark of schlock, it would be the Death Note people, but nope. What a disappointment.

Good luck with that!