Erased

[type_wild]

Watch on YouTube

...yeah, let's just say that I finally get what the wank about "Most heartwarming moment" of the Crunchyroll awards was all about, and in conclusion: it's good and you should watch it.

Time travel plot is time travel plot, but isn't really about time-travel as much as it is about cleaning up the regrets of your past. I expect there is a lot of fanboy wank out there about whether the handwaving of the time-travelling sinks the story, because... well, because avid sci-fi readers would probably be able to pinpoint a number of things that should've been fucked up by the changing of events in the past. But the fact is that this is a twelve-episode murder mystery. It hasn't got the time to delve into the technicalities of causality chains, and wisely chooses to turn the limelights to the problems of human relationships.

It is a murder mystery, but not your usual kind: in Erased, the tension rests not on finding the culprit, but in preventing the murder from happening in the first place. To the point where the story honestly loses a bit of steam when finding the culprit becomes imperative, but again: the important thing was human relationships, not exposing the guilty party. The true issues at hand here is the question of reaching out to others. How deep into someone else's life should we dig in order to save them?

Full disclosure: The story ends with a couple of dangling plot threads and has a glaring hole if you at some point after episode eleven think back to episode one. But that never becomes critical failure because it somehow isn't the events that drive the plotline of ~finding the killer~ that are given screentime in this story. Oh no, this is the anime that dwells on birthday parties and walking to school together, and on how these are things that can save a person's life. The thing Our Hero needs to do in order to prevent a horrible thing from happening isn't to take down a brutal murderer with the body of gradeschooler. He saves the people around him by reaching out to those who aren't truly seen by the world around them.

A similar question is the slumbering backstory of Mawaru Penguindrum. The question of "invisible children" is a lot more prominent there, but Erased does a better job of illustrating the fatal consequence of being an invisible child, and why it is so incredibly important for these children to be seen by the world around them: namely the common statistic that when the world looks away, the people with ill intentions will see an easy victim. In a medium with a tradition of celebrating "nakama", I haven't seen a lot of other anime that so frankly displays how relationships aren't just about being a team and working for a common goal. Erased aptly illustrates how unconditional friendship might not only be about stopping someone from feeling lonely; it can be critical to their physical survival.

The story is engaging and the themes are different. Production-wise, the animation is good and the show in general is very.... visually interesting, for lack of a better word. The OP in particular is definitely unskippable, but this isn't the kind of show where you can count the stitches on your knitting needle while listening to the dialogue. And after nearly two decades of watching anime, I really enjoyed watching the setting of Hokkaido, 1988. Both becaues of the nostalgia factor of the timestamp, but also because it's honestly lovely to see settings that aren't either a different universe entirely, or "vaguely Tokyo". Might have something to do with being a rural northerner myself *g*

Erased is one of those shows you'll want to show people to explain why anime is different. It's not without its flaws, but almost all of those flaws are to be found in the parts that this anime ultimately wasn't really about - and so they're not vital, and the story fulfills its mission almost perfectly in the end.

Yes, yes, even if the end is honestly all sorts of silly.