The 29 year old protagonist, Satoru Fujinuma, is a failing manga artist currently employed as a pizza delivery guy. Satoru is an unassuming person seemingly without any exceptional qualities, hence his current state of employment. His character design is pretty boring; the standard scraggly brown hair, slender physique, etc. this design choice does emphasize how ‘normal’ his life is at a glance, but this image is quickly and intentionally flipped on its head. During a scene of Satoru out on a delivery he witnesses a traffic accident, the frame distorts and a jarring sound blares. When Satoru returns to his senses, he realizes that he has been pulled back a few minutes into the past, where he has time to intervene preventing the accident from happening, Furthurmore, this is a common occurrence for Satoru.
This ability initially has some intrigue to it, as a viewer I really enjoy when time control is well executed in anime. The implications of cause and effect are vast enough that the idea can be explored in an innumerable amount of ways, and this style of vaguely introducing the ability provided them with infinite freedom to flesh out its mechanics; What conditions must be met to trigger a loop?, What’s the extent and frequency to which Satoru can control it?, How did he come to possess this ability in the first place?, Are there consequences to using it? There were a limitless amount of ways they could have spun the idea, but they did literally nothing with it. It’s mind blowing how so much potential was cast aside here. The only time Satoru ever mentions this incredible ability of his, he always says something to the effect of “it’s something that happens sometimes before a disaster”. The ability is turned into a plot device; an unexplained contrivance which completely negates any tension the narrative attempts to establish. Anytime that Satoru messes up anything remotely important, he is returned to a convenient point without any consequences; Erased ends it’s episodes on cliffhangers in an attempt to force tension, but it’s always followed by an anti climactic payoff in the form of either a time reset, or a character appearing out of nowhere to help him out because plot convenience. The reasoning behind Satoru’s desire to intervene in the these future situations during the early episodes is never explained or justified either, they leave it to the viewer to assume he is ‘just a good person’, which isn’t preferable to providing us with set characterization. This way of writing let’s Satoru act whatever way works best for the narrative, because the audience can just ‘assume’ things about how he thinks.
Back to the narrative’s lead up; after discovering that his mother has been murdered, Satoru becomes implicated as a primary suspect in the investigation, because he ran away from the scene. There is no motive, and no evidence, the decision to run away from the police was a stupid one that only served to strengthen the case against him when he was only implicated because of a misunderstanding to begin with. This is understandable considering his state of mind at the time, but even after he calms down his thought process remains unchanged. The dramatic crux of the introductory arc involves Satoru being sent back in time to 1988 when he was eleven years old. Events lead Satoru to the realization that the murderer of his mother might be the same criminal who murdered a young girl when he was in elementary school, killed the same year Satoru is currently reliving. By preventing the death of the child he can indirectly save his mother. This establishes Satoru’s motivations, and leads us into an interesting setting. The only thing I have to question here is why Satoru is so certain that this will work, he doesn’t question that this is the singular deciding factor of future events, even though there are a lot of things he can do over the next 20 years that would protect his mother.
The unique perspective of an adult living in a child’s body is actually pretty well utilized. The biggest problem being the awkward hints of a possible romantic route for the relationship between Hinazuki and Satoru thrown in despite the obvious age difference, there wouldn’t be a way to write this without it being absurdly creepy, so it’s played off as comedic, and scraped pretty quickly. In his adult life Satoru was almost constantly alone, the only relationships in his life are with his mother, and a coworker who had taken a friendly interest in him. Whenever Satoru provides exposition as to what his life was like as a child, he always mentions that he had plenty of ‘friends’ but never formed a meaningful connection with anyone, something he came to regret as he grew up. This set a foundation of development for Satoru, he has an opportunity to improve himself layered below his primary motivation of saving his mother.
Kayo Hinazuki is the single exceptional character aside from Satoru, her character arc spans through the majority of the series early episodes considering she is the child Satoru is sent back in time to protect. Satoru has vague memories of Hinazuki from before her murder, but remarks that she was always quiet and doesn’t know much about her. While attending school, now an observant adult, he notices a bruise on Hinazuki and quickly pieces together her situation at home. His suspicions of child abuse are later reinforced by the contents of an essay written by Hinazuki found later in the episode. She’s presented to have an apathetic front covering her emotional nature, and she cuts herself off socially because she is afraid of getting hurt. Satoru and Hinazuki share some great dialog between them, and the contrast in their home lives create a really interesting character dynamic that leads into the biggest emotional outpouring in the series; Hinazuki’s realization of what a family is supposed to be like, and her experiencing it for the first time in her life. Satoru act’s under the impression that if he pushes Hinazuki’s life in a direction of stability in enough ways, while watching over her as much as he can as a child, he can make her a difficult target for abduction, and eventually end the abuse she receives from her parents.
Outside of Satoru and Hinazuki, everyone else in this series is made of cardboard. The other children are especially poorly written, their characterization over the course of the series doesn’t even extend as far as being set within an archetype for some of them. They are vehicles in Satoru’s development and nothing else, except for a child named Kenya, whose characterization actually makes him worse. His whole character can be described as ‘the smart one who wants to be a detective’, convenient for a mystery anime. Kenya’s only relevance is to provide insightful exposition in uncovering the murderer’s identity. What makes his character ‘worse’ doesn’t lie in how minimalist his characterization was, but in that they made this 11 year old child smarter than every adult, including Satoru, in the entire series. Every character in Erased seems to act only on what Satoru tell’s them to do, they don’t even ask for specific details as to why a lot of the time. There is a point where the children help Satoru to practically kidnap Hinazuki for a three day span, they don’t know that she is being targeted by a future serial killer, he tells them nothing about the situation, but they don’t even bother to ask for a reason.
Unfortunately, Erased completely fails in the handling of its mystery element. The mystery genre is inherently difficult to write within. The author must attempt to introduce important information in a way that feels natural, while stringing these pieces together in a way that is difficult for the readers to follow, but at the same time, isn’t esoteric to the point where the conclusion feels like an ass-pull. In Erased these clues fall into Satoru’s lap without any deductive work on his part, everything Satoru learns about the killer is provided by info dumping through poorly contrived ‘chance’ encounters. I mentioned that the show has frequently used the ‘red eyes’ motif to establish dangerous elements, and to that effect it can also act as a ‘red herring’ to throw the audience off, but this is made transparent immediately when used for a character that was obviously just introduced for that purpose, or a character whose place in the narrative probably won’t lead to him to be recurring again. I’m trying to avoid spoiling key plot elements, but throughout the entire series there is only one reasonably suspicious and recurring character, and they couldn’t have made it more obvious if they tried. This character is given a variety of creepy character traits that could hardly be called subtle, and he is literally framed in the shadows through many scenes; his reveal as the killer isn’t even through deduction of the protagonist, or a mistake on his part, he outright displays himself to Satoru, and proceeds to soliloquy his intentions aloud like you would see from a cartoon villain. This character is as bland as an antagonist can get. His motivations are nonexistent; the vague reasoning they provide for him targeting Hinazuki essentially chalks everything up to insanity because the author couldn’t think of anything meaningful to give his character. Throughout the final episodes his actions completely contradict his spoken intentions, and just make no sense considering his current position; passing up opportunities under justifications that go against everything he said previously, and this happens multiple times.
Erased tries to present a lot of creative ideas that sound interesting when put together, but there are a lot of times that it fails to bridge these ideas together in a coherent way, it often struggles with basic execution, and almost never expands on anything past the initial premise. Two characters are fleshed out and developed by the end, but most are just blank slates or act with flimsy justifications. Hinazuki aside, the characters don’t really make a lasting impression. The time reset is never explained, and it triggers under so many different situations that any reasonable first conjectures were ruled out by the end, It acts whenever it needs to push the narrative forward without cleaver writing. With its unreasonable resolution and laughable antagonist, it utterly fails as a mystery series. I can’t see myself recommending Erased for anything other than some brilliantly directed scenes throughout the show. Despite getting a fair amount of enjoyment from the series, notably in the early episodes, I don’t feel like the end product is anything above average.
