ThatAnimeSnob

I tried to wait until it’s over before shitting it properly, but the damn thing didn’t let me. It kept piling up bullshit, the fantards keep excusing them with more bullshit, it got all the way to no5 on MAL and no1 on Anime-Planet, and the topics I made on Reddit and MAL about its problems were deleted immediately, so nobody can have an opinion that differs from the damn circlejerk. This piece of shit that the anime community considered better than Legend of the Galactic Heroes was plain offensive on so many levels and I am here to tell you why.

1) TIME RESETS MAKE NO SENSE.
Just look how there is absolutely no consistency amongst them.

First & Second resets:
- Trigger before someone nearby gets killed
- The protagonist doesn’t need to know about the eminent death for the reset to happen
- The protagonist has no control over when it happens
- The reset sends you 5 minutes into the past
- If the protagonist fails, time moves on as normal

Third reset:
- Triggers after someone nearby gets killed
- The protagonist needs to know about the death for the reset to happen
- The protagonist has no control over when it happens
- The reset sends you 20 years into the past
- If the protagonist fails, time reverts to present, and he can try again until he succeeds
- Let’s not overlook the time paradox of managing to chance the day of death but everything else remained exactly the same, something which is impossible because of the butterfly effect. Also, we are supposed to believe when he returned to the present, his old self magically forgot everything, life went back to normal and played out in exactly the same way. Bullshit.

Fourth reset:
- Triggers when everybody is fine.
- The protagonist wills it to happen. The fan boys were defending the show before this, saying it was great how he had no control over this power, since he can’t use it to his benefit and the tension is tenfold because of it. Well, so much for that. But the fan boys still defended it, saying the protagonist could always control time travel but was too afraid to use it consciously. Excusing bullshit with more bullshit.
- The reset sends you 20 years into the past but not at the same moment the third reset did.

Fifth reset:
The problem with this one is that it doesn’t exist. We get to a point where the protagonist is in grave danger and yet no time reset triggers. Why is that when it fits several criteria from previous cases? I mean, yeah, he says that the fourth reset would be the last, but how did he know that? Did he read the script for what happens next? If he knows he lost the power, how does he know that???

Sixth reset:
Despite the protagonist reassuring us that there will not be another reset, he contradicts himself in the last episode by willingly going back in time and warns everybody of what to do so he can expose the killer. And guess what, he was in grave danger when it happened. Why didn’t it happen in the previous life or death situation? Why didn’t he go all the way back to the car scene, so he won’t lose 15 years of his life? Because shitty writing, that’s why.

And once again, the fan boys said it was no time reset and that he used a super amazing mind game to do everything right. Sure man, he just regained his memory and figured out of a plan that involved the killer taking him to the roof, while his friends would be waiting on ground level with a huge cushion. He would know that the killer was going gay for him too and that he would be fine if he jumped down the roof, with the power of friendship saving his ass and making the killer admit his crimes. Sure, it was all an amazing mind game by a guy WHO WAS A RETARD DURING THE WHOLE SERIES.

2) THE PROTAGONIST HAS NO STEADY MOTIVATIONS.
They change in every episode with no rhyme or reason, something the fan boys didn’t notice because he is a bland self-insert who can be anything and anyone at any given moment. I mean did you even see how generic his face is? Take all faces A1 Pictures animated from light novels and compare them. They are the exact same one, featureless face!

First & Second reset: He saves kids because he is altruistic
Never explained why he is, he was magically born that way.

Third reset: He wants to save his mother by manipulating the emotions of a little girl
A selfish reason, now he is magically no longer altruistic.

Fourth reset: He wants to save the little girl
He no longer cares about saving his mother, which by the way was never hard to save. He had 20 years of time to simply be around her when the fateful night arrives.

3) PLOT CONVENIENCES.
Many events happen seemingly by chance and end up affecting the plot considerably. No proper mystery or thriller should be so reliant on chance because it cheapens what it’s trying to accomplish.

Episode 1: The mother gets killed exactly when she finds out who the killer is. How nice for the killer to wait until he is revealed before deciding to walk in the house.

Episode 1: The reason the protagonist panicked so fast when he saw his dead mother, was because at that exact moment a neighbor came in and the police arrived outside. There is no way for the killer to have arranged it that way, since the neighbor was just passing by. Therefore, it was darn luck and not incrimination that made the protagonist panic, turning the whole thing into stupidity instead of an elaborate scheme.

Episode 3: The protagonist has birthday the exact same day as the girl he is trying to save. This is way too convenient and lazy writing for the sake of cheap feels. He already wants to save her; there is no reason to hammer it even further with more drama.

Episode 5: Airi appears out of nowhere and helps the protagonist when he is hunted by the police. The reason? She just believes he is not a killer. Ok…

Episode 5: Airi’s house is set on fire immediately after she finds out who the killer is. Again, the killer is waiting to be revealed before making his move.

Episode 6: The manager appears out of nowhere to help out the protagonist. The script just wanted him to be there for the sake of plot armor.

Episode 7: The protagonist is about to kill someone when a friend of his appears out of nowhere and stops him before it’s too late. The script just wanted him to be there for the sake of ruining tension.

Episode 8: The girl was hiding from her mother in the exact same bus that the person who wanted to kill her was hiding his equipment. From all the places in this universe, what are the odds of the target running to hide into the killer’s base?

Episode 11: The killer knew that the protagonist is alive but in a coma for many years, yet didn’t do anything to kill him, despite having the political power to do anything he likes. He just reappears when the protagonists wakes up, does his best to make him remember what happened, and THEN tries to kill him.

Episode 12: The killer out of nowhere is not only unable to kill the protagonist but he is also willing to save him and commit suicide if the guy he wanted to kill just a few seconds ago is not alive. And all that were well known to the protagonist who had regained his memories just a few minutes ago. What the frack???

Episode 12: Airi appears out of nowhere under the bridge and is super friendly with a guy she just sees there. Dumb girl is dumb. Also, this was a sappy ending just for forced feels.

4) THE PROTAGONIST’S REASONING MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE.

He runs away from the police, thus incriminating himself for no reason. The fan boys excuse it as him panicking because of the murder of his mother, thus he wasn’t thinking reasonably. If that is the case, why is he STILL running away from the police after he returns to the present? He is calm now, and thinks reasonably. Hell, he spends half the episode playing with children out in the open for everybody to see, and then goes to chat in a public cafeteria full of people. Seems like he is not afraid of being seen, right? But when police officers arrive, he is running away again. What is this bullshit?

He assumes that he can save his mother by saving a little girl, the two of which have absolutely nothing to do with each other, just because he is at the time when the murders began. Well, thank goodness nothing else happened in the world that year, or he might have arbitrarily assumed he would have to do something completely different.

The fan boys excuse it as, if he stops the killer, he will save both at the same time. But how is this going to work? Just look at how no matter what he does, it will never have a positive outcome.
- He is not intimidating to keep a child killer away by spending time with the girl (in fact, this makes the killer double as motivated)
- He is not strong to beat up the killer in case he shows up
- Even if he scares the killer, this will not stop him from killing other children or his mother in the future
- Even if he saves the little girl, it will not prevent her mother from beating her all the time
- He is not trying to tell anybody about it, which over-complicated things for no reason. The fan boys tried to excuse it like nobody would believe him if he talked. Yet in later episodes pretty much EVERYBODY believes EVERYTHING he says and helps him out.
• His fellow students agree to hide the girl in a bus by simply believing his story.
• They leave her there in the cold for three days, only for eventually telling his mother about it. She believes him as well, and lets her hide in their house thereafter.
• He then tells child support to come check out the mother, something nobody was doing for years. They also believe him and turns out it was easy to prove the girl’s mother was a bad parent.
• The mother’s mother is also magically thrown in the story and is the one that revels what a terrible mother her child is. All the protagonist did, was to tell her to go there when child support is talking to the mother. Something nobody thought of doing for years.
• So basically, he could have resolved the show’s entire conflict by episode 2 if he simply told everybody what is going on right away.
- He then moves to protecting other kids after the first is saved, which again makes no sense. He has no reason to assume the killer would go after the same people, in the same order, and in the same dates. He changed his actions for Pete’s sake, he could have gone after someone else with completely different methods or schedule.

5) THE MYSTERY ASPECT OF THE SHOW IS COMPLETE GARBAGE.
- The protagonist is doing absolutely nothing to find out who is the killer. He prefers to spend his time in a cringy romance between a 10 year old girl and a 30 year old man.
- Whatever the author thinks that can count as clues, is nothing more than hints dropping on the protagonist’s head by complete chance (the bus Hinazuki is hiding just happens to be the killer’s hideout) or through someone’s convenient infodumping (the meeting with the old man, or the teacher in the car). This destroyed any sense of mystery, since the protagonist didn’t use deduction to find clues. They were thrown at him with ridiculous convenience.
- There aren’t even many possible suspects for who the killer could be. It can either be someone from the cast we see all the time, or a complete stranger which would make the revelation BS (thankfully this is not the case). Now try to count how many people look like the guy we see in the first episode (male adult with no beard). There, it can only be THAT guy. What kind of a mystery is this where you know right away who the killer is?
- 10 year-olds in the 80s are somehow masterminds. They can psycho-analyze the protagonist (Hinazuki) and deduct he is hiding something (Kenya). He on the other hand can do nothing but stare like an oaf despite living in the freaking internet era. He is so useless, even little children are better detectives than he is.
- The killer was not revealed because of a mistake he did. He exposed himself and even went as far as soliloquize his evil intentions, like a Saturday morning cartoon villain.
- A mystery story is supposed to give you answers at the end. Yet you don’t get any explanation for why the protagonist has the power to travel in time. Magic space Jesus gave it to him just because. The story never explains anything regarding time travel; it just throws it out there and then expects you not to give a damn when it’s vital to the plot. The fanboys kept saying that you should disregard it entirely, and focus on the mystery instead. Which is impossible since without time travel you have no story. No, really, the story would end in the first episode without it. Also, as proven above, the mystery was also shit.

6) FAKE TENSION WITH CLIFFHANGERS.
Every episode ends with a cliffhanger that makes the average viewer wanting to find out what will happen next. The problem here is that what follows the cliffhangers is a dud. It is always something anti-climactic or completely stupid. The show systematically tries to undo consequences or hide its plot conveniences with cliffhangers that are too obvious to spot when you marathon the show.
- Every time something horrible happens to the protagonist (fails to save the girl or gets captured by the police), a time reset occurs in the beginning of the next episode to undo all the tension.
- When the protagonist is clueless or about to do something really stupid, another character appears out of nowhere as an ally and helps him out with not much justification.
- When the killer gets in the bus where the girl is hiding, is followed by him leaving without even trying to find her because it was conveniently his lair, and not because he knew she was there.
- And of course, the last episode where the protagonist is about to be killed again, but out of nowhere he becomes a mastermind that has planned everything to happen exactly as he hoped.

7) VICTIMIZING GALORE.
A one dimensional evil parent hits while laughing her own child for forced drama.
- No fan boys, saying this happens all the time in real life does not make it any less forced.
- Let’s have the girl being bullied at school as well. No reason to assume the more victimizing they throw at you, the more absurd it becomes.

8 ) PLOT INDUCED STUPIDITY.

Episode 3: Everybody is either too dumb to do anything about it, or too blind to notice the domestic violence. Because a child full of bruises, the testimony of teachers and students, as well as a mother who is constantly running away from inspection, or swings shovels at people, is clearly not evidence.

Episode 5: People lose their jobs, ruin their marriages, and leave town because of a chocolate bar. But people who beat their children every day while laughing about it are left to do as they like.

Episode 5: Only complete retards open the door to a room they know it’s on fire.

Episode 10: You see someone getting in a room but never coming out, despite you standing right outside the whole time. How stupid do you need to be to actually believe the person teleported away?

Episode 10: A little child can’t slip through a jammed seat belt, when it’s easy even for an adult to do it.

Episode 10: The protagonist yells to the killer that he knows his future, something that the killer believes. Which is bullshit because if Satoru knew it, he would know the killer would try to murder him.

Episode 11: The killer does his best to make the protagonist remember he is the killer instead of killing him right away.

Episode 12: The killer magically changes his goal from trying to murder the protagonist, to saving his life and then killing himself.

9) PEDOPHILIA, AS THE PROTAGONIST IS SEXUALLY ATTRACTED TO A LITTLE GIRL.
No fan boys, just because his body is 10 years old, does not make his brain not 30 years old. And nobody knowing he is not really a child does makes him not pedo. Pleading ignorance does not pass in court.
Oh, sorry officer, I thought I could have sex with 10 year olds because I’m a time traveler.

10) ONE DIMENSIONAL EVIL CHARACTERS.
- The manager lusts over Airi, and betrays the protagonist just so he can have her for himself. The fan boys try to excuse it like he did what he thought was right, but all we see is him being a jerk who laughs idiotically and saves Airi because he wants to impress her and get in her pants.
- Letting us know Hibazuki’s mother was mistreated by her husband does not excuse her actions. She is one dimensional because her husband was one dimensional, the end.
- The killer loves to kidnap and murder little children, just because. He is also presented as a mastermind for half the show, always magically teleporting to people that find out who he is, and managing to throw the blame for what he did to someone else. But towards the end, he turns into a laughably incompetent idiot who monologues his evil plans to the protagonist and has no alibi for what he does. He also changes his reason for killing people, from making sure nobody will find out who he is, to magic spider webs only he can see being the reason he needs to kill certain individuals. Also, he does his best to be caught by making the protagonist REMEMBER he is the killer and not killing him while he is vulnerable.

11) AWFUL TIME SKIP.
Any hints of logic the show had, are completely gone when a time skip takes place in the last episodes.
- The protagonist falls in a coma and wakes up with amnesia, two of the most bullshit tropes only lazy soap opera writers would be using. Not only that but they are also completely meaningless. They are both dealt with in the same episode they appear in.
- The only major change made during the time skip was the kids he saved getting married, and everything else remained exactly the same. Because that’s how time travel works. Why would his mother be living in a different place when she is taking care of a comatose man, or the killer having a different lifestyle when he ran away from town and didn’t kill anyone?
- Why the hell did those kids marry each other? There was no damn chemistry between them! Three quarters of the show were spent on building a relationship between the girl and the protagonist, and the result is her getting married to a minor character she didn’t care about that looks like a girl? How did that happen?
- Every fantard was yelling netorare in the episode discussions for not getting the pedophilia ship they were hoping for. In fact, the show began decreasing in average score only because it made the fandom very butthurt.
- Not only the killer did not try to kill the protagonist while he was defenseless in a coma, but also does his best to make him remember. Where did his ingenious plans to keep his crimes hidden went to?

12) UNDEFINED FOCUS.
This show has no idea of what it’s trying to be about, leading to a complete lack of identity. This is evident in how the fanboys were gradually changing their opinion of the show, every time something was disappointing them.
- First, they said it was a time travel type of story. Something I proved it was very bad because it made no sense.
- So, they switch their opinion to, no it’s not about time travel but a mystery story about trying to uncover a killer. Something I also proved wrong, since there was absolutely no deduction made by the protagonist and the killer was obvious right away. I mean, yeah, the fanboys were still surprised with the obvious revelation because they were refusing to believe it would be so obvious. They still pretended it was amazing writing because it made it seem it was too easy to be him. This was self trolling caused by people who didn’t want to accept it was so easy after all.
- Then they say it was never a mystery but rather a thriller, where the protagonist is rushing to save kids from a killer before it’s too late. Again, I proved this was a lie since the constant time resets and the plot conveniences were destroying all sense of tension.
- Desperate to excuse it somehow, the fanboys were then saying it was a drama about people living miserable lives by being mistreated by their family or not getting what they want in life. Something I also proved it was the result of being stupid and not simply talking about it.
- Oh, and let’s not forget the usual double standards they were using all the time, saying how real the characters are, how the show makes them cry, and how amazingly interesting the mystery is. But when I proved the time resets are unexplained bullshit, they immediately say it is just a cartoon and you shouldn’t take it seriously. If that is so, why do you find them real and cry about it??? Why do you call the mystery amazing when it makes no sense???

See? They can’t even defend the show as something done right.

SO WHY THE DEVIL WAS THIS SHOW SO HYPED AND ADORED BY EVERYBODY?
Erased fails in everything besides emotional manipulation. It had a premise where a good hearted man tries to save his mother and a cute girl the viewers feel sorry for. As soon as both these issues were solved in episode 9, the interest in the show immediately evaporated and what followed was a bullshit killer revelation and a retarded time skip nobody could take seriously.

Basically, while the show was using forced drama and a sickening romance between a man and a little girl, everybody was blinded to its problems. The second those were dealt with, they instantly woke up and realized it was crap all along. The whole thing is yet another example of why crap like Sword Art Online become super hyped and loved by everybody while they air, and then are hated as soon as they are over. The anime community is a cesspool of immature people who can’t think straight and let emotions cloud their perception. And then some wonder why Donald Trump is so adored for all the ridiculous things he does. Faith in humanity, lost.