The Serial Betrayal of an Audience
It has been almost four years since The Day I Became a God aired, and I would be lying to say I don’t think about it more frequently than I should. If you were to poll our AniTAY community members about what they remember most about the anime, the unanimous answer would almost certainly be “the ending.” Maybe you were lucky enough to not hear about the way this anime ended. I will go ahead and give you the opportunity to check it out yourself if you are curious, but this article will be filled to the brim with spoilers related to both the ending and the story of this comedy drama.
Before getting too far, it probably helps to set the table a bit. Jun Maeda (of visual novel developer Key fame) created the concept, screenplay, and music for The Day I Became a God and worked with the team at P.A. Works to see this anime to fruition. Aniplex and Funimation/Crunchyroll helped with production and licensing, and green-lit the anime for twelve episodes in the Fall 2020 slate. Remember these details, because we will come back to them a bit later. The anime follows a high school senior named Youta who finds himself contemplating his future as he rounds the corner on graduation from high school. By chance, he meets a girl named Hina, who gloats that she is the god “Odin” and that she has psychic powers of precognition. The two acclimate to a life together and provide help for various people in their relatively small town.
While this concept doesn’t sound too inspired, the “help” Youta and Hina provide others works in a way that just clicks. Reconnecting a broken family, drumming up interest in a struggling small business, and producing a student film to rekindle the dreams of a hopeful student make for a dominating seven episodes that had me singing the praise of this anime potentially going down as one of the all time greats. This is something I still believe as I re-watched the anime to this point. The characters are all great, there are gut punches at the right moments, and the resolutions to the arcs all feel triumphant. This is Key at their best (maybe Jun Maeda more specifically). This anime was firing off all cylinders, and staying in the race for anime of the season alongside favorites like Jujutsu Kaisen, TONIKAWA: Over the Moon For You, DanMachi Season 3, Sleepy Princess, and Talentless Nana.
The cracks begin to show around the eighth episode and we see what was shaping up to be a contemporary anime classic crumble into a mess by its tenth episode. Remember all of those great story beats I was just talking about? Those all get stuffed into the trunk and the car gets driven right off the bridge into the “Shocking Sad Twist” river. Maybe someone dies, maybe you have your characters face significant hardship. I get it, you need conflict introduced. But the anime takes things to an extreme that left everyone still around, quite frankly, livid. An incredibly off-beat plot line collides into the otherwise perfectly paced anime and suddenly we see Hina kidnapped by men in suits and a miraculous piece of technology that had allowed her to live her life despite having what the show calls “a life ending disease” is literally ripped from her head via forced surgery. This leaves Hina in a regressed state, constantly hyper-vigilant.
To call this “twist” exploitative doesn’t do the feelings it brings me justice. It is outright offensive. It feels like someone wrote something alarmingly ableist and clearly did not put any thought into the implications of it as they pursued shock value. I constantly waited for there to be some fantasy/sci-fi resolution to this plot line, but all the anime does at this point is lean further into how problematic it exploits the Hina character. The once likable Youta loses all appeal as he shakes and yells at Hina and tries to force her into returning to the person he used to know. There are no moments of introspection, there is no challenging of his behaviors, all that happens is people support him as he chooses to selfishly return Hina to the community when she was very clearly being well attended by medical professionals. If I sound like I am skimming by the last quarter of this anime, I assure you I just summarized the anime. The “bad guys” don’t get it at the end, there are no answers for what happened, all we see is a selfish young man do what he wants to with a vulnerable girl because it is what he says she wants to do.
To this day, I think about what happened here. Four years have gone by and I still shake my head at least once every other month or so remembering this anime. I finally felt ready to really break down my disappointment. Remember the details I asked you to remember earlier? Now, if a Key/P.A. Works lovechild with a divisive ending sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because we have seen this song and dance twice before The Day I Became a God. Angel Beats! (2010) and Charlotte (2015) both released to very divisive opinions and both share much of the same Jun Maeda creative DNA as the third title. Indeed, we have suffered the utter betrayal of great writing spoiling before our eyes several times. Angel Beats! is a bit more fascinating because it was the closest to a “complete” anime with exception of being remembered for failing to land the plane in a smooth fashion. It was a beautiful, moving journey that kept its “twists” a bit more contained but, sadly, it decided to crash land at the very end (only that, in this example, imagine there were like five beautifully maintained landing strips around and the plane decided to just nosedive into the woods). Charlotte felt strange because it cashed in the “shocking twist” card at exactly the six episode mark, hit a masterpiece of a conflict resolution arc (many of us here hail the seventh episode as one of the single best episodes of an anime), and then decided to turn around with the finish line in sight and get lost in the woods with the weird Angel Beats! ending.
Where am I getting with this, you might ask? Honestly, it isn’t just a “let’s dunk on Jun Maeda for never writing a good ending outside of Clannad and Little Busters!” kind of point (if you say that, that’s you, not me!). After reflecting on my re-watch of The Day I Became a God, I genuinely believe these anime are victims of only having 12–13 episodes. It is a bit unfair to ask someone who is used to writing and pacing for visual novels to come up with complete story and character arcs in roughly 5 hours or so. Little Busters! and Clannad both had twenty six episode first seasons and 13-episode second seasons to tell much more robust and evenly paced stories. When you give someone twelve episodes to tell a story they are used to telling in 39, I imagine it is like when SpongeBob freaked out and thought he had to “floor it” during his boating exam (the audience is Mrs. Puff going “Why SpongeBob, why?”). Does this excuse the heinous writing of The Day I Became a God and let it off the hook? No. I still stand by my disdain and loss of respect I have towards Key for the way this story was handled. But this theory stands as the main way I have tried to make sense of what happened. Maybe I’m off the mark, but it does make me wonder how many anime have had otherwise great writing/storytelling derailed by cutting of episodes and/or pressure to “wrap it up.”
Maybe this discussion has been a bit “all over the place,” but I want to say I am happy to be writing with you all again. I’m hopeful I can return to setting time aside for more regular writing in the future. Hope you all have been keeping up well, and I look forward to writing more soon!
