10 Second Anime - Death Parade - Episode 12 [END]

Death Parade - Episode 12 [END]



Decim delivers his judgment of Chiyuki's soul. Slight changes have been made to the afterlife. Season Finale.

Heh.

Oculus' lotus petals may be fast, but Nona was faster. We never did see what her special attack was. Decim had his puppeteer strings and Ginti controlled liquid, but all we saw of Nona was her strength.

 

Decim needed all of Chiyuki's memories to reconstruct her house and her mother to make the ultimate trial. Interesting that his test amounted to a well-conceived version of Ginti's test for Mayu. They both required harming another soul in exchange for a desired result. Ginti's test for Mayu was cruder in the sense that a living person knows what the consequences of death are for someone, but having only been told what the Void was, Mayu didn't have a full picture of what happens to a soul sent there.

 

Nona may be playing the long game against Oculus here. The story focused on people learning that Decim felt emotions, but he and Ginti came to their jobs together, so I suspect he also felt emotions. The epilogue confirms this for me as both Decim and Ginti honor the memories of their human assistants.

Ginti even made that strange little bear hair clip for his Mayu version of the wooden dolls he keeps. Because Ginti wielded liquid, he chose those cultural vessels to honor guests who affected him. Decim chose the mannequin forms because of his marionette string power.

 

Yay! Decim learned to smile naturally.

 

I wonder if the Memyne cat who left Ginti was the soul who joined Mayu in the elevator, or whether he just didn't like him anymore after sending that nice girl away.

 

Interesting that Decim's cross pattern denoting an Arbiter's eye disappeared while he was experiencing a strong emotion. He got better.

 

Nice little change there at the end, using the puppet version of Chiyuki to stand in for the real Chiyuki in the opening credit scene.

 

 

Hmm.

I was expecting more out of the confrontation between Nona and Oculus, but all that happened afterwards was issuing a fourth rule to the three that governed the natures of Arbiters. One of the rules already said that Arbiters couldn't feel emotions, so I think that adding a sanction against having humans assist Arbiters in their judgments is moot. But it is a change to how things are done, so Oculus is like Nona in one regard - he gets bored too and wants to see something new.

 

Nona's ultimate reason for trying her emotional experiment was in attempting a change to how many souls came to them for judgment. Presumably, there's an automatic judgment protocol for souls who are really good or really bad. Nona thinks that they've been sending the wrong souls back for reincarnation, otherwise they wouldn't keep coming back for judgment because their souls are too much near balance. Did they really need to waste so much time judging a serial killer, a couple of lovers, or a nice old lady who died of old age? Nona thought the system wasn't working well, so she tried something new.

 

As the series progressed, the afterlife's workings were fleshed out, but still some mystery remained. This is good. There's lots to offer up to interpretation and lots left to speculate about. Like how Oculus claimed they were all dolls. It was hinted in the second episode that God isn't around anymore. I wondered if Chiyuki was going to be offered that kind of role, but the story remained rich within its confines. The ending made sense for our main characters, and that usually marks a successful story.

Final Thoughts.

What an interesting world we saw in this show. The afterlife, occupied by some kind of manufactured intelligences whose roles are to judge the newly dead souls, is in some kind of decline, but we don't know who's fault it was. The ones left behind are going through the motions, finding hobbies to pass the tedium, or secretly breaking the rules. Add unpredictable human souls to the mix, and we found our plot.

 

I was worried that the show would devolve into a dead couple of the week, making the show a collection of short stories illustrating a theme for that week. Thankfully, nothing so boring happened here. Each of the pairs were used as the catalyst to explain how the afterlife worked, the issues in life and death that make judgment difficult, and the overall theme of what it means to be alive and how to live.

 

Decim reminded me of an adult Pinocchio. Imbued with emotions at his origins, he only had to realize they were there. He didn't need to go on a journey to find out how to feel. Unlike Pinocchio, he never wished to become a human. He always knew what he was, but only worried whether he did his job correctly.

 

This particular story of the afterlife is done, since it was only about Chiyuki and Decim's relationship, and how an actual person could show an emotional puppet how to feel and live with those feelings. This world is rich and mysterious, though. I'm satisfied with this complete story, but I'm also wistful for answers on the missing Creator and what roles the Arbiters, Clavis, Castra and Oculus were supposed to play before being abandoned. All that is just the setting for this story. The completeness of Death Parade lies in Mayu's likeness in Ginti's bar and the slight but warm smile on Decim's face.