A young man rewinds time repeatedly to solve a crime. Sound familiar? If you’re getting Erased-vibes… well, yes and no. Yu-No: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of this World starts with a premise that sounds similar, but quickly establishes itself as something altogether different.
In the first place, it’s grittier. How is that possible, you ask? After all, Erased dealt with child abductions and grisly murders. Well, now we’re up to episode 4 of Yu-No, and (mild spoiler) one of the main characters just slashed her own wrist. Because she was blackmailed on false evidence into letting herself be raped. After someone else she was working with shot at her son. Etc.
Furthermore, in Erased changing the past means the old past is… erased. In Yu-No the old past gets folded into the new timeline. How exactly it works is still being explored, and it looks to me like it works a bit inconsistently (if the time traveler retains memories of alternate timelines because they get “folded” together, how come no one else does?). But it’s a neat concept, and one that potentially resolves certain traditional time travel paradoxes.
Both the grit and the treatment of alternate timelines seem drawn from the story that inspired the series’ title: the 1968 award-winning short story by Harlan Ellison, The Beast that Shouted Love from the Heart of the World. In that tale, powerful beings from one timeline drain the evil out of their criminals, in the process shunting it off into worlds like ours where it possesses people and creates psychopathic villains for us to deal with. I guess you can’t make an omelet in some worlds without breaking eggs in another.
Yu-No‘s concept of time, however, is only superficially similar to Ellison’s. And so far the rest of the show seems independent from the older story. Whether it will ultimately prove to be in the spirit of Ellison and the classic Sci-fi masters will depend on the remainder of the season.
I never watched Erased. The comparisons in my head are more to Steins;Gate and Re:Zero, but I agree this show is distinguishing itself so far.
Episode 5 certainly I think some hat eon for doing in 1 episodes what those shows devoted an arc to. But I rather like this approach so far, we’re still setting things up after all.
Re Zero is an interesting comparison (haven’t seen SG yet). Thanks for mentioning; I’ll have to think on that one.
I thought I’d forgotten which Blog I had this exchange on but I managed to find it again.
I’m currently labeling this the best Anime of 2019. But what’s most interesting is how I learned it’s based on a Visual novel from 1996, fascinating considering how inherently a product of current trends it seemed. It came up on my BlogSpot a few times.
Really? I found it intriguing, though I didn’t consider it S-tier. Glad you enjoyed it, though! And kudos for finding this old conversation!