WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Platinum End Episode 1, "Gift From an Angel," now streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.
The fall 2021 anime season features plenty of notable anime series, including Season 2 of Demon Slayer, and Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata of Death Note fame have a new series of their own: Platinum End. In the series premiere, the young protagonist Mirai Kakehashi resolves to find true happiness -- without abusing his new angelic powers to do so.
Mirai Kakehashi's childhood happiness was shattered when his parents and brother died and his abusive aunt and uncle made his life miserable. Now, after an aborted suicide attempt, Mirai has an eccentric angel by his side, and he vows to honor his family's legacy and find ordinary, innocent happiness in a seemingly hopeless world.
Mirai lost all happiness when his family died in their exploding car, and now, immediately following his junior high school graduation, Mirai sees fit to end his own life. He believes that happiness has become impossible, and he leaps off a tall building in Tokyo. However, Nesse the angel swoops in to save his life, granting him the arrows and wings of a true angel. She promises love and freedom for Mirai, and later, Mirai explains to her his real goal -- to find happiness.
After the death of his cruel aunt, Mirai secludes himself in a hotel room with Nesse and explains that as a child, he had only wanted ordinary human happiness. To his younger self, happiness meant having friends and family to support him, a decent job and at some point, a wife and children of his own. He has a humble and ordinary vision of happiness, and now he has the resolve to seek it once again, all self-destructive thoughts forgotten. Mirai vows to honor his deceased family's legacy by pursuing the happiness they wanted for him -- in particular, he recalls a colorful drawing of his cheerful family. He can no longer bear the thought of ending his own life and ruining that.
All this proves that Mirai has the raw materials needed to create a meaningful and productive life for himself; his dark worldview was the result of external trauma, not innate cynicism or apathy. His determination to be an upstanding and happy person had always existed inside him, and today, he finally sweeps aside the mental dirt obscuring it.
Mirai has made a supernatural friend in Nesee, and Nesse eagerly tempts him with the incredible but disturbing powers of an angel. Mirai accepts ultra-fast angel wings and special arrows, but he refuses to exploit these new gifts for personal gain. Nesse even encourages Mirai to sustain himself with crime, stealing food with his wings and controlling people with love-inducing arrows, but Mirai refuses. To him, this is not true happiness, and he would feel guilty and tarnished if he used his angelic gifts that way. Nesse appears confused and disappointed with Mirai's decision, making it clear that the two of them have very different attitudes about power and ambition.
Instead, Mirai seeks happiness the honest and normal way, and he intends to make minimal use of his new gifts to find it. He was born human and will continue his life that way; he won't become a pseudo-angel monster to get what he wants. However, Mirai's upcoming role may disrupt his humble plans, as he is one of 13 candidates to become the new God. Mirai cannot live a satisfying and happy life as an ordinary human if he becomes the supreme being of the universe. Sooner or later, he must reconcile these two quests, or he will never find happiness either as God or a mortal human being.