To begin our mystery box series, we start with a guide to Universal Law in anime.
What is Universal Law?
Universal Law is the setting, plot and environment of any given anime, the so called laws are established to keep the story on the right path.
To use Death Note as an example, the setting uses real world physics, the supernatural element are the shinigami and the Death Note itself and no character has immunity to death as the rules of the Death Note are written in a way to avoid breaking the Universal Laws of the story.
How Do You Break Universal Law?
Universal Law is a very fragile tight rope to walk and can easily broken when introducing any story that involves character death or hard to explain stories like time travel or anything that changes fate; power of love and friendship is notorious for breaking this.
Case Study: A Good Librarian Like a Good Shepherd
As an immediate example lets look at this anime.
Based on a visual novel, the plot revolves around a library that sees it's so called Shepherds capable of changing fate but when it comes to a character predetermined to die, they are saved by essentially revealing the secret of the Shepherds meaning that said character is banished and has their memory erased, however the whole thing gets retconned to force a happy ending.
Case Study: Plastic Memories
This is also the same issue with tragic endings, it's often implied that Isla is the Giftia in the epilogue scene when she should've been deactivated, I'll cover this more with my article on Isla.
Decisions That Weren't Meant to Be
Negima has more than a few problems with it's story, everything from constantly making Negi an adult/teen just so he can fight at full strength, to an anime adaption with the same retconned predetermined death that plagues an already bad adaptation. Don't get me started on the fact that Negi marries Chisame Hasegawa
Isn't This Just Jumping the Shark
Jumping the Shark, Nuking the Fridge, yes I suppose it does follow the same concept, although this plagues longer running shows such as Shonen Jump titles, four examples include.
One Piece: Characters that should be dead but not.
Bleach: Fullbring is bull shit.
Naruto: Itachi's convoluted plan as well as Akatsuki's more bull shit Jutsus.
Hunter x Hunter: Gon's utterly stupid rage transformation.
Power of love and friendship is universally hated for pulling a victory out of nothing when it's obvious that a character is about to lose.
Plot armour is another name for it.
