What if, one sunny evening, you came home to find that your wife was no more?

This was Tatsumi’s reality.

He did what many people might do when the law is incapable of delivering the justice they deserve.

He killed his wife’s murderer.

But isn’t that precisely what the law is supposed to prevent? You report a crime. The police investigate, arrest the perpetrator, and then the courts decide the punishment.

Tatsumi was a detective himself. Finding the murderer should have been simple. And eventually, it was. He found him and avenged his wife.

The story should have ended there.

Except it didn’t.

Instead, that act of revenge triggered the chain of events that would eventually entangle Tatsumi with Shimada, another grieving man. It reshapes the course of Shimada's life and seals Tatsumi's fate.

Tatsumi is the antagonist of Episodes 8 and 9 of Death Parade, an anime series in which the dead people arrive at a mysterious bar and are forced to participate in high-stakes games. These games are supposed to reveal the true nature of the dead, determining whether they will be reincarnated or sent into the void.

But Tatsumi’s story asks a question that is far more disturbing than whether a murderer deserves punishment:

What happens when we start relying on a kind of justice that cannot give us back what we have lost?

Perhaps we begin relying on it when the original event is over, but we are not. Tatsumi finds the murderer and kills him. By every conventional measure, the story is over. But Tatsumi does not return to the life he had before. Rather, he pays a higher price.

So, what price did Tatsumi pay for his vengeance?

In simple words, killing someone is taking a life. But what does taking a life take from the person who takes it?

For Tatsumi, it was his identity. Tatsumi promised his wife that he would always protect her. After her death, Tatsumi was left with the unbearable knowledge that his badge, training, and authority had been powerless to save her. He knew the justice system was incapable of preventing the kind of tragedy he had experienced. Eventually, he began searching for control outside it.

His life began revolving around watching, judging, hunting offenders, and preparing for violence until his identity became consumed by it. He felt like he was the avenger.

For Tatsumi, revenge begins to resemble a ritual. If he believed someone was dangerous, what would he do? Inform the police? Track the person and attempt to prevent the crime?

No. His method was more disturbing: he watched.

And at times, that watching involved the rape of a minor, helpless girl.

Doesn’t that make Tatsumi complicit in the crime as well?

According to him, it doesn’t. In his words, sacrifices must be made, and he is ready to sacrifice himself as well.

But why? Why should innocent blood be spilled for his justice to happen?

Because Tatsumi believes that the offender will escape and commit the same crime with someone else.

Before judging Tatsumi’s actions, however, it is worth asking what might have driven him toward this logic.

Firstly, no way I agree with what Tatsumi believes. Secondly, let’s try deciphering why he may do what he does.

His profession couldn’t save his wife from dying. As a matter of fact, no justice system can guarantee that innocent people won’t die. It can punish people, but it can neither guarantee safety nor bring back the dead

And in some cases, criminals won’t get punished.

Death Parade imagines one possible response to traumatic loss: a man who mistakes revenge for recovery. Not because trauma predetermines violence, but because unresolved trauma can divert the search for justice into an endless attempt to recover a sense of agency. Something that violence itself can never truly restore. Though Tatsumi achieves revenge by killing. Yet his emotional life remains frozen. His wife’s death continues to govern every action. The revenge succeeds legally (from his own perspective) but fails psychologically.

Freud's concept of repetition compulsion offers one way of reading this pattern. Tatsumi repeatedly returns to the structure of his original trauma: a victim, a perpetrator, helplessness, and punishment. The people change but pattern does not. Perhaps his act of watching echoes the helplessness of arriving too late which he experienced when his wife was murdered. For him, revenge turns into a substitute for healing.

This is where Shimada’s path merges with Tatsumi’s. Shimada’s parents died at an early age. So, he felt responsible for his younger sister’s life. Just like Tatsumi, he promised that he would always protect her. Things change when a man raped his sister. Despite reporting to authorities several times, Shimada was left helpless.

Tatsumi knew the offender. He watched him. And when the man attacked Shimada's sister, Tatsumi still did not intervene. He waited until the crime had occurred before acting. This truth shattered whatever faith Shimada had left in justice. Revenge became his last resort.

Despite occupying entirely different positions in society, Tatsumi and Shimada lost faith in the justice system and decided to take matters into their own hands.

When a detective loses faith in the justice system, what does that say about the system itself?

Justice answered the legal question: “Who did it?” But it couldn’t answer the emotional question: “How do I live after this?” Those are different questions.

Both men were caught in the same logic: if punishment cannot repair the damage already done, perhaps preventing the next tragedy can give the suffering meaning. Shimada thinks: “If I kill the rapist, my sister will finally be at peace.” Tatsumi thinks: “If I keep eliminating criminals, no one will suffer as I did”. Both are trying to use punishment to repair a wound that punishment cannot reach.

In Death Parade, that gap is stark: legal or vigilante justice may identify and punish offenders, but neither can restore the relationships, trust, and meaning that trauma has shattered. Shimada turned to the system. It failed him. Tatsumi dedicated his life to it. Yet grief brought them to the same place. Their different paths converged because neither institutional justice nor personal revenge could answer the question that haunted them most: how do you keep living after someone you love is hurt severely or gone?

Death Parade places a detective and an ordinary person side by side to show what happens when the roles that once gave them power become useless against loss. Both men were ultimately confronted with the same unbearable reality: neither could change what happened to their loved ones.

In the face of profound loss, they are no longer primarily detective and brother. They are simply two grieving men searching for a form of justice that does not exist.

Adding spoiler tag as im revealing one of the messages which IS in a way a spoiler.

Dude holy crapadoodles i was not expecting to watch a show with a message/philosophy similar to mine. Live life like its the only one you got! The idea of an afterlife/heaven in many religions just causes people to live meekly thinking in the back of their heads "oh if i do good enough ill just live forever happy in heaven anyways" this excuse to waste ones life is one of the many reasons i'm athiest. Theres another philosophy of "absurdism" that i learned about earlier in my life which yes death parade isn't explicitly talking about it but you're supposed to derive several meanings from a story anyways! Absurdism is pretty close to the message of "living in the present." I honestly needed a hard reminder for this and Death Parade certainly reminded me! can't believe i almost forgot what my younger self strived to live for. Btw after thinking all this i looked at the openings english lyrics and thats when the message becomes obvious lmao.

Anyways DP is peak go watch it and there's definitely way more messages/meanings from this show you can find!

I watched it 2 years ago

It was good

It gave me some stuff to rethink

Short and sweet it was

It was deep

I even cried when The female character saw or met her mother and all

I don't remember much i apologise

I'm writing this review in order to tell you all

My affection for this Anime

It's a niche and underrated anime

And Fandom would be small but ik it would be awesome 😎

But Anime 💯

I hope more people watch it

🤌✨

hi guys! i'm back with a permanent invite for the non-official death parade discord server:

https://discord.gg/UymUZda6UN

​

don't hesitate to join and say hi! ♡

I made these custom tapes with all 12 episodes of the anime split into 3 tapes! I make more anime tapes and stuff. I post them on instagram @customvhs

i’ve been wanting a necklace like Chiyuki’s i just love the green and gold around the green pendant. Does anyone have an amazon recommendation to find one just like it or really close to it?

So do they signify who goes up and down? IN the billiards one, the old man went down and young man went up?

Got my death parade piece finished recently wanted to post! Lmk yalls thoughts! (Ps had the joker card before this idea was just adding around it and gonna touch up/detail it soon)

Alguém tem ou sabe onde encontrar esta imagem em maior resolução?

It’s lowkey surprising me how I didn’t notice that earlier but lemme explain:

I watched this video some time ago and based on the visual, the audio and simply the atmosphere I ended up writing a comment, that describes a reality that it made me think of. And now, years later I noticed that what I wrote there could go hand in hand with what the void in Death Parade could also be like:

I reposted my comment so you can find it after sorting to the newest comments, because reading it while having the video playing adds to the experience.

But I’ll paste what I wrote into this reddit post too, for those who don’t wanna go to youtube to read it:

This feels like you have been in a coma for 3000 years and then you wake up. You start walking around, just to realize that you can’t find a single human being in this futuristic, mysterious and dystopian world.

[Imagine like the game portal (1, not 2) or cyberpunk but without the people there.]

You have that desire to see the inside of that building but as you walk and walk forward, you can’t find a single entrance in this otherworldly perfection of a building. You start wondering what’s inside there, maybe people? The engine that keeps the world going? Or even the entire world itself and you accidentally got out of it?

You simultaneously start to notice that you can’t feel your body anymore and you’re not even sure if your body was even there since you woke up.

What you notice is, that you currently are nothing more than a soul, that isn’t tied to a body anymore.

You are free to move as you wish without having a body that limits you so you fly up towards the windows of this construction to look what’s inside of it.

But once you take a look inside these windows, your level of confusion and fear increases again as you start seeing multiple snippets of your life that you used to live. Each window is like a an uncrossable gate to a certain point of your past which lets you see the various moments you have experienced in the life you once had. You see it in a shade of orange due to the color of the windows and as you keep floating from one window to the next, you start noticing that you can’t remember to have experienced some of these moments and as you keep going, this seems to be the case with more and more of the windows that you look into.

It’s when you start noticing that your friends look older than they did in your last available memory of them, that you start to understand that at some point something must have happened to you, which explains why you don’t appear in these snippets of your life anymore.

As you keep searching for answers in this unlimited pool of memories, you find one shocking snippet which answers all of your questions.

You see all of your close people gathered at a rainy and grey place outside, with all of them wearing black. And despite you being in seemingly a different dimension the emotions of this moment have no issue with reaching your soul, not at all. In this exact moment the first assumptions have formed inside of you and you equally wish for them to not be true, but as the memory goes on it gets clear that this is a funeral you’re looking at.

But not only that, Your worst fear was true. The person in the coffin, It was, it was you.. 🪟🎚️

So, I did a search on Google, and saw a bunch of people asking where to watch Death Parade. And also people saying that its not on Crunchyroll. Which is true for the CR app and website. BUT...

I did a search in my Amazon Fire Stick search part. Not on their internet browser. But on the top bar of the home screen. Where you can search for anything...apps, shows, movies, games, ect...

And Death Parade did show up as being on Crunchyroll as a channel subscription in Prime Video. Which is weird, because when I searched for it in my Prime video app. It didnt not show it in the list it gave me. (I have Crunchyroll and HiDive as subscriptions in Prime. As well as a normal CR app subscription)

I posted some pictures to show what I am meaning. But once I got it on the Fire Stick search, I hit the Death Parade picture, then "Seasons and Episodes" and it went into Crunchyroll in Prime and I can play the full season. As you can see in the picture, I'm on episode 9.

So, if you are wanting to watch it...for some reason it is still there by doing it that way.

It's a great anime btw. My kids recently got me into watching Anime. And I am hooked. I literally don't want to watch real people shows or movies anymore lol. It's a problem lol. Hope this helps someone be able to watch it. It's really good imo.

TL;DR: Death Parade is not on the CR app or when searching for it within Prime. But the search on the Fire Stick shows it as being available on CR through Prime. And it works. But no clue why it does.

Probably you guys already know them. So ‘Quindecim’ is Latin and translates to ‘fifteen’ and that’s the floor Decim’s bar is on. That’s a common fact. But let’s analyse a bit further. Decim’s name comes from ‘Decima’ who was a Roman goddess. She build a trio with two other goddesses. They represented the fate of humans, that’s why they also were called the “three Fates”. Decima’s job was to measure the life of a human, which was represented by a thread (rings a bell?), with her rod. The other two goddesses were named Nona (!) and Morta. Nona represented birth, which might be a reference to anime Nona being the manager and therefore recruiting new arbiters. Morta was in charge with looking after the death. Can’t think of a character representing her. It must be the void itself then (Morta= Mori = death).

To come to a conclusion, the mythology references in this anime are BANGERS AND THANK YOU PINTEREST FOR HELPING ME OUT THERE AND EXPAND MY KNOWLEDGE ABT DEATH PARADE 🔥🔥💜💜 as you see I’m no expert and I don’t know Latin but I was so excited about these references that I wanted to share them here with you haha. Sorry if they’re already well known.

Important note: The making of this post was approved by the mod team beforehand.

Hi! It's been more than 10 years since Death Parade aired, when I first watched it after already loving the Death Billiards OVA (which I honestly don't remember how I found it, because it was really niche). Despite (tragically) not having any sequels of any kind since then, it left an impression on me that has never left. I'm a sucker for psychological stories like it, and the dark bar setting was super unique. I've never really seen anything like it since.

So here I am to contribute a little bit to fixing that. SEVEN(!) years ago, when I decided to make a visual novel as my first ever game, the idea of making it a death game appeared very quickly, as I'm also a big fan of series like Danganronpa. And almost right after that decision, I thought of setting it in a bar. And not just any bar. The visual style, especially the main colors, naturally became very similar to the Quindecim. I even used a screenshot of the anime as a placeholder for the alpha!

Beyond R: Rule Ripper is a passion project that I've poured everything into, polishing it as much as I could. While DP is an anime and this is a visual novel, so not everyone in this sub will be a VN reader, if you're hungering for another story where people of different walks of life meet in a bar and have to duel to the death...the Golden Jack bar welcomes you. Don't expect it to be a 1:1 copy of it, however. I had many inspirations besides DP from many of my favorite series and all their DNA was mixed to produce a story with its own identity, but without forgetting its origins and paying homage to them.

I don't want to go into much more detail, especially when you can play a whole 10 hours of the game in the demo! I am not kidding, the free demo lasts for about 8-10 hours. The first three chapters of the game (and a bit more) with no cuts. Once you're done, you can load your save in the final game and keep going with no extra work.

Please check it out and wishlist it if you like what you see, it makes a huge difference to small devs like me!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2551380/Beyond_R_Rule_Ripper/

The Oculus Pokémon!

It is said to oversee the judgement of the departed which determines their destination in the afterlife. It looks down on most humans and Pokémon alike only giving respect to monarchs and legendary Pokémon. It can read the minds of those caught by its lotus-like beard.

The Figure Skate Pokémon!

The spirit of a renowned figure skater imbued the very snow in order to become this Pokémon. It has no recollection of its prior life yet it persists as an incredible ice skater, carving wondrous patterns with its skates that are said to be good luck if witnessed.

NO GUYS I AM NOT CRYING AHHHH—

First of all: Why does Ginti keep Mayu with him for a while? Is it for the same reason that Decim keeps Chiyuki? And if so, what the heck is there to be doubtful about? Mayu is probably the kindest soul in the entire show, the most obvious to be reincarnated, she was willing to die for another person, so why was he unsure? Then, why did he send Harada into the void? I mean, all he did was having a lot of girls... And if you ask me he proved he was a pretty good soul when he refused to let Mayu sacrifice herself and was pretty upset when she fell anyways Third, what's the deal with episode 11? Is it actually possible to bring someone back from the void or was it all a trick by Ginti to judge Mayu? And if it's the latter, why did he actually send her to the void when she decided to sacrifice herself????

I got this shirt recently because I don't really see any Death Parade shirts, even fan made ones, aside from the select few designs that a bunch of people seem to be selling. Just thought it'd be fun to share with others that might appreciate it.

hey there, i'm very new to anime. I just finished watching Death note and, man, IT WAS A WORK OF ART
i reaally wanted the show to have some sequel or a spin-off of some kind. BUT could not find anything..The only thing i came across is this fan speculation that light is shown in the show, waiting for something that feels like a verdict after death...
anyone, who's got an idea, please enlighten me