GsGsarthotegga
March 29, 2025
Not RecommendedFunny
Re:CUCK -Revenge of the Otakus in Another World- Season 3 is the worst in the series thus far, and the "rocking" OP that has all the smugly smiling characters lining up like they're walking into a capeshit film is telling. The dialogue and characters have always had weaknesses that were masked by the more intricate plotting, mystery, and tension of past seasons, yet with almost the entire cast bouncing off of one another with sassy one-liners and yucky banter in what has shapeshifted into a battle shonen, the series is at its most juvenile: Just look at the Looney Tunes ice skating chase with hammerbonks or the 12-year-old DBZ/Superman fanfic writing of one character heading to the moon and back to earth in less than a day.
Early parts of Re:LOLI feel like they're set at a kindergarten because of all the lollygagging with lolis, upping the ante for the baby talk moerot like never before, until they're sent to nap time because of how long the battles are. Looking to the latter half, episode 14 is a contender for the worst episode of the franchise. At least half of it's a sluggish, pointless flashback consisting of information the viewer either knew already from the White Whale arc or didn't need to know. The forced drama and crybaby antics here look like a parody (except they're dead serious) of a soap opera. Re:SNOT has led me to realize how important animation and composition are for crying scenes in particular. A raw closeup of grandpa Astrea ugly crying all of his dignity away, with the tears practically looking like icicles stabbing him in the eyes because of how static the shot is, cheapens everything further. The sappy music is the rotten cherry on top. The director embraces the author's clumsy melodrama and makes it even more obvious, when an adaptation should try to diminish these issues rather than double down on them.
There are also a few added characters and developments outside of the main plot and battles: There are new rambling villains, with Wrath being like a Diet Petelguese but with a poorly concealed identity, and the reveal will undoubtedly be butchered by the ridiculous melodrama. Liliana is a bard, who looks exactly like Trixie Kong, with a hackneyed filler backstory that she dumps on us in the middle of a battle because we just needed another flashback to Re:TARD the pacing. For the character with the most bloat in Re:BARF, there's Garfield boasting of being a "Gorgeous Tiger," the unconvincing "trauma" of having Elsa stalk him as a figment of his mind (as opposed to the more appropriate Subaru), a generic quest for vengeance, and a sappy backstory and "must protecc" side plot. We could have done without most of this, and it's hard to imagine anyone being moved by his portrayal, as the main reveal undermines any developments to his character from the Sanctuary arc and is embarrassing. There are cliche things with great execution in many cases, but this is told without any real craftsmanship. Most other characters aren't worth mentioning.
Although not as expressionistic as other examples of weebish heroes, like Dandadan's Ken Takakura and his removable pork and beans, Subaru is perhaps one of the most well-rounded pathetic, simp, doormat, zero-to-hero archetypes to emerge from the collective consciousness of the otaku. Which is not to say that Subaru is a good character, but he represents all the trashy wish-fulfillment, otaku pandering, and "Just Like Me" syndrome cases, and Re:REEK distills it all into one of the stinkiest, please-change-out-of-your-Adidas-track-suit-that-you've-been-wearing-for-several-years-straight-and-take-a-bath packages. It's all there. A NEET with no confidence, who sits around playing video games and does unspeakable things with grill figurines, dies and is isekaied into a world where he is quickly thrown waifus and responsibility far more desirable than what he'd ever find back home. That's not to say Subaru's rise is without considerable effort, for Re:CUCK isn't the easiest of power fantasies, at least at first. Furthermore, while he is OP, it comes with a cost: He is a loser who fails over and over, soaking up the pain and rage of the otaku like a suffering messiah as he works through the elaborate plot like a puzzle and makes things right with the help of his reset hacks, various mommies of his harem course-correcting and pulling him up by his bootstraps, and numerous higher-status males who come to respect him and blow smoke up his increasingly smug and annoying ass.
An obvious undercurrent running through the series has always been Subaru's self-loathing, relative uselessness compared to the other characters, the constant tone of "You're pretty awkward and not very reliable, but I can see how hard you try," and whiny insecurities. Of course, because of the "reset by death" hack he achieves great things. Re:CUCK is ultimately about the reformation or redemption of the NEET otaku, but since being a cog in the machine is not particularly inspiring, we're instead treated to an exciting fantasy world, adventure, and lots of waifus. The meeting of Emilia and Subaru in S1 of Re:SIMP, which has him ascending from would-be stalker to white knight by means of a plot convenience, goes something like this:
Emilia: Boohoo! Oh, if only I could reform the kingdom and end discrimination against half-elves like me.
Subaru: That sounds like a great cause, Emilia-chan. Tell me, does your hypothetical society discriminate against otakus wearing Adidas track suits, by any chance?
Emilia: What's an otaku? Are those the vegetarian hobbits with smol Peepis that I've been hearing about lately?
Subaru: Ahahahaha... forget I asked *Subaru shifts his beady eyes*. I would be honored to help as your knight, milady *Subaru kneels and takes Emilia's hand, his long, thin, forked tongue slithering out with a hiss*.
It appears quite a bit of that redemption is underway by S3 because the tone is now much lighter, whereas S1 sometimes felt like a horror series, for it dripped with Subaru's despair (okay, that was probably just the waste seeping out of his track suit), reveled in crushing suspense, and what seemed like perpetual dying and resetting. By contrast, S3 has all the characters appearing to respect Subaru, and even though ikemen like Julius used to roast him on a spit (at least he got in his "loli tsukai" line in this season, which is equivalent to little girl user/tamer/wielder), they're now brothers in arms, if not outright bromancers. A number of his waifus had tsundere traits, yet almost all of that has vanished, with even Ram probably eventually getting the tsundere-to-deredere pipeline taming treatment in future installments. Subaru, unsurprisingly, gets the kindest, most unconditional, mommy-like moeblob of all time, Emilia, who can see his inner beauty beneath the track suit, as his main squeeze (any moeblob who will not accept him unless he takes off his track suit is trash!). There are a few reasons why the tsundere archetype is popular. One is because they are more difficult to tame, and the other reason is because the more beta society becomes, the more desire there is to be treated like a doormat. But I think the other thing to note is that even when the tsundere kind of likes or even begrudgingly comes to love the MC, when she's being mean to him, there is a subconscious knowing that the little rat bastard deserves every kick to the balls and wounding of his pride that he gets. There's almost none of that here, even though he deserves it for being such an insufferable MC; spare the rod, spoil the child! Nevertheless, Subaru is on his way to becoming one of the great men of Re:CUCK's world and acts like a smug bastard put on a pedestal and worshipped. I'm sure he'll go down in history for his laughable "Okay, everyone, listen up. I'm a loser and totally pathetic compared to all of my allies, but even I'm managing in this struggle, so you can too" speech. Then he's like, "Don't make fun of me... I know it's a bad speech... Uwaaaah..." And his allies are like, "Nuh uh, that was amazing, Subaru-sama."
While it's a matter of taste whether one wants a series that's on the darker or lighter side, the author doesn't handle the latter quite as well. Just look at his villains. They are unhinged baby-eating psychopaths on meth, cocaine, and caffeine, all at once. There's the gruesome device of dying to reset the story. Subaru is quite troubled throughout much of the series. Many of the characters are exposed to trauma to the point of crumbling under the weight of a psychotic break. There was an outlandishness to the scenarios because Subaru would end up having to correct the most dire of outcomes and navigate through a labyrinthine and ever-changing plot, and we got to see things from different angles that added dimension or information to characters and events that we wouldn't acquire otherwise. The device is used a few times early on in S3 and is soon forgotten, without even the slightest tension of it being utilized again for most of the run.
Part of why this season is so lackluster is that there was once a greater sense of mystery and more attempts at creating atmosphere, yet all of that fades away as a result of S3 being like a long-form version of a battle shonen film. The formula for films of this type is even more subpar than your average TV shonen because we're introduced to new villains without much, if any, development or backstory, everything is usually rushed and shallow, and these films rarely rise above being action fanservice. To seal the deal, we even get to see Subaru suddenly become a poorly dressed Indiana Jones, tripping villains and swinging across rooftops with his whip. Very quickly, rivalries form or various characters pair off to either overcome a challenge or because they have some kind of counter to one of the villains. The worst part about the various characters being paired up against the villains is that it, again, sounds like a puzzle meant to be solved, just like the way the reset was often used in the past. It would have been more gripping had they failed because of uneven pairings, leading to Subaru dying and realizing a need to rearrange the parties so they are better matched. There could probably be more insight into the villains this way, since we would get to see them be victorious at least once or more.
There are too many battles going on at once for anything to be well developed. Even though several of the villains had been introduced prior, like Gluttony and Greed, none of them had many scenes or much to their characters, not to mention that content was cut for the adaptation. Petelguese stood out with his unhinged monologuing, and that's pretty much the course taken with all of the villains, yet the scenery chewing has ceased to be that amusing. None of the villains receive as detailed of a portrayal or an appropriate amount of time like Petelguese did, who we even got to see prior to his induction into the cult. There are hardly any insights into these villains as we watch the battles unfold. Going into this, what do we really know about Gluttony, for example, other than he made a few of Subaru's waifus forget things? We don't learn anything else about him until nearly the last episode, when the anticipation for his fights would have been greater if his scenes had been incorporated earlier into the series, and there's no reason this couldn't have been restructured more because most of the fights are occurring simultaneously. Even if you set aside the lack of resetting, the plot structure is less than ideal, and the finale is extremely rushed. But once you understand how the formula works, you'll realize that there's no chance for any of the main characters to die or for Subaru to use his reset by death, completely dissolving any tension or interesting progression for most of the season. If you reset in relation to one of the several ongoing fights, you have to reset all of them, and that's a hassle, which just emphasizes the laziness of this season's approach.
The most important fight of Re:CUCK S3 ushers in the ultimate NTR and Revenge of the Otakus experience. As if to provide foreshadowing, there's a scene where Subaru is driving the carriage and Otto and Emilia are having a friendly conversation in the back. The ever-insecure Subaru almost drives off the road at numerous points for our first dose of cuckold comedy. To make this component hit below the belt even harder, there have been a few tweaks to the character design, but they are most obvious with Emilia because she is the main heroine and temporarily a damsel in the worst kind of distress: the dreaded NTR event! In past seasons, when there was regular conflict between Emilia and Subaru, the eyes were sharper around the edges (tsurime), but they are now much softer and rounder (tareme). The result is that she appears more innocent and docile, has an increasingly generic "girl next door" moeblob feel, and she has lost any mystique she had from earlier seasons and is just Subaru's boring trophy. They also apply a blush effect that makes her look like she's in heat and dtf, heightening the impression that the Archbishop of NTR's Peepi is looming over her like a sword of Damocles.
Then we get to the main course of ball-busting suspense, for the Archbishop of NTR swaggers in and abducts Subaru's elfblob to take as his waifu. Of course, the Archbishop of NTR has like 72 virgins already, and I imagine his cowering harem will subtly convert to Subaru's outer harem once his nemesis bites the dust. The contrast here is supposed to be that the Archbishop of NTR is the most tyrannical and perverse scumbag, while Subaru is gentle and noble. If you look past the initial dominance of the Archbishop of NTR, in a sense, he's like the most narcissistic and smug otaku who plays multiplayer video games with cheat codes (invincibility hacks), collects waifus (note that the virginity check is something of a red herring and these waifus are purely objects of another sort), and goes on endless monologues on message boards about how incredible he is, all leading to him being an NTR hentai super villain. He is the most obvious mirror held up to Subaru; the Archbishop of NTR is essentially a villainous Subaru with unlimited power and no character development. Most isekai and otaku-centric shows at least implicitly interact with the idea of a redemption story, but the way these two characters are paralleled is a riot.
The "7 deadly sins" are obviously meant to be a reflection of the MC's bad traits that he's working through in some sense, but the author lays it on really thick: He writes a story where Subaru (author/otakus) meets Emilia (crush) first and can goof up and have infinite resets to win her over and save the day, and he's such a well-meaning, dedicated simp that she falls for him. Then the author depicts the Archbishop of NTR (bully) as the villain responsible for using and abusing his many conquests (harem). You can tell the author is attempting to process his trauma of the high school bully cuckolding him by dating the girl of his dreams, dunking his head in the toilet, and stuffing him in a locker. The author simply reverses everything as part of his Re:CUCK -Revenge of the Otakus- plot. Finally, Subaru is so amazing and good that he has Reinhard (Chad), who he constantly notes is better than him and how inferior he feels next to him, save the day and step aside so Subaru and Emilia can be together. The author even takes this fiasco so far that he creates a plot hole in relation to Reinhard's sword draw, serving the double-edged purpose of enhancing the shaming and making the later Astrea character arc more emotional, yet the latter is squandered because the author writes such contrived melodrama.
Subaru spends most of his time in fights against the Archbishop of NTR shaming and talking down to him, cavorting around like a mooning monkey, screeching insults and flinging poo simultaneously. I've never seen a better example of a fight devolving into a glorified shaming ritual than this, and I can almost hear the author crying from the catharsis of having finally gotten the better of his bully through words in a popular LN series. If the author had put as much effort into plot and characters as he did shaming this one villain, then S3 could be a masterpiece! Subaru and Emilia's interactions with the witch cult, even when there should be "bombshell reveals," don't lead to any deeper insights or effective beats. The worst part is how they shot themselves in the foot by being so judgmental and spiteful with writing cues here, while being overly forgiving elsewhere.
We know that the witch cult are villains who will eventually all be captured, reformed (Subaru needs to pad out his harem, after all), or killed. We're all flawed and grapple with these "sins," yet the witch cult brings out the absolute worst in an individual. We've already seen the transformation of Petelguese from a normal man into the monster that he became. All the leeway they give to Subaru and how we're supposed to feel sorry for him... well, isn't Regulus just a shade of Subaru at his lowest but with immense power to act out his most depraved fantasies? Regulus and the entire witch cult are really tragic figures, and the way they present this, with all the exploitative glee of gawking onlookers gathered around the carnival freak show, is a disservice to the themes and storytelling thus far. In a lot of ways, the power fantasy is far, far more pathetic in this segment of Re:CUCK than your average isekai where the MC is simply OP, and S3's naked, warts and all, writing makes it even more ridiculous.
