SiSingleH
September 30, 2020
Mixed Feelings
It’s not often I find myself with the experience to’ve been on both sides of the anime fandom regarding a show as contentious as Re:Zero. Whether you’re among the uncontrollable super-fans who’ve adored Re:Zero for the last four years or among its haters who’ve vehemently despised it for just as long and decried it with just as much fervor, I bet there was never a time when you were in the opposing camp, and while I suppose my position isn’t quite so polarizing, it’s definitely an awkward middle-ground of its own. What’s worse is the fact my opinions on the show as I knew it werenever actually changed, but the second season’s stark contrast to the first was so strong, that when it forced me to average the quality of both seasons, the results weren’t pretty.
I think what makes Re:Zero so interesting to me is just how ostensibly bland it is. All the people who hate it are of the opinion Re:Zero is any other isekai, and if you think otherwise, you’re either blind to tropes or just plain stupid, and they are basically correct, just for incorrect reasons. Where Re:Zero is bland is in its proceedings, its moment-to-moment. While its setting is that of every isekai fantasy you’ve ever seen, the actual set design of the world and its many locations is where the uncharacteristic amount of effort put into the show’s production really begins to shine. The first season of Re:Zero is extremely well-produced for a White Fox show—White Fox being a relatively small studio with little industry purchasing power and few people to outsource from, which isn’t even mentioning how often they themselves are outsourced from, left with even less staff to work on in-house projects with—so the fact they could put out anything on the level of Re:Zero season one is honestly incredible. The world of Re:Zero wasn’t the same game-start village copy/pasted from Konosuba ad nauseam, it was a real world, and it felt like a setting with some thought put into its creation, even if said creation was ultimately somewhat basic. The background art was as inconsistent as any modern anime nowadays, but at their height they were fairly gorgeous, and the color work was fantastic, especially at the beginning of the show. Re:Zero was, all things considered, a technically cared for work of animation in a landscape of utterly soulless contemporaries. However, the tropes really started seeping through the cracks in its text. While there is more political intrigue in the world of Re:Zero than there is in others, said political intrigue is quite sophomoric and not even explored that extensively. It’s a royal succession, and each of the different candidates has the most distilled version of whatever archetypically opposing ideology the author assigned them to have. You’ve got your capitalist, your royalist, your anarchist, your chivalrist, and your token moderate in Emilia. What I’m getting at here is just how simpleminded the show is under a magnifying glass despite the heart and soul behind its presentation, which is why what ultimately rocketed the series to stardom was the addictive shock-value in its thrilling direction and the astounding breadth of tone it was able to command in persuading its audience to care. Subaru is, to the haters’ credit, just the otaku self-insert. He’s just your self-deprecating guy serving as a mirror to the audience, pandering until they find him relatable, but the subtle difference in Subaru’s characterization is in the fact he actually has a personality, whereas most of these kinds of characters don’t. Most of these characters are only self-deprecating in so far as their mere existence, and devoid of realism, they never get ugly. Subaru, genuinely, gets very ugly.
When people claim every isekai protagonist is commenting on the otaku condition to some degree, they aren’t wrong, but those exemplars don’t dare get as personal as Subaru. Most isekai protagonists just go, “Oh, I’m this lazy bastard, but isekai turned my world upside down, and now I’m a god because, well, it’s like a game world, and I’m an epic gamer,” so on and so forth, but this admittance of having lived a pathetic life is still within the viewer’s comfort zone, because the show then commits itself to shameless escapism which justifies the indulgent lifestyle it just called pathetic with a fantasy world who’s sole purpose is to reify skills once worthless in the real world. While Re:Zero has all the same tangible elements in its many waifus and MMO RPG style setting, Subaru’s life is by no means worth being envious of because his super power is a curse. It’s not the most creative subversion in the world, but nevertheless, it is an intentional difference clearly meant to make a point, because instead of empowering him, his life in another world mercilessly tears him down. People hate Subaru even though—let’s be honest—they’re otaku of the anime community the same as he is, because they don’t have the perspective to acknowledge the fact he just hit way too close to home. I love Emilia memes aside, when people say they hate Subaru because of episode thirteen, what they’re really saying is it got too real. Most hack isekai authors imbue their protagonists with one rule and one rule only: keep it funny. The anxieties of their main characters are exclusively addressed through wry, self-deprecating humor, and their issues only effect them in their own minds and never become physically destructive, but with Subaru, the otaku’s problems have suddenly been manifested into stress, anger, and any other realistic emotional response, so it stopped being funny and just showed how sad the condition really is. If you hate a character merely because they’re impure, either you’re too immature to accept a fictional character being as complexly flawed as a real one, or you’re made uncomfortable by the fact you clearly see yourself in them, in which case you’re just a fucking coward. Subaru is proof a generic character can still be human, and when he endures such torture, those who empathize with his weakness invest in his struggles easily because he is the archetype easiest to connect with. He is the otaku boy, he is the self-insert, and the fact he’s depicted with such a beating heart elicits a genuine emotional reaction from his audience comprised of individuals much like himself. Personally, it was endearing to see a show with such an honest protagonist finally tackle the themes others like it had avoided or made light of, and it made the show feel like something a little more special and meaningful than the rest in its shallow genre.
The first season’s crowing jewel, though, is definitely its directing. The way that beautiful color design—the color balance in particular, and the gradients in the shading—informs the aesthetic; the tone shifts triggered by the atmospheric coloration and the brilliantly timed musical queues; and the audio editing and sound design, which themselves are facets of production very much overlooked in genres as cheap as isekai. It all has such attention to detail put into its presentation, it makes the show as a whole a more immersive experience. Re:Zero never feels too edgy because of how artfully crafted its scenes are, even when they are, by all rights, way too edgy. Almost in spite of this, though, the script behind the cinematography—not the sincere themes weaved throughout the script, but the writing itself—is always at odds with this directing style, and this is the problem with Re:Zero season one and the exacerbated problem with Re:Zero season two. What makes the script the problem is it’s so much more childish than the actual psychological core of the show is. I just discussed how Subaru is a character who makes his audience face reality in a lot more poignant a fashion than his contemporary self-inserts commenting on the audience watching them, but the way in which he goes about this is utterly juvenile, because he just over-explains himself in such petty detail way too much. When people criticize, for example, Mari Okada shows for being melodramatic, all I can think is, “Well, you’re not wrong, but if THIS is your bar for melodrama, then you yourself must be one hell of a drama queen.” Listen, Re:Zero is melodramatic, okay? The average anime is melodramatic. “Melodramatic” just means what is more dramatic than is realistic, and in real life, no one rants about their emotions as much as characters do in this show, in most anime, and in most casual entertainment in general, be it animation, live-action, or god damn puppet shows. I know the counterargument to what I’m saying right now is going to be one big fat middle finger, because if 99.9% of anime write themselves in this way, then why even bother bitching? But my argument to that is, well, 99.9% of anime aren’t masterpieces. Yes, a lot of them do have this problem, but that doesn’t make it not a problem, especially for someone my age who by all accounts should’ve quote-unquote “grown out” of this genre quite some years ago. Yes, it is a show for made for teenagers and young adults and it comments on issues of teenagers and young adults with teenage and young adult characters, so in that sense, it fits the market perfectly, and its massive success with those demographics proves this, but from a writing standpoint, I can’t help but feel like so little happens only because so much is being said…and in particular, in the second half of every arc.
The first half of every arc in Re:Zero season one is infinitely better than the second half because the first is where everything of interest actually happens, by which I mean, where the artistic substance, narrative intrigue, personal stakes, and thrilling pace of the show all lie. The first arc of Re:Zero is the four episodes spent in the capital where many of the principle characters are introduced and much of the foundational world building is set up, and these episodes are kept engaging by the thrillingly directed death scenes and fascinating hints at the greater mysteries to come. This is what intrigues viewers, this and nothing else, at least not yet, but after these hooks are sunk into our attention, it just becomes a generic fantasy action-adventure show where they defeat Elsa having finally learned of her general motive and identity. This wasn’t a problem in my opinion, because it’s only four episodes, and even being as impatient of a viewer as I am, an episode and a half of generic TV anime isn’t that hard to sit through when it was preceded by two and a half episodes of one of the most unexpectedly captivating opening acts to a show I’d ever seen going in with such low expectations. Where I stop being so lenient, though, is in the second half of each of the following arcs comprising the remainder of season one. I would consider the second arc to be the mansion and the third and final arc to be episodes thirteen though twenty six. I know most people would take that to be two arcs seeing as there’s two checkpoints, but since the conflict in both sections is centered around the ultimate goal of reaching Roswaal’s Domain with enough resources to protect Emilia, I consider it one big arc. Anyway, the first part of the mansion arc is so damn good because it’s just a super compelling mystery box which you pull back the layers on only to find yet another super competing mystery box hidden inside again and again, and you’re constantly in a state of learning a lot whilst seeing a lot. Most anime will just explain the thing, but season one of Re:Zero always committed to showing you the thing, enchanting you with the thing, then tactfully meting out natural answers to explain the thing over time. But once the thing is explained, the characters just kind of deal with it, almost monotonously, and while one would argue this to be inevitable, that’s where the bloated script becomes a problem. While I’d agree to a certain extent you can’t just introduce hurdle after hurdle without demonstrating the successful loop which actually made the leap over, I’d also assert the resolution to not strictly be necessary in such superfluous detail when said resolution is ultimately not all that dense. The thing about death loops is how overpowered the main characters are when considered objectively. On paper, the only thing stopping someone who can reset the events of any conflict until they or the side they’re fighting for becomes successful is psychological damage, because while they aren’t invincible, they are theoretically immortal. All an antagonist can do to stop a protagonist from looping is to break their spirit and make them give up, so any story with a death loop can only approach the conflict therein in one of two ways: either by limiting the properties of the loop to essentially void the fact the protagonist is immortal, like in Higurashi no Naku Koro ni where Keita doesn’t actually keep his memories between loops, or by making the protagonist’s mental state vulnerable to collapse, like in Steins;Gate where Okabe is constantly toeing the line between sanity and despair throughout the course of his struggles. And Re:Zero very much takes the latter route. This melodramatic insistence on constantly monitoring the emotions of every major character leaves the slower paced conclusions to each arc absolutely overblown with inflated dialogue and soapy fluff since the author feels the need to cram all the relevant character development into the successful timeline to guarantee its permanence. Seeing as Re:Zero just loves to have its cast stand around and talk about the plot when the plot needs to be resolved, the show as a whole gets so boring and becomes a never-ending exchange where characters who know more about the world than Subaru does exposit the relevant mechanics to him so he can solve the problem, and in turn, he exposits his overemotional analysis of himself and the surrounding characters so the young audience can keep up and get the point, even though the technicalities of both are in no way intricate or deep respectively.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call the shaman dog cringeworthy, but only because if it was, I wouldn’t have been able to fall asleep during those episodes, and while I acknowledge Rem’s backstory was engaging in so far as it adequately explained why she was such a static character, thusly justifying her self-effacing worldview on some level, it was just as predictable and emotionally immature. When I think of the mansion arc in Re:Zero, I don’t think of Subaru and Ram running around a generic forest which robbed the show of its beautiful color balance whilst expounding their adolescent emotions, interspersed with a collection of tensionless battles against an army of CG dogs. What I think of is Subaru staying awake all night, clutching his blankets in absolute terror of whatever—he knows—will kill him during the night, only for it come from inside his own body and compel him stumbling out into the dark, empty hallway, dazed and desperate, grasping at anything he can to try and call for help only to have his arm ripped off—and you see it with the haunting beauty of an expertly framed first-person perspective shot—hanging from the chandelier just long enough for you to experience the same horrifying realization the threat is coming from inside the house, and hearing the sound of the chains as—boom!—he dies and wakes up in the bed, dreading the thought of the days to come yet again. I think of him agonizing in confusion and sadness as he witnesses Rem emerging ominously from the forest with the mace and chain in hand, panicked in thoughts of why she’d ever do this to him and how he could ever reconcile with an enemy he only ever saw as an ally, just in time for her to mercilessly lunge forward and brutalize him as she had before, berating him with all these seemingly directionless insults and foreign accusations, all of which I knew nothing of, and Subaru knew nothing of, choking with blood as he insists just that and as I myself learn of all these crazy implications regarding his connection to the Witch—and then getting hit with that exhilarating lightbulb moment—that’s what the power is, that’s who brought him here, and I’m learning all these things from a character who knows more than I or my main character, and who’s not just sitting around explaining it to he or I, but who’s doing something spectacular, motivated by this knowledge I desperately want to learn, and which she is delivering to me with all the flair in the world. THAT’S what I think of when I think of the mansion arc, not just saving the day and watching teenagers coddle their emotions into some level of catharsis with unsubtle dialogue. This praise and subsequent critique can be stated of the final arc as well, because episodes fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen have—and I think anyone would agree, whether they like this show or not—become truly iconic. In the last four years, the shot of Subaru’s head getting snapped off by frostbite as Puck bursts out the roof of the Mathers’ estate has become nearly as iconic as the head of the Colossal Titan peeking over the walls of the Shiganshina District in episode one of Attack on Titan…okay, maybe not that iconic, but whether you like Re:Zero or not, there’s no denying these episodes have cemented themselves in modern anime history with their incredible imagery and their exciting delivery of information the likes of which I just described, like in this case, Betelgeuse holding up the Gospel to a catatonic Subaru asking if he is the one called Pride, implying not only the existence of Seven Deadly Sins as living threats, but the open possibility that Subaru was brought to this world and equipped with Return by Death by the Witch with the expectation he’d join her ranks. All these naturalistic yet narratively juicy dialogue moments delivered while cool shit is happening on screen is how you should be learning and progressing the story. You shouldn’t be progressing by standing around and expounding your emotions so everyone knows why you’re doing what you’re doing and why you want to solve the plot, then having subsequent exposition dumps on how to solve said plot, because no one cares. Realistic characters just shut up, do the thing, and have people judge them upon the merits of their actions like an adult. This was the downfall of Re:Zero season one in my humble opinion, and while I use a word as dramatic as “downfall,” I still liked that show quite a bit. It had problems, but they were nuanced, and they were problems shared by a great majority of anime, so they weren’t too egregious to sit through, and at its highest heights, it was borderline masterful.
Re:Zero season two is analogous to the second half of an arc from Re:Zero season one over the course of its entire run, and this is why Re:Zero season two has converted me into one who can no longer say they like Re:Zero. Re:Zero season two is a constant exposition dump. It is Subaru, coming off the heels of his last victory having secured all his relationships, realizing he’s made enough waves in the world to—minor spoilers—get the attention of the other Sin Archbishops. With the Witch’s Cult now coming after Emilia in full-force, this is no longer a radical cell led by Betelgeuse to try and assassinate her in her own domain. This is now a small-scale war against a terrorist organization and a coalition of militarized nation-states within a kingdom which Subaru has essentially started and leaders such as Roswaal and Crusch now have to conduct. Yet, despite all this, the stakes have, if anything, lowered drastically. The death loop which occupies the entirety of this cour, first of all, only comes into play around half way through the show, because the first half is dedicated to a deluge of banal conversations, but once the pieces finally begin to move on the board, even then, it just falls flat, lacking all its past mystique and therefore all its past intrigue. When Subaru finally dies, he sees not only what kills him, but who kills him, and we know this person, so we know why they did it. We also know why he’s going to do what he’s doing because it’s a location we’re already familiar with, so we can also extrapolate why they were there to do what they did. And even when he’s killed by something which is in any way shocking or new, he’ll wake up, and immediately have someone with the relevant knowledge info-dump everything he needs to know about said thing instead of letting him experience it himself like he did in season one oh-so intensely. While Re:Zero is not strictly a mystery, its mysterious elements were what made it such an addictive thriller. And that’s not even mentioning the fact those first few hours of wasted screen-time to get the ball rolling again were spent demystifying obscured elements of the world and storyline which didn’t tell us anything new in an interesting fashion. Skipping over the fact they ruined characters such as Roswaal and Beatrice by retroactively writing over their motivations from season one, there are a whole new set of characters, but they have no direct relevancy we know of and exist only to profess to Subaru mechanics which he didn’t already know, some of which include the six ancient Witches who were overpowered by the one Witch of Envy, only to make them all random waifus who demand no respect and inspire no fear. There are new locations, but none of them are visually interesting as set pieces, and the vast majority of our time is spent on familiar grounds anyway. Ultimately, the entire experience just drones on with very little pulse and a hell of a lot of dialogue. If season one endeared you to these characters to the point you can stomach them all standing around talking and arguing and going through over-emotional spiritual transformations that mean nothing, then I suppose this season will not only be engaging to you, but will also be emotionally gratifying, because the fact the trials and tribulations of the principle death loop have become more emotionally stressful than psychologically stressful suggests that’s what the author was going for, but when the emotions at hand are so callow, the stakes simply cannot be taken as pressing. To me, it just feels like the author thought of a way to begin a narrative in an organic and excitingly spontaneous fashion sparking questions you wanted answered, only to lead you along with exciting developments, thoughtful characters, and a meticulously created world wrapped in a familiar exterior, slowly giving you small answers to the most promising parts of the bigger questions, until he realized this could only ever be act one. When I said Re:Zero season two is analogous to the second half of an arc from season one, I meant it to imply just how much season two has put season one into perspective. I can now say that on the whole, even though the arcs from within season one are structured the way I discussed, season one as a whole when compared to the second is like “part one” of an arc from within it. Season one is overwrought with exhilarating moments of thrilling direction and expertly timed, densely packed, narratively rich dialogue, and driven by multifarious, multifaceted characters who you want to get to know, and season two is just the following, flat proceedings.
Season two is just the flat proceedings of a show which has exhausted its once tantalizing wheelhouse of concepts to capture its audience with. It’s just, we’ve set the board, we know the players, we know the objective, we know the rules, and I guess the author just had nothing left up his sleeve, so now we’re just doing the thing. We’re just going and learning about all the witches with flat exposition dumps, we’re learning about more aspects of the world with more exposition dumps, we’re meeting new characters and learning about their emotions through more long conversations. We’re just talking, and talking, and talking, and talking, and when we’re moving, we’re still talking and the actions we’re talking have lost their intrigue even when they honestly shouldn’t have. I mean, the new death loop only takes up the entire season because it’s so unfathomably complicated when compared to the previous loops, which I know sounds awesome, but the author must’ve thought his ambitiously large set-up would go over the heads of his young audience, so he decided to undercut the mystique of the deaths with instant explanations and continue to undercut the genuineness of his cast with constant clarifications of their already unsophisticated emotions. As I stated at the beginning of this mess, I know Re:Zero is a very contentious show, and for that reason I’ve tried to shut up about it, because even though I largely don’t care what people think of me, the last thing I want is to have a bunch of enraged teenagers spamming my MAL page because I expressed what they perceive to be the incorrect dissenting opinion. After all, I’ve written reviews which have done exactly that, and even though I don’t care about my reputation, I do care about my sanity, and I’d hate to proverbially stir the hornet’s nest yet again. But I think I can express my disillusionment with Re:Zero season two in good faith because I’ve made clear the fact I’ve now been on both sides. Re:Zero season two is a fundamental disappointment which failed to deliver on the expectations which the first beget, and frankly, I have no more expectations for this series going forward. I was not particularly vulnerable to season one emotionally, but from a directorial and stylistic perspective, I respected what it did right which countless others like it have done and continue to do so very wrong, and the fact it would just kind of peter out into what the haters always said it was is honestly something I can say I’m sad about.
Thank you for reading.
