i can explain the quick tl;dr about this showin four words. one of the better ways that i thought of toreally explain what this show is all about is to actually talk about a scene from a completelydifferent show, if you’ll permit me. it’s a show that also has zero in the title. in the first episode of fate/zero, or seconddepending on how you choose to number it, delinquent and murderer ryuunosuke (afterkilling a family and tying up their child) goes through the motions of “summoning ademon†resulting in the appearance of the servant caster. ryuunosuke happily offers the crying childto caster as a gift, expecting him to murder
the child straight out or devour him whole. but he doesn’t. in fact, he lets the child go. he removes his restraints and points him tothe door, much to the displeasure of ryuunosuke. so the child goes, he runs to the exit, andsees the light. in that moment, he has hope, he has freedom,and with that…he gets devoured by caster’s shadowy tentacles. caster explains that he did this, giving thechild that glimmer of hope, because it’s that quick moment when hope becomes despairthat fear tastes best.
i brought all of this up because that moment,that feeling right there when hope becomes a bottomless pit of despair is re:zero ina nutshell. re:zero is a series that likes to teeter backand forth between those two extremes, showing you what you want to see – hope, courage,perseverance – then slowly tilting the scales, allowing the weight to shift and then crashinto despair. and then it continues this cycle over andover and over again. ladies, gentlemen and others, my name is arkadaand welcome to glass reflection. today, we are talking about the first seasonof studio white fox’s re:zero: starting life in another world.
let’s jam. some of you are going to hate this show. there is no way around that. re:zero contains a cavalcade of elements thateven i will admit have weighed down other shows in the past. its protagonist subaru originally was a worthlessneet and, after a miracle of all miracles, he is transported to a magical fantasy worldthe likes of which all super nerds salivate over. despite having no obvious magical ability,he takes to his new life rather optimistically,
turning himself into a semi-hero of justice,because that’s what you are supposed to do right? and he does his best to help out a drop-deadgorgeous half-elven woman who saves his life. without spoiling too much, over the courseof the series he fights monsters, demons, makes game of thrones-esk political dealings,builds an unofficial harem out of all the beautiful women he meets, all the while beinghaunted by a unseen wicked witch because his character needs to be tragic and loldeep. but that’s the surface of it, and some ofthose things are most definitely negatives. i’ve verbally trashed shows for less.
the times where the series follows heroictropes to an almost absurd level, having subaru be walking deus ex machina, while at the sametime trying to portray his abilities as a common everyday neet make me roll my eyes. if that was it, if that was all this showhad, then i would have dropped it long ago. but i didn’t. of course to explain why i didn’t we needto dig into this show, which means spoilers. so if you haven’t watched it and are wonderingif you should, here’s my pitch: re:zero is at times a complicated mess of tropes seeminglydesigned to draw you in because those tropes all come from other popular shows, and ifyou liked those this will serve your interests.
normally i frown on that, but there comesa time, where the plot traverses its own kind of uncanny valley reaching a point where it’sso bad, that it’s amazingly good. i cannot defend the narrative problems thatthis series has. but by god can i say that it is entertainingto watch, even if this series doesn’t tell the whole story, which we all expected becausethe original story is not finished yet. but if you haven’t watched it, then i highlyrecommend it. beyond this point in the video is potentialspoilers. i’m not going to reveal obvious plot elementsfrom later in the series, so most people will be fine, but if you want to enter this seriesblind, then this is the point to do so.
go out and watch the series, come back, andthen we’ll talk. i can wait. so! first and foremost, the show is not over. *sigh* in fact, we’ve only seen a fractionof the story it wants to tell, and that worries me. anime of this length that are not popularshounen have a habit of never being adapted beyond this point and as someone who doesn’tread manga too often because i prefer anime as a medium over comics, it depresses me thati might not be able to see the rest of this series in the same way that i started.
notice: if you are watching this from a magicalfuture world where the second season is announced or perhaps even released, please ignore thisstatement. but what we can look at now is the story ofsubaru, which has some interesting problems with it. the main one is that we don’t actually knowat any point in time while watching the series, where it wants to end. subaru is brought into this world withoutwarning or explanation, and for the first little while just acts because he feels that’swhat he’s supposed to do in that situation. you know, until he dies.
which he does, a lot. if you are one of the few people that ignoredmy spoiler warning, subaru does have a magical ability, return by death which activates everytime he dies returning him to a semi-save point some time earlier, fully healed, notdead, and containing all memories of his previous life. this is kind of the defining element of theseries, the thing it has that other fantasy shows that on the surface look similar donot have. the time traveling element on its own is nothingnew, and was utilized most recently in the anime adaptation of steins;gate, which isconvenient as both steins and zero share the same animation studio, along with the traitof putting some form of a colon in their name
because it’s so cool. [sonofabitch]the one thing that i will ever say that steins;gate did wrong however, and it wasn’t somethingi noticed until i played through the entirety of the original visual novel, was that themental stress of constantly repeating the same timeline over and over again, witnessingthe death of your friends over and over again, was to an extent downplayed in the adaptation. it was still touched upon, but ultimatelydid not have the same dark trenches of despair that the original ended up treading. re:zero however, as i alluded to at the startof the video, makes a very large part of suabru’s
story arc revolve solely around that despairand his eventual mental breakdowns. so often does subaru get that glimmer of hopeonly to see it dashed before him and he gets dragged back to the save point to do it allover again. another difference between the two shows is that steins;gate also tells us what the end point is. in steins;gate, it’s to traverse into theother world line and save the life of kristina. but in re:zero? is it…get emilia on the throne? subaru’s save point keeps moving forwardwhen he overcomes various obstacles, almost like every arc is a new game level that hehas to complete, but his future is unpredictable.
we don’t know, and he doesn’t know, whenthis hell of repeating events over and over is going to end. but somehow he keeps at it. none of his loops are taken as time off asit were, he’s somehow able to drive himself to do his best in every loop like it couldbe his last. this is even though just taking a loop offand seeing what happens could give him priceless information. there’s another thing, subaru as a characterconfuses and at times irritates me. multiple times throughout the show subaruis given information, but not the ability
to piece it all together until it’s convenientfor the plot. hell, he dies twice before he realizes thathe keeps going back in time, making me think that he’s just idiotic, but then there areother times when he’s able to come up with complex solutions to problems and act on themlike they are easy. the story keeps changing the competency ofsubaru to suit its needs. when he needs to be smart he is, and whenhe just needs to die he becomes one of the biggest idiots in the whole world. in the loops where he knows he’s going todie, a smart man would gather as much information as he could before his inevitable death sothat he might have an advantage next time
around, but that’s never something thatoccurs to him. hell, when they fight a giant white whale,he conveniently forgets that it has the power to wipe people from existence until halfwayinto the battle, which would have been a good thing to let the combatants know! but hey, he can magically figure out and politicalmaneuver others to get them all there fighting in the first place, because the plot demandsit. but in his favour, what i really liked aboutsubaru is that he is ultimately flawed. not just in the ways that the plot demands,but in his own outlook. other shows like sword art and titan haveprotagonists with the same drive and the same
level of perseverance that subaru has, butthey get mystical plot armour to help them solve problems. subaru doesn’t. or at least, not in the same way. his plot armour lasts just long enough tomake him think he’s invincible, until reality comes crashing down upon his soul. like the wicked witch is just toying withhis life, which could very well be a thing. subaru is a character who has delusions ofjustice, of heroism, of what is right and good, but he himself is a selfish prick whocould be construed as only looking out for
#1. he acts like he cares, but does he really? or is he just acting this way because that’swhat he’s “supposed†to do, thinking that if he does otherwise he’s just goingto die a painful death with no payoff. and honestly, the best part of the series(for me, anyway) is when he acknowledges all of it. episode 18: the episode so important thatthe creators removed the opening, ending, and also gave it an extra 80 seconds of runtime. however, if you were to mute it, you wouldthink it’s the most boring episode ever produced because besides its opening scene,the entire episode is just talking heads.
a conversation between subaru and the demonmaid rem. but the show gave episode 18 so much timeand care because it was the episode where subaru came to terms with who he is. leading up to this, he has been abused, insulted,and abandoned. he died over and over again, and saw rem – oneof the few people who trusts him implicitly – both betray his trust and vanish fromexistence. in the span of 26 minutes, subaru starts tocome to terms with who he is, so that he can better continue his life in the circumstancethat he has found himself in. it’s a hard episode to watch, but honestly,it has become one of my favourite single episodes
of anime for its impassioned dialogue – evenif after its conclusion the series continues its cycle of death and rebirth, of hope andeventual despair that it so gleefully enjoys tormenting us with. episode 18 also proves that rem is best girl, no contest, fight me irl bro! but subaru has his heart sold to another. it’s a real shame too, because he couldhave had rem. you could say that he really imprezza’edher, you know. subaru could have lived with her and becomea real… forester…maybe they could have moved tothe…outback, and had children who could
be his…legacy. but instead he’s continuing his despairjourney... and constantly get wrex’ed. get it? cause those are all subaru vehicles! i’m not going to go the distance for thissection like i normal do. the last segment ended up being far longerthan i planned for it to be and hopefully the animation clips i’ve been using areproof enough for when i say that white fox is amazing at what they do, and that i heavilyenjoy their work.
but instead of just skipping this portionentirely, i wanted to still have it mostly because i needed a place where i can justfor a brief moment mention how much i loved the japanese voice actors for this show. yuusuke kobayashi with his asshole-ish soundingvoice that got him hired in the first place, rie takahashi who’s been getting reallygood roles since seyu’s life (and by god does she deserve them) and finally, inoriminase, who i hope i can one day hear again as rem. *sigh* well, we can all dream, can’twe. overall the series has been rather divisiveover the last two seasons that it’s been airing.
people who like it overlook the flaws andtout it as one of, if not the best anime that came out these last 6 months. as could be expected, others did not taketo that label well, especially with a show that has several elements that are perceivedas “flaws†like the harem, the confusing timeline jumping that could be explained asthe writers trying too hard, and just subaru as a character being a generally unlikeableasshat sometimes. but you know, when it’s gets over thosehumps, things change. subaru starts to become a character that youcheer for, on top of being one of the most plot conscious characters to probably existin an anime.
(please tell me if someone fits that descriptionbetter.) the plot becomes less predictable. it doesn’t actually end, so that’s stilla black mark, but considering we ended up with a several episode showdown between subaruand a guy voiced by yoshitsugu matsuoka, it turned out all right. it also wasn’t a cliff-hanger ending. sure, there are still plenty of plot pointsleft unexplored, but they didn’t focus on that like some other shows. so since we all knew that they weren’t goingto finish the plot, i’m glad they ended
it the way they did. so with all that in mind, i would like topresent re:zero with the recommendation to buy it. it has enough bumps in the road to stop mefrom giving it my highest recommendation, but hey, if it really wants it badly enough,then they can give me a second season, the bastards! until then, buy it is more than enough. its clichã© intro episodes eventually breakoff into a world of pain and despair the likes of which we may never see again for a longtime.
which would seriously displease me. but that’s just how these things work. at the time of this video, re:zero is unlicensedfor home video…unless it happens to fall under the recent crunchyroll x funimationagreement, but details in regards to that have been vague. you can however watch the series in sub oncrunchyroll’s website if you happen to have access to it, and there’s a link in thedescription for a free trial of their premium service, should you require it. for alternate anime recommendations, i’mgoing to start with another anime that uses
time loops to great effect, but the main differenceis that the characters don’t remember anything past the loop – at least at first – andthat’s higurashi no naku koro ni. second recommendation is the obvious one ofsteins;gate, mostly because of its similarities with re:zero and not just the fact that whitefox animated both of them. so with these two, keeping in mind that theyboth rank somewhere on my list of favourite anime series ever, they should be somethingto your liking assuming you have not yet had the pleasure of watching them. and that’s it from me. please subscribe if you liked the video, followme on twitter if you feel so inclined, and
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