Oct 30, 2016
In my opinion, this show can easily be described as the "Beyond two souls" of anime in some of its major shortcomings.
My core point for claiming this is also the shows greatest weakness. The author very clearly cared first and foremost about having certain scenes and setpieces. Putting these together to form a coherent narrative was secondary.
Beyond two souls does this by jumping back and forth within the timeline of the main character's life, while Re:Zero on the other hand ...does...nothing.
It simply introduces plot points only to completely ignore them, hoping the viewer has a low enough attention span, that they won't question this.
A lot
...
of die-hard fans for this show will defend this by pointing towards the source material, saying that once the anime has adapted a couple more seasons worth of it, these plotpoints will be picked back up.
I do not consider this a valid excuse for 2 reasons:
1. Anything, wether it is anime, a game or book, should be able to stand on its own. Why would some source material be considered when judging the anime? It simply does not make sense to me.
2.Even if we were talking about the source material or about this anime in a couple of years, if more of it happens to be animated by then, and all of these dropped plots would be resolved at that point, that would still leave you with a bad end result. You would go from a show with tons of dropped plotlines to a show that doesn't know how to handle its plotlines. A lot of them were given way too much time to be postponed at all.
Now let us talk about the characters.
It's quite ironic that the show has a minor villain with the ability to erase people from everyone's memory, as the cast is incredibly forgettable.
Most characters are either nonsensical and annoying trainwrecks, like the maid sisters Rem and Ram, the main love interest, that is not present for most of the second half, or Subaru, the main protagonist.
Or they are somewhat likeable, but mostly because they follow popular cliches very strictly, which leads to them being especially easy to forget. Some examples would be the red haired swordsman or Willhelm, the old man with the grudge.
There are some minor exceptions, mainly the main antagonist for the final arc, Betelgeuse.
While he does fall into the second category I listed somewhat, he still manages to be mostly entertaining.
I'd like to talk about a few of these in minor detail.
First of all everybody's favorite, Rem. While she starts of fairly decent and her backstory is probably one of the better parts of this show, the moment she falls in love with the main character is to me the part where the show goes from somewhat above average and fun to a boring and forgettable slog. Her strong obsession with Subaru not only is annoying, as she expresses it way too often, the reason behind it is also incredibly shallow.
This could be intentional.It does seem like a major point of the second half. The author probably was trying to show, that true love is greater than someone who just loves you, because you saved them. Now let us pretend for a moment, like Subaru's feelings for Emilia aren't easily as shallow. Even if we do that, with how hamfisted this message is presented and how poorly written and uninteresting all of these characters are, all I could think while watching was "I get it, but don't care about any of this.".
Subaru in general does also fall victim of this. A poor man's hamfisted Shinji Ikari, but unlike Shinji, he actually is a genuinely shitty person. Add to that some extremely hamfisted otaku slander, related to how shitty of a person he is and you get Subaru.
Not every main character has to be likeable and great. But Subaru is nothing one would want to see. He is neither likeable, entertaining or interesting in any manner. It realy does seem like the author was more concerned with their meta commentary on otakus, than actually writing a cohesive narrative or worthwhile characters.
A final example of their inability to write a character, is Willhelm. The crux of he semifinal arc is him trying to get his revenge. His target is a giant white whale (slow clap for the subtely of the author). This whale has a rather interesting ability and the world of Re:Zero has all kinds of magic powers, so while I did not expect a conflict as clever as anything from Jojo part 4 and onward, I was still let down. Every single character's unique magical abilities simply boil down to a damaging projectile. To further make the viewer lose all interest in the conflict, we don't actually know the specifics of Willhelms motivation. We are given these in flashbacks during the fight. Not only does this feel way too rushed, these flashbacks are awful. It's not only painfully generic, it also managed to make me upset about a gender based cliche. I am honestly the last person you'll see up in arms about any gender nonsense, but this actually pissed me off. In the flashback, he's telling this female knight to stop fighting. People during medieval times obviously had a different mindset about gender roles, we all know that. But to actually have him convince the woman to stop fighting for good and have her newfound whiteknight protect m'lady instead, was utterly baffeling. The worst part about this though, is that it didn't make me care for Willhelm. And as I was neither invested in the characters nor the boring combat itself, I didn't care about the entire conflict.
There were some good bits here and there, but the slog that is the second half, the hamfistedness of everything, the uninsteresting characters and the complete mess that is the narrative as a whole, overall left me with a completely forgettable experience.
Also I cannot stand the art style.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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