I'm not at all befuddled by the praise this show is receiving.
Spoiler free
The most humongous factor for its popularity must be the breaking of trends. A casual individual thrown into a fantasy world is a setting often seen in anime. You see the person there finding his footing unrealistically quick, his Gary-Stuish road to power and heroism is facile and paved with obstacles that do not feel very dangerous, just an excuse for there to be some kind of opposition and uphill struggle when you deeply know MC will win in the end regardless.
Take a moment to contemplate those GaryStu-type stories. What are the eye-rolling
...
awful qualities that are responsible for their character?
They teach you that you are invincible, everything works out in the end regardless, every mistake will only weakly (if even) punish you, everyone will love you automatically.
Now to describe Re:Zero, we can flip the sentence over. It teaches you that you are worthless beyond description, you will die in the end regardless, every mistake will get you killed (ranging from an understandable one such as entering a shabby storehouse during midnight in a slum area, to petting a puppy that innocent children are playing with), do nothing suspicious yet still be regarded as suspicious and thus be killed for it.
You see, Re:Zero did not truly grasp the issue that the former generic shows with their Gary-Stu formula had. The problem wasn't that the good guys won again. The problem was HOW they won again, HOW the stakes were tilted in their favour from some omniscient presence. It's not about how powerful the Main Character is, it's about how he BECOMES powerful. Results are not what determine the authenticity and realism of a piece of content, it is the reasoning leading up to it.
Re:Zero does not care about how he dies, the concern is that he dies, period. It simply flipped it around and visited the opposite side of the spectrum. You may not have your rainbows and chirping birds and colourful meadows there, but the bloody corpses and screams of agony are upheld by the same faulty level of logic. In setting out to break common trend, Re:Zero has actually taken upon the qualities that made said trend dreadful. It is the result of breaking a trend for the sake of doing it.
It can be compared to someone adding sexual content into a piece to increase its level of maturity. Then, those third-graders' mathbooks full of drawn penises and tits should be the most mature thing out there, shouldn't they?
When you forget the philosophy of your norm-breaking actions, it can backfire.
There's a golden rule in writing and storytelling, one you may have heard: "Show, don't tell."
In Re:Zero, the superficial values such as art and soundtrack function as the worst form of storytelling. Telling you what to feel instead of making you feel it. A happy moment is made happy and victorious from how a character finally managed to overcome his struggles and we can indulge in the victory with him. This character, at the end, decides to smile. Because of the narrative leading up to it, you can feel the happiness from the smile. It has shown you the entire pathway instead of, simply implying there at the end that: "Hey, he's smiling, it's happy time!"
In Re:Zero, how do you know when a scene is shocking?
Answer: When there are bulgy eyeballs and crazed facial expressions, when the music is dark and eerie, when the colour complexion tones down to a grim shade. When is a scene happy? When there's cheerful music, when random rose petals are flying in the air (despite the lack of nearby roses), when there are happy tears. Normally, art and soundtrack are supplements that underline what is there. But in Re:Zero the writing does not suffice to give you those emotions, it cannot show enough on its own, so it resorts to bluntly telling you through art and sountrack.
It also boils down to the way Re:Zero decides to spend its seconds.
Let's give you a very simple story:
Bill's best friend, Carl, died. Because of that, Bill is sad and devastated.
A good narrative would have focused on Bill's sadness and devastation, how it's nagging at him during his everyday life, how it has switched him up as a person entirely, how the void left behind by Carl is too much.
Re:Zero will switch the focus over to the death. It will cautiously tend to every nerve, bone, and limb in Carl's body during his death, twisting and breaking whatever there is to twist and break, squeezing every drop of blood from his body as if he were a wet rag. What about Bill? Ah, there'll be a scene where he cries, some sad music, it'll probably rain as well. And then, Reset.
Then there are characters, or rather, THE character, our main man. Nothing has any long-lasting impact on this young man. There is no trauma great enough to leave a chronic imprint on his personality. He will revert to the same persona soon enough. Sometimes there is not even that. For the most part, the impact is not only woefully temporary, but does not exist at all. That is the reason why he waltzes into the same alley with thugs over and over again, cleans and cooks and trims the lawn and plans the same dates and cuddles with the spirit puck despite having ended up in fatal danger at the end of the days when he did exactly that.
And despite the lack of consistency, it would have been incredibly difficult to relate with him anyhow. This man is insufferable. To have a flawed character that struggles around his negative sides is one thing. However, in Re:Zero, to describe him as 'a flawed character' would be an understatement. This is not a few flaws. This man, with repeated opportunity, was unable to prevent himself from walking into one single alleyway. This man tries to befriend his murderer, holding no menace towards her at all. This man charges headfirst into unknown situations (in a world where every corn of dust can kill you) without a plan or shred of knowledge whatsoever. This man exits gruesome and harrowing experiences of death with a natural smile on the face. We're not dealing with a character that has a certain achilles heel. We're not even dealing the adjectives 'stupid, arrogant' or any other of their synonyms. What we are dealing with is a lack of fundamental common sense and basic ability to perceive what is happening around oneself. This is beyond a personality description. I make this statement in all seriousness, but this treads into the territory of mental disability, more commonly and angrily phrased as retardation.
Throughout the show there are glimmers of well-done moments. Examples would be the maid's backstory as well as the MC's occassional mental breakdowns. Although not too shabby on their own, it is as if they never existed once you allow a bit of time to pass over them. The maid transitions into a pandering role bercause that has a higher chance of success than a decent character does.
But the interesting point is how they do not map her out like that from square one, they give her a backstory beforehand, aiming for an all-encompassing appeal that offer every group something to turn towards. Do the backstory and her waifu role correlate with each other in any regard? No they do not. But consistency and actual substance is not the aim here. None of these aspects, her backstory and MC's mental breakdowns, are deftly weaved into the flow of the story the way good writing does. They are simply... there... precipitous and temporary pass-overs that never leave a strong overall mark. Out of context, they are fine, but place it in context and they are part of a story where they hardly matter. Plain and simple, it is easier to look good a few short times than to keep it active during the entirety.
The mystery tag of the show has also utterly failed. It shares purpose with artificial suspense in the regard that it wants to drive you forward without having to provide any worthy content. The key aspect to any mystery is vagueness, not nothingness. In Re:Zero they have simply taken the bulk and backbone of the "mysterious" elements and hid them away in later parts of the story, leaving a complete vacuum in the earlier stages. There is nothing of interest surrounding these elements other than the mere fact that they exist. And when their existences serve nothing but functionality, functionalities which guide turning points in the "plot", they come off as cheap tools of convenience.
I'm still giving this a 3 in score, because meh, I did get some good laughs, and the first arc did mildly hold my interest (although it was far from flawless). But at some points I could not bear with it. Re:Zero is a visceral experience. Don't think, don't question, just watch. Don't take a step back and look at the bigger picture, just accept the scene you're watching.
Sep 20, 2016
I'm not at all befuddled by the praise this show is receiving.
Spoiler free The most humongous factor for its popularity must be the breaking of trends. A casual individual thrown into a fantasy world is a setting often seen in anime. You see the person there finding his footing unrealistically quick, his Gary-Stuish road to power and heroism is facile and paved with obstacles that do not feel very dangerous, just an excuse for there to be some kind of opposition and uphill struggle when you deeply know MC will win in the end regardless. Take a moment to contemplate those GaryStu-type stories. What are the eye-rolling ... |
