Death is an entirely natural phenomenon, and humans are evidently not above committing acts such as murder. It is entirely possible for fiction to contain elements of death and gore without it negatively affecting the story, and in some cases it is even necessary, as it is for stories focused on issues such as war. The fifteenth episode is easily the biggest offender in this regard as it is nothing more than one massive slaughterfest, intent on making you feel bad for Subaru and his many waifus, him screaming in rage and gurgling on blood like it is some sort of torture porn.
Everything that could possibly go wrong does go wrong for Subaru and friends, long before you are given any reason to care about their fates in the first place. It is violence without meaning, as artificial as can be, extreme and over-the-top to the point that it can almost at times resemble satire. They will lose their limbs, be hacked to death by chains or tortured to the point where they no longer resemble a human being. What Re:Zero does to compensate for this is killing its characters off in increasingly brutal ways. He is the God of his story and the world is his playground. Subaru's mistakes are immediately erased upon rebirth, and he can go on about his day with nothing but his own guilt holding him back. There is no cost and no meaning to anything that happens. It doesn't really matter if someone does die, as time will conveniently bend backwards for Subaru's sake- never to the beginning, and always to the last major event in the story. If there was any consequence to these events, it is immediately brought to nothing by the show's contrived gimmick of rebirth and time-travel. It is shocking to see major characters die within the first episode, to be fair, but it no longer feels shocking the second, third or eleventh time. It never develops its setting in any meaningful way- about all you know for the duration of the story is that it is generic fantasy-land where people hate witches and bad things happen all the time- and it throws death and gore at the viewer from the very first episode, when nobody even knows or cares about who Subaru is. Where Steins Gate spent nearly half its runtime developing the setting and its characters before asking the audience to empathise with and feel for them, Re:Zero does so immediately and does not ever ask for consent. This is a great disservice to Steins Gate. I have seen many people compare Re:Zero to Steins Gate in the months since its airing. (Minor spoilers will follow from here, as it is near-impossible to discuss an anime like this without revealing anything.) Re:Zero is ambitious in mediocrity, notable only for its perverted sense of drama. What is there in Subaru's tragic story that the audience can take with them at the end? What does it want to say? Not a whole lot, to be sure. throughout most of its twenty-five episodes to demonstrate that there is more to it than this. Re:Zero may not be terrible and irredeemable, but it certainly struggles
It reaches for its dear, dear life, but remains in the end wholly unremarkable shounen fare interested more in shocking the viewer with gore and theatrics than in telling a genuinely meaningful story. They boil in this hell, fuming with anger and regret, any shred of happiness they find fading almost immediately to nothing.īut Re:Zero isn't something. It shoots for the stars, it tries new things and throws the characters through so much torture and misery that the fantasy-world they are living in resembles more a hell. However, Subaru immediately reawakens to a familiar scene-confronted by the same group of thugs, meeting Satella all over again-the enigma deepens as history inexplicably repeats itself. But unbeknownst to them, a much darker force stalks the pair from the shadows, and just minutes after locating the insignia, Subaru and Satella are brutally murdered. In order to thank the honest and kindhearted girl, Subaru offers to help in her search, and later that night, he even finds the whereabouts of that which she seeks. Fortunately, a mysterious beauty named Satella, in hot pursuit after the one who stole her insignia, happens upon Subaru and saves him. Armed with only a bag of groceries and a now useless cell phone, he is quickly beaten to a pulp. Things are not looking good for the bewildered teenager however, not long after his arrival, he is attacked by some thugs. When Subaru Natsuki leaves the convenience store, the last thing he expects is to be wrenched from his everyday life and dropped into a fantasy world.
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