Animisery – A Blog About Living Miserably with Anime (Among Other Things)

Gosh I need to update my blog more. I didn’t even do my monthly “here’s what I’ve been watching” for two months. Absolutely slacking. You can’t be a better blog writer by saying you need to write a blog and then not doing it.

I recently picked back up Re:Zero after having it on hold for nine(!!!) years. I finally pushed through the second season of Mushoko Tensei while I was on vacation and was really seeking out the cheap thrills of popular isekai afterwards so Re:Zero was an blatantly obvious choice. I went in, watched the next episode I had queued up, realized I didn’t know what was going on by the slightest margin, and restarted it again. I then remembered what made Re:Zero such a difficult watch within the very first episode: it was Natsuki Subaru.

It’s obviously not an unpopular or even controversial opinion to loathe Natsuki Subaru by any means. When the show was airing and I was watching it week to week, it was practically mandatory to throw your sharpest barbs at Subaru because clowning on him was just that easy (and fun) to do. Nowadays, it seems like there’s some mild push back if my casual reading of blog posts indicates what the world at large thinks (and it probably does). “Natsuki Subaru is SUPPOSED to be flawed”, “Natsuki Subaru is a subversive protagonist and that’s what makes the show work”, “Natsuki Subaru is traumatized so of course he acts this way”, and so on and so forth are the more common explanations of why such an insufferable turd of a main character is allowed to hold up the show.

Maybe that’s true from a certain mindset. Maybe it isn’t. I just finished the first season and so far I heartily disagree with any of the “Subaru is a good character” camp myself. I don’t think a lot of Subaru’s behavior forms a very cohesive or well written construct as he bounces around from overwhelming self righteous arrogance to an obnoxious low self esteem “woe is me” mindset within one setback and he’ll propel himself back to his vindicated and unearned confidence once more. He’s in a deep depression over the course of the later half of the first season and all it takes is Rem confessing her love for him to reinstate all his vigor and give him the extra brain cell he needs to actually make the plot progress. This could all be my personal vendetta with him but it never failed to irritate me.

I’m also really not a huge fan of how he just gets transported to another world and, in the first season at least, he’s just notoriously laissez-faire about what he left behind. I know it’s because it’s about the “other world” in the other world fiction that we’re supposed to be engaged with but it never fails to irk me. From Cid Kagenou to Kazuma, every isekai protagonist just seemingly loathes their parents it seems. Yeah, I know that Subaru has some flashbacks to his parents in episodes I haven’t seen yet but man is dropped in a new world and sees a beautiful woman and instantly discards any notion that he’s going back home.

The cloyingly boisterous front he puts up also doesn’t endear me to him especially when I compare it to other doom loop protagonists like Okabe Rintaro of Steins;Gate. Okabe is a man forced to see how powerless his actions are to an uncaring world as he fails to prevent his best friend’s death time after time. Eventually, all traces of his former rambunctious mad scientist persona are dissolved as the trauma consumes his mental well-being. Natsuki Subaru, however, will die in the most agonizing of ways and find a way to bounce back after some mild reaffirmation from himself or others. Is this due to the nature of Subaru’s inner will that has clearly been developed and put on display or is he just poorly written? I’ll proudly say it’s the latter. Subaru is what he’s supposed to be for the plot to have gravitas and not much more. I don’t feel like I have a definitive grasp on who he is or what measures him and his last minute confidence boost in the first season felt hugely unearned. Suddenly, Subaru is a hyper competent planner and strategist with wicked bravado that we’ve hardly seen an ounce of before and everyone is hugely impressed with him. Obama is there and everyone claps so on and so forth.T his intelligence coming from the man who can’t grasp the butterfly effect and how he doesn’t need GRAND SWEEPING MOTIONS to change how everything turns out is factually wild. I know that the audience wouldn’t exactly have a great time reading how Subaru morphs the future into something new by picking his blue underwear instead of the red ones but it just comes off as very “this is a pulp read and we’re not sure you have the brain power to understand this” by the writer. It’s not intended to be high literature but it’s just another gripe from me.

I know I’m chugging a huge bottle of lemon lime Haterade but my feelings still haven’t dissipated after all these years, I guess. I’m willing to give Re:Zero another season (especially since as much I hate Subaru, I am extremely curious about the world and lore of Re:Zero) so if he has any major improvements then I’m willing to admit my opinion has changed. Subaru was a routine frustration for my watch in this first season and I’m so detached from his misery that maybe I won’t even notice if he actually does. Ganbare, Natsuki Subaru. I will not be rooting for you.

Also Rem is still best girl

Thanks for reading! Feel free to check out my podcast The Anime Brothers Podcast (episode 201 and onward) at the embed below or wherever you get your shows! Have a great day and let me know what you think!