5 Favorite Anime Blog Posts from 2024 Week 25

8 thoughts on “5 Favorite Anime Blog Posts from 2024 Week 25”

1. I don’t talk about writing a lot these days, but when I first came online writing boards were my first major hangout spot. And one thing I’ve learned is that any insight is valuable, but if you coalesce that insight into a rule, you sow the seeds of a bad habit. That said, the post inspired by Kaijuu No. 8 was great. I’ve often felt that people are often… too in love with their unique and clever ideas (they’re usually not unique, and while they’re usually clever, they’re usually not *that* clever).

   The core behind twists is that – narratively – keeping secrets from your readers comes with a cost: the less you tell them, the less you can develop your ideas “in sight”. You can develop them behind the scenes, but that’s… hard. You need to give out information that you plan to reframe later so they make sense. It’s a bit like chemistry: you drop the reagents, you drop a moderater, and then you drop the catalyst. It’s a balancing act that’s hard to pull off, and no matter what you do some readers are going to figure you out ahead of the planned reveal.

   One of my favourite examples is Blood C. I thought the show was pretty good at slaughter porn, but not at much else. And I’ve always thought a huge problem was keeping secrets. Villains and victims alike had stories you couldn’t tell because you didn’t want to give away the twist. Then there was the reveal, but it was too late. The main villain was obvious from the moment you saw him (true to a specific type), and so on. I didn’t figure out what happened, but people who knew Clamp a little better than I did back then certainly did. In the end you have a story that relies on a repetitive status quo, with plenty of characters with interesting backstories, none of which you could tell because of the secret. In the end the only draw of the show was to go from one gruesome death to the next (and I thought the show was pretty good at that – but it’s not really my type of show).

   So, yeah, when you really love an idea and think it would make a great twist… take a step back and see if the need to keep secrets doesn’t make you sacrifice an even greater potential development. A lot of the stories that impressed me didn’t do so through surprise; they showed their cards early and then develop that idea. I mean… imagine if Madoka Magica had waited until episode 9 to kill off Mami (which is what I expected – the death didn’t suprprise me – the timing did).

   A less known show that did something similar would be Kamisama Dolls. I was moderately involved with that show – it was fun. Than – I think – episode 4 happened… No character death, here, but certainly a game changer. And unlike Madoka, I wasn’t expecting that at ALL. Yet it was simple and obvious. And because it happened early on, the show had plenty of time dealing with the fall-out.

   A simple example. You’ve read plenty of super hero stories with secret identities. And you find you’d like to see what happens if that identity is revealed. One approach is: what a twist! Nobody’s thought of this before! It’s going to be the highlight of my story. Another approach is: So once you flaunt that narrative conventions… what happens?

   The point isn’t: which approach is better? The point is: what sort of story do I want to tell? And the cautionary aspect here is this: your initial excitement might intuitively make you great idea the goal – the selling point of the story – something the plot should lead to. But sometimes you might want to make that great idea the starting point and see where it leads.

   To show how both approaches can lead to interesting shows, I’ll use two examples from this season. Both shows have me invested.

   Tonari no Youkai san actually has a pretty good idea for a setting, but slowly reveals and escalates its plots. Early on, it looks a lot like a slice-of-life show, but there are set ins – both in terms of personal narratives and setting reveals, that tells you there’s more to it. The show remains episodic, but the episodes themselves set up a climax of sorts. The show pulls back the narrative curtain bit by bit and finally has things come together from *both* ends – world building and personal stories. It’s pretty well done.

   Go Go Loser Ranger on the other hand tells you right from the start what the concept is about. The fights are a sham, and the remaining grunts of the invasion merely actors. From then on, the show sets up expectations but almost immediately subverts them, until what we have is a chaos free-for-all. Don’t misunderstand me; there are some twists, but they’re not game changers. They’re not a big thing to work towards. In terms of writing, they’re continual points of “so, what if what everyone tends to think isn’t true?” The twists lead to new expectations which lead to new twists. None of the twists are particular clever, but there are many, and they come in quick succession. The result is a show that sort of simulates the chaos of life, while still having the “melos” of a tokusatsu show.

   Now it’s not actually perfectly obvious that me categorising the two shows like this is valid. It’s just sort of a feeling I get watching them. That Tonari no Youkai san uses reveals as expanding the scope of a narrative – that it converges on a goal. And Go Go Loser Ranger uses reveals to throw the story into chaos. It’s “Ah, now I have a clearer view of the big picture,” vs. “I don’t know what to think anymore.” (But clearly it also depends on what expectations you go into a show with.)

   Basically, when you have this one idea you love a lot and want to explore or develop in writing, you might want to take a step back and question the idea. Not “is it any good?” Or “is it original”? When you have an idea that excites you there’s usually a reason for it, but it’s not always obvious. what that reason is. More fruitful questions are: What excites me about this idea? Is the idea a better ending point or starting point for the plot? Is the idea compatible with other ideas I had (if two ideas clash you might have found a surprising central conflict). And so on.

   I’ve always been more of a short story writer. I’ve once tried to write a novel – and I finished a pretty rough draft, but then did nothing with it. However, the lead up to that is enlightening here. My idea was the following: I’d use a rpg party gathering, adventuring strutucture. The world is on where “magic is dying” but a sudden magical catastrophy is roaming the land. The Aimless One from myth. The party’s chasing the Aimless One, gathering clues, and so on. And when they finally find the Aimless One… it’s not what they expect (da Dum!). The party would be composed of various politically opposed factions, each having their own view on magic and how to deal with its disappearance (basically, religion, scholarship and science). And so on.

   I had three false starts, none of which worked. Then, on a writing forum, someone made a writing-game thread. Apply for an adventuring party. I used my main point-of-view character: a factionally neutral character: a gambler. This sort of developed into some sort of collaborative story (and I’m forever grateful to anyone who participated; I learned a lot during that time). What happened was that I developed this one character in an unfamiliar context (later I brought in more characters). And in doing so I realised what was wrong with my idea; why I had all these false starts. The rpg party structure didn’t work. I was interested, majorly, in exploring what magic actually is in this world. I was interested in the interfactional differences, but also in the *intrafactional* differences – something I couldn’t explore if I had party members during an adventure representing their factions.

   The end result was that – rather than a party travelling the world – I had the Aimless One strike in a neutral zone (the politically independent city of Feyshore) and all the factions send investigators, who are officially supposed to uncover the secret of the Aimless One, but who are also there as ambassadors in the changing political scenery. (There are always two, loosely in a master-apprentice relationship – so that gives different views on the faction, as well as the local leaders of the faction who are used to diplomacy and far less hostile to each other here than they are on the rest of the continent).

   But more importantly: the first major character you meet is… the Aimless One, who is not what anyone expects (Da… dum?); except no expectations have yet been set up. I decided to make the tragedy of the Aimless One the core of the story and reveal it’s identity early on (not it’s secret, though, as discovering that is what drives everything from personal stories to what magic is about). The story was so much more interesting to write once I abandoned a linear narrative structure in favour of a point-of-view-chaotic multi-character epic, with the Aimless One being reduced to one character among many rather than the major conflict and vortex of a “great idea”. The story was never about trying to vanquish the Aimless One only to find out it’s not that simple. It was always about why the Aimless One’s the Aimless One, and how that fits into the larger world-changes. And that’s why I had all those false starts. I couldn’t see what interested me about this story. I couldn’t see why I wanted to write it.

   Don’t avoid twists; but don’t be taken in by them either. Sometimes all you see is the scum on the surface making interesting shapes; but the sea is deep.

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   1. This is an excellent post.

      With your point on Tonari no Youkai-san on its personal narratives and setting reveals showing there is more to the story, I could tell that this was the case for Re:zero. I’m a very detailed-oriented person, so I like shows heavy with foreshadowing or a build-up to something, which Re:zero has in spades.

      While so many anime-onlies were speculating that Satella is future Emilia, that was something I had limited interest in Season 1 due to the lack of details surrounding Emilia and Satella’s relationship aside from their seemingly being physically identical.

      The main things that caught my attention in Season 1 of Re:zero are that Subaru appeared to gain and more time with each loop to either witness something in a later loop or have more free time to get arrive at a similar event happening again and that Petelgeuse said if Emilia proves to be a suitable vessel that the Witch would be reborn on the coming fated day (Crunchyroll screwed up the translation, suggesting it was the other way around, but it doesn’t make sense the way Crunchyroll translated it).

      That is how I came up with my theory involving spacetime displacement for Return by Death after Season 2. Although it’s probably not 100% accurate since there are still many arcs to come that will likely need me to nail all the details, I’ll rehash my thoughts on it.

      For starters, I propose that Return by Death is Satella setting a save point and rewinding time with her Authority of Envy while Subaru uses his Authority of Envy after that to warp reality as if he arrived at the save point at an interval somewhere between a minute to a few minutes earlier (probably a few minutes).

      My entire theory here hinges on giving White Fox the benefit of the doubt and not assuming it screwed up in animating Re:zero, and I’m confident that everything was intentional. I believe that, in addition to reloading at a save point, reality is warped so that Subaru and his surroundings within a TBD radius somehow arrived at that point somewhere between a minute and a few minutes earlier each time he dies and that reality is warped to account for this discrepancy much like how the White Whale’s Fog of Elimination can erase a person entirely and adjust people’s memories that involved a person that was erased as well as erasing that person’s material possessions. Why do I believe this to be the case? The primary reason is because of the difference between Subaru’s first loop and his third loop in Arc 1 and because of what happened with Subaru’s ringtone for the Whale hunt.

      A stone statue of the insignia was shown right after Subaru’s realization that he was summoned into another world, which then cut to a scene at 2:26 in Episode 1 showing Felt running on rooftops and jumping across them with Emilia’s insignia in hand long before Subaru had even met the appa guy, which is where his first save point would be. At 5:02, Felt is again being shown running and jumping across rooftops, which shows she had the insignia before meeting Subaru in the alley. This suggests that RBD not only resets time when he dies but that there’s a spacetime displacement on top of the reset or else he wouldn’t have ever been able to see the the theft in the first place in the third loop given that he had time to pass out in front of the appa guy’s shop and see Emila pass the appa guy’s shop and have a brief conversation with her during that third loop.

      Subaru would not be able to figure out that there is a spacetime displacement by checking out his phone after a death since his phone resets with him and would show the same time reading every time he Returned by Death, but it would be possible to figure this out by checking his phone during an event that consistently happens such as his first meeting with Roswaal and the mansion’s residents in Arc 2. However, Subaru did not check the time during these meetings, so he missed the opportunity to see whether he experiences a spacetime displacement. Subaru asking Rem and Ram what the date and time were in Episode 6 showed that Subaru just did the bare minimum, which is to see what time it was when he started his save point, but he made no effort to discern whether there was anything more to RBD. I will now post some circumstantial evidence involving Arc 2 and some more damning evidence in Arc 3 that I believe supports my theory.

      In the first loop of the mansion arc, Puck awoke after Subaru and Emilia had exercised briefly, and he wasn’t tired in the least. They spoke a bit and then Ram and Rem inform that Roswaal has returned. After his first death, Subaru had time to run around the mansion and find Beatrice so that he could mope in the library. He then left the library and met Emilia outside, speaking to her somewhat briefly, and Puck was visibly tired after waking up. They had time to spare since the twins didn’t come to announce Roswaal’s return. In the third loop, Subaru spent an even longer time with Beatrice, got knocked out of the mansion by Beatrice twice, and got cleaned by a visibly tired Puck, yet he still had time for banter with Puck before the Roswaal meeting. So he wastes more and more time in loops two and three but still seemingly started the meeting at the usual time. I speculate that in the second and third loops, Puck is more tired because he is waking up earlier than he did in Loop 1, which shows there is a spacetime displacement on top of the time rewind.

      Now, here is the big one. During the loop the alliance actually fought the White Whale, Subaru’s phone rang for a while before the whale showed up. The sky was also clear. In the loop directly before that in which Otto and Rem were erased by the White Whale, the area was already foggy and the whale had already attacked by that point. This suggests that Subaru’s phone started ringing a bit too early because it had been running for a longer period of time due to a spacetime displacement on top of a reset. If the strike force had been defeated, forcing Subaru to reset once more, everyone might have just deserted him because the Whale would have taken longer to arrive on yet another loop. I also believe that the reason Subaru saw Russell Fellow in Episode 16 is because Subaru died enough times to finally witness Russell leaving Crusch’s mansion, and that would be because of the spacetime displacement. You know what they say. Once is by chance, twice is a coincidence, and three times is a pattern. There’s no way White Fox messed up in animating Re:zero 3 arcs in a row.

      I believe that the reason Tappei had Russell Fellow take Subaru’s phone after the subjugation was completed was to prevent viewers and Subaru himself from finding out about the spacetime displacement associated with Return by Death. This is likely something Tappei intends to keep a secret for future arcs, and I believe there’s enough hard evidence as well as circumstantial evidence from the anime to support my theory that Return by Death is Satella setting a save point and rewinding time with her Authority of Envy while Subaru follows that by using his own Authority of Envy to warp reality as if he arrived at the save point at an interval somewhere between a minute to a few minutes earlier (probably a few minutes based on how much time he had with Beatrice and Puck and because of the ringtone ringing before the White Whale arrived). If I’m right, RBD should more precisely be called More Than Just Return by Death, but Subaru never figured out the intricacies of his Authority because he didn’t think critically about small little differences between loops.

      Given I believe that we’ve only seen how Subaru’s Authority of Envy interacts with Satella’s Authority of Envy, it’s hard to say what would happen if Satella didn’t use hers, and it was just Subaru using his. Whatever Subaru’s true Authority does in isolation is probably limited to affecting space and time at some interval between a minute and a few minutes assuming my theory about the spacetime displacement is accurate, which I believe is highly likely.

      Now for the part about Petelgeuse testing Emilia to see whether she is a suitable vessel for the Witch, I like to think of the reasons why things are the way they are, which helps me follow shows with many mysteries well. It was established by Beatrice and the Witch Cult in Season 1 that Subaru is loved by Satella, so the main question I pondered about for this season is why Satella, the equivalent of Satan in the fantasy world, summoned him of all people, a weak guy with poor self-esteem. That is why in Episode 24, when Petelgeuse said that if Emilia proves to be a suitable vessel they will put the Witch in her on the coming fated day, I had a eureka moment. I reasoned that if Satella intends to return to the world and loves Subaru that much, she could be eyeing for him to kill her after she possesses Emilia’s body, intending for Return by Death to grow his self-esteem and eventually result in him being the greatest hero the world has ever seen.

      Fast forward to Season 2, and Satella literally tells Subaru in Episode 38 to love himself and some day come kill her, and it proved I absolutely had the right idea to think that Satella did in fact want Subaru to come kill her at the end of the story, so I was asking the right questions about the story at the time.

      I don’t know if you’ve been following along, Dawnstorm, but I’ve been posting a lot of TCrow’s blog and re-contextualizing scenes from Season 1 and 2 based on what I did catch on my first watch of Season 2 of Re:zero, which was that Echidna’s words did not line up with her actions for the most part. After thinking about it years later, I reasoned that Satella, Pandora (I am not convinced she is evil but merely playing the role of a villain), Echidna, the dead Witches of Sin, and perhaps many characters from 400 years ago are pushing Subaru towards a specific path that leads to the world being saved.

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   2. I think I made such a definitive statement about avoiding cleverness and favoring clarity because of my own experience. That said, you’re absolutely right — boiling a concept like that down and turning into dogma is not a great idea.

      Reading your post reminded me of an incident I’d forgotten. I wrote a short story in sixth grade. I thought it was super clever. I had a twist that no-one saw coming. When my friends read it, I was aghast — they didn’t like it. They felt cheated.

      At first I was indignant. I felt convinced they just didn’t get it — that being a writer older than my years, I was above their comprehension level. Yep. I was a bit of a prick. But I’m was an honest prick. It dawned on me that they weren’t the problem. If I, as a writer, could not convey an idea to them, that was my problem.

      There are exceptions, of course. But my default position should be that it’s a problem I need to work on.

      I also realized that “clever” was relative. And as a twelve year old, I had nothing like the experience to know what was clever and what wasn’t.

      Your analysis of the difficulty of preserving a major reveal articulated something that I hadn’t given myself enough time to think through. I say that a lot — I wonder if that means I’m keeping myself too busy to really succeed as a thoughtful writer? I’ll have to make time to think about that!

      When I play with twists now, it’s something the reader knows — but my character doesn’t. At least right now, I’m having a blast with that technique. I’ll fall out of love with it someday. I can feel an inclination to go in another direction, maybe with the next series I start. But for now, I’m having fun with it.

      Gotta say that I’m intrigued with your description of the Aimless One. Did you publish it? Do you plan to?

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      1. ***Yep. I was a bit of a prick. But I’m was an honest prick. It dawned on me that they weren’t the problem. If I, as a writer, could not convey an idea to them, that was my problem.***

         It’s never quite that simple, though. There might be people out there who love the twist.

         There’s one thing about twists: if the reader has read the story a certain way, and the twist comes along and gets rid of the core thing that made the reader love the show, the twist’s not going to go over well. This happened to me with, say, Psycho Pass or Samurai Flamenco. But the problem with this is that other people have other draws, and those twists in those shows have their fans.

         ***Gotta say that I’m intrigued with your description of the Aimless One. Did you publish it? Do you plan to?***

         Thanks for the kind words. I have nothing worth publishing. An example: The religious faction was a variant of scriptural monotheism when I started out writing; but the world building suggested to me that the faction would be better off as scriptural ancestor worship (with a mono-ancestor twist). A key scene is, I think, a point-of-view disaster; I’ve got a new point-of-view concept for that scene. One feedback I got was: “people talk to much and act too little” (and I agree). Another important insight I got from someone else was that I forget that public places have other people than the main characters around (which is true – and especially damaging for this piece of writing, as it’s a story that shifts point-of-view all the time, and sometimes to bystanders who aren’t even characters in the plot.) So, yeah, I finished a first draft – but to get that up to publishing standards requires a *lot* of work. (I should still have a rtf-file on an usb-stick somewhere if you’re really interest, but I’m not sure it’s worth it. It’s very long and hasn’t been written with coherence in mind. I just wanted to see if I could finish something that long.)

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         1. I think the question comes down to: do you want to write? If you do, then it might be worth publishing. I read Dean Wesley Smith’s “Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Publishing,” and I struggled to accept what he has to say about rewriting.

            But he’s sold over 20,000,000 copies. I don’t know that art has a strict definition of success, but as a writer? I’d call 20,000,000 copies sold a success.

            It might make an interesting read for you.

            If you can find the file, I’d like to take a look!

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2. TCrow, I think Episode 29, Parent and Child, has another indicator that Subaru’s parents have been in Re:zero’s fantasy world at some point. This image is what I believe is the major tell.

   https://snipboard.io/7OG0Nr.jpg

   While on the surface, this looks like a perfectly normal and innoculous remark, I believe it’s hinting that Kenichi and Naoko had Subaru in part ’cause they wanted to save him due to his past self 400 years ago having low self-esteem. This is also likely why Satella said in Episode 38 that she will allow for Subaru to be saved through Return by Death ’cause a lot of people (including herself) care for Subaru even if he doesn’t remember that in his second life.

   It’d be why Echidna intentionally led Subaru down the path of having Emilia doing the trials and even outright told him to do it, saying maybe he could give the cowardly princess wings, said something so evil about Beatrice, and took away his qualification for entering the tomb as that showed clearly favoured Subaru assisting Emilia with passing the trial. Echidna was heavily putting her thumb on the scales in his favour. I believe Satella, Echidna, Pandora, and many characters from 400 years ago are working to save the world from destruction by opening the Seal in Elior Forest on their own terms instead of one day having it be open under unfavourable conditions, and this plan involves building up Subaru to be a man with high self-esteem.

   https://snipboard.io/5rCEjB.jpg

   Puck also indirectly told Subaru how many shadow hands Satella could generate (1,000 is half of what Satella could). Then Subaru used a number associated with Satella to express how positively he feels about Emilia in saying that if Emilia names 10 things she hates about herself that he’ll list 2,000 things he loves about her. Then he says he’ll save Satella in Episode 38, which shows Subaru likely had very positive feelings about Satella 400 years ago and that when he used a number associated with Satella when addressing Emilia, his subconscious memories of Satella were affecting him in that moment. He was most likely Satella’s lover in the past, which explains his penchant for silver-haired heroines as seen by Episode 29, Parent And Child, and why Satella said that Subaru gave her everything in Episode 38.

   Even if Subaru doesn’t look like he did in the past, most likely ’cause he had a different body in the past, I’m sure a lot of characters are rooting for Subaru and want him to succeed, both ’cause they care for him and ’cause they want the world to be saved.

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   1. Have I asked why you think Subaru doesn’t remember? This seems like a lot of effort going into preparing Subaru for what he should already know.

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      1. I speculate that Subaru was literally born again in a different body because he was originally born in a different body than the one today. That would be the reason someone like Beatrice or Puck do not recognize Subaru as being someone they used to know.

         The reason he doesn’t remember would be ’cause his current life experience is where he can draw most of his memories from with the memories from a previous life being dormant. I believe Subaru’s soul was cut off and saved for a rainy day to be the hero of the story.

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