“We know exactly how you think and how you’re fighting!”
“We cannot decide where we go but you can.”

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Altair crashes the party with heretofore unseen abilities, leading to Selesia taking a mortal wound. As she inexplicably recovers, the show can’t decide on the themes it wants to express.

Iro’s thoughts

First of all, sorry about the double post, but I was watching E3 coverage and simply couldn’t be assed last week. Too bad, since some stuff is actually happening in this show… it’s just dumb stuff. Boy howdy, do I wish this show was better, but the writers seem determined to take the easy way out pretty much every single time.

Most of Episode 10 is dedicated to a fight, which I can appreciate. Unfortunately, the entire premise of the fight is that Aliceteria took Magane at her word, which is among the dumbest things anyone in this show has done. Again, I point out that all of the combatants in Re:Creators are fictional within the show’s own context, and thus there shouldn’t be any mystery involved with their motives or abilities. Even Alicetaria seems to be aware that she’s being manipulated – she admits as much – but she still insists on attacking Meteora, because… how else is the plot going to move? Meanwhile, Mirokuji falls for Magane’s bizarre superpowers a second time, just because it’s more dramatic that way. Surely there’s a way for this show to progress without everyone acting like a complete moron?

Speaking of, even Altair worms into playing catch with the idiot ball. Granted, she’s about the only Creation who’s justified in having unknown abilities, but if she can pull tricks like straight up turning off Selesia’s weapon or summoning a second Gigas Machina (way to create another plot contrivance to prevent Kanoya from entering the battle, by the way), there’s no good reason for her “faction” to lose any fight. Her stated goal is to destroy the world, right? So just pull in Gigas Machina and start smashing things. Even with what appears to be some arbitrary limit on her powers, a giant robot with big-ass laser cannons can cause untold destruction in even a few minutes.

Episode 11 tries to go for some actual character development, but as a result highlights a number of the problems with the show. The hospital bed conversation between Selesia and Matsubara could have been good if it wasn’t so occupied with lines like “Humility isn’t in your character description” and such. That could be said of the entire show really, and they can’t even keep it straight from scene to scene. There’s been a bunch talk about “character descriptions” and how the Creations are moving beyond their basic existences or whatever, but then Kanoya has a long conversation with Sota about how the Creations are inherently bound by the limits of their stories and how the Creators are not. So, which is it? If this is meant to be each Creation coming to different conclusions about their existence, the show isn’t doing a good job of telegraphing that. Instead, it’s all extra egregious because of how dumb the characters act all the time.

Meanwhile, you have all this stuff about how great and important stories in general are (much of what I’d probably agree with, honestly – but when said directly, it’s just tiresome), and Nakanogane might as well be turning and winking when he talks about how authors need to hit their deadlines even if the world’s ending. There’s this feeling of self-satisfaction that goes through the whole show; I don’t think any author on the planet could get the kind of Twitter numbers Matsubara does in the same period of time. And then there’s Sota’s whole deal, blaming himself for Setsuna’s death with some of the most ego-centric dialogue this side of Sword Art Online. We’re talkin’ shit on the level of “Is this my punishment?”, and it’s just… fuckin’ disappointing, on all counts.

You’d think a show that brings so much attention to the nature of stories and storytelling would know better than to just follow all the shitty cliches, but I guess not. Whatever.

Re:Observations

• Selesia doesn’t say the dumb incantation for her new power-up. Also, that ought to have severed her spine.
• For being a warrior all her life or whatever, Alicetaria seems awfully shocked every time she actually lands a blow.
• Boy it sure would be convenient if Kanoya actually could just step on Altair with his giant robot huh, I wonder what contrivance will prevent that.
• You can’t just take someone else’s glasses and see fine, even if you’re both nearsighted. They’re prescription made.