“Be desperate and draw something fascinating.”

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The team somehow deduces Altair’s bizarre abilities and begins to devise a plan to defeat her.

Iro’s thoughts

Did you know? Exposition sounds really dumb when constantly peppered with words like “probably” or “this is my hypothesis”. It makes the characters all sound unsure about the already tedious dump, and in comes off as a cheap excuse for the characters to seem more competent if something goes wrong later, because, well, it was only a hypothesis, you see. It’s also a cheap trick to keep delivering this absurd information when – by all accounts – there’s no way any of the characters should know any of this. I complained something like 7 or 8 episodes ago that there were no clear signs (to the audience or the characters) of anything Meteora was saying was a danger, and there still aren’t. Sit down, shut up, and enjoy the infodump while we cut from still frame to still frame of people standing in a room.

Meanwhile, the entire Sota/Setsuna thing is still slimy and unpleasant, with her circumstances and problems being treated as issues for making Sota feel bad and guilty, with Setsuna being completely ignored. She exists as a plot device, a dead girl to make the main boy more sympathetic, and hoo boy I’m getting tired of that one. Honestly this show could be substantially more interesting if Setsuna had been the main viewpoint character all along, since she has a far more personal stake in the supernatural goings-on, but this is anime, so we need a milquetoast male protagonist with cute girls fawning over him and suffering purely to punish his existence or whatever. Blergh.

See also Aliceteria, who’s finally mellowing out after – you guessed it – talking with Sota, since the show’s writing has been going out of its way to ship him in one way or another with every single female Creation. Again, I’m not particularly against the high-falutin’ talk about the purpose of storytelling in human existence, and the scant interactions between Creator and Creation have been some of the best scenes in the show, but I still kind of want to line up the entire cast of Re:Creators and running deck them in the face. Catch you next week, if the new season hasn’t drowned me entirely.

Re:Observations

• Where were Aliceteria and Blitz supposed to be talking? Are there a lot of ruined urban wastelands near Tokyo?
• Is the only reason Altair gets fanfic powers because she is herself a fanfic? The show didn’t do a good job of explaining that one.
• I guess the mystery Creation at the end is Selesia’s boyfriend from her show? He looks like it, anyway. I figure this would carry more impact if Selesia actually brought anything to the show; she’s actually been remarkably unimportant so far.
• Kikuchihara says anything they do will take at least three months, which is conveniently exactly how long the show has to keep running.