The hypocrisy of Tappei, Subaru the Sacrificial Lamb, Subaru as Jesus as the Scapegoat, Christian influences in Re:ZERO
@sufferu here's my magnum opus on why Emilia sucks But he was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, And by his wounds we are healed — Isaiah 53:5 Replace he/him with Subaru, and you got arc 3. The beating by Julius was literal scapegoating. "This beating is necessary to sate their egos, it is for your own good, it offers us salvation"
Subaru from René Girardian perspective: the fandom hates arc 3 Subaru and pile on him when on a relative scale he is committing the least number of mistakes that hurt people... ...in the same way there are some people who want to bully some innocent people for being weird or different. They prove as useful scapegoats, and Subaru is the scapegoat for most people's real life troubles.
Subaru in arc 3 is simply being shoved into a locker. Priscilla represents this best, the guy is desperate, weak, and doesn't like himself, and tries to lick her foot, and he gets kicked in the face for his self-abasement. Priscilla very likely represents a portion of the audience who despise Subaru for his weakness and self-hatred, his dog-like behavior, they want to "shove him into a locker" so to speak. This is barbarism. Emilia is not so different. The way she explodes in LN 4 is fucking repulsive and retarded. She's truly, unbelievably, abhorrently sinful and retarded. In the story, it is not Emilia, but Subaru who gets punished so much for being weak and different. The half-elf racism she faces doesn't matter a damn, she just gets spoiled by her status, Subaru, and Puck anyway, nobody's brutalizing her. Emilia's cowardice and running away from real responsibilities take the form of false maturity, hypocrisy, and blatantly manipulative absolutist tendencies befitting a Witch in the same way Subaru's "insecurity" (because Julius, Ferris, and Emilia all were insecure, Emilia especially so) stemming from how Emilia treated him took the form of grandstanding. However it wasn't even grandstanding, the dude just got pissed at the garbage Julius was spouting without knowing a single fucking thing about Subaru and Emilia.
What happened in arc 3 to Subaru was textbook scapegoating. Subaru, being the weak person he was, proved a scapegoat for everyone to project their weakness onto him. Ferris for his physical weakness, Julius for being exactly like Subaru deep down, Emilia because she can use Subaru getting hurt as an excuse to run away from responsibilities ("Everything went to shit because I'm a half-elf, waaah I'm so tragic!") and use him to feel a sense of superiority (which blew up in her face, because without him she's really nothing but a sack of meat under Puck's helicopter parenting).
He is basically the sacrificial lamb. The ones who were sinful were everybody in the royal selection ceremony, it is not Subaru. Roswaal's ruse, him openly insulting Emilia, all of this gets a pass, Marcos pats him on the back, Miklotov laughs it off, Emilia threatening everyone with Puck and saying she just wants fair treatment and her bullshit speech has Bordeux kneeling and blushing (I just find this all repulsive), but somehow Tappei paints Subaru calling himself a knight the most embarrassing thing there? That it somehow dropped the room's temperature below that of Puck's appearance? It's unbelievable repulsive, does Emilia not see the cost Subaru is bearing for his lack of physical power and status? How the fuck am I suppose to sympathize with her being a half-elf when she does not even really suffer for it in the story? Frozen Bond is not an argument, her being rejected by the villagers is not an argument, because Subaru was right fucking there, he was showering her with all his love and affection and loyalty, but she throws it all back in his face after he took a fireball, because... what? It's just stupid, a fake resolve that she has, exactly as Ram described her old self in arc 6. He bore a colossal cost for what Emilia did in the throne room, chiefly her apathy toward everybody else throwing around insults, doing whatever the fuck they want, even insulting her, but Subaru alone is punished absurdly. It is sickening, most sickening of all is how she puts Subaru on a pedestal now. The royal guard are merely props, mere cardboard cutouts, the crowd cheering and laughing at the Witch being burnt at the stake so to speak, when the Witch is just like Lusbel, an innocent boy who was earnest but made some mistakes is all. "Julius was justified because of these cardboard cutouts who never participate in the story again" People reveal a lot in how they take this interpretation at face value, that the dude was actually justified. He wasn't justified due to the simple fact the royal guard and nobles never take part in the story again in any fashion where status matters. Emilia never gives a damn about it, the Emilia camp acts like one big family, EXCEPT for the one novel where she decided to go along with Julius's tirade for some bloody reason. Can you actually imagine Julius or Anastasia standing by if someone started shit talking an Iron Fang member for being demihuman or having low-birth and other nonsense? It's all fucking theatre, Julius, Emilia, everybody were being fucking hypocrites, and the tragedy that occurs is that while Emilia had always been a normal girl in Subaru's eyes, despite all her physical strength, she does not ever see Subaru as a normal guy, she "can't even imagine Subaru dying" after all. It's so stupid, she's put the guy on a pedestal, how she is allowed this privilege, and yet when Subaru depended on her, when he most desperately needed her support, she turned her back on him, and that act left a deep deep scar in his heart. She absolutely should have apologized, and absolutely deserves a fitting punishment. It's just plain cold-hearted and stupid, it makes zero sense, she was being so needlessly hurtful and cruel, and even that Tappei (through Julius) paints as "noble and beautiful" which is fucked up, because most of the fandom takes it at face value, when Ferris, the realist and not the "fool full of idealism" that Julius was, is the one with the correct take that Emilia should have been wiser. Julius was a fucking prick and a plain asshole in arc 3. The idea that his actions "saved Subaru," is one of the most horrifying and repulsive notions this fandom believes. It's truly repulsive.
