#crusch

So somebody DM’d me this template and wanted me to fill it out and it seemed neat, so thus I obliged. Below is my reasoning for each pick if you are interested.

Intro

This is a semi-hate post and a Doylist critique of Re:ZERO, about where I believe many of the series’ problems originate. I have always been into isekai, and Re:ZERO is famous for subverting the genre’s tropes. I do not think it subverts them well, and plenty has been written about why.

This critique takes a different route. Instead of relitigating the usual complaints, it examines the root pattern behind stories like this one, a pattern as old as written stories themselves: the scapegoat. I will argue that Subaru is the narrative’s scapegoat, that this is why he reads as the author’s doormat, why his suffering is structured the way it is, and why the story so often feels hypocritical.

There is a path for Tappei to redeem the series, if he is bold enough to take it. If not, Re:ZERO devolves into yet another isekai slop, just with extra steps (i.e., suffering porn).

Girard in two minutes

René Girard, a French philosopher, spent his career on scapegoating and the origins of social violence. It starts with mimetic desire: we desire what others desire. A kid may not care about a toy until he sees another kid wanting it, and then he wants it too. The same happens with adults, with partners, and in society at large. The result is a constant background of envy and tension.

That tension has to discharge somewhere, and the discharge takes a specific shape: everyone-against-everyone collapses into everyone-against-one. The group picks an outsider, somebody strange or different, and blames them as the source of the tension, despite the victim being guiltless. For this to work, the crowd cannot recognize what it is doing. Bullies are not scheming; they are swept along. By “unaware” Girard does not mean the crowd is ignorant of the violence itself. The throne room crowd in arc 3 knows perfectly well it is humiliating Subaru. What the crowd cannot see is that the target was chosen arbitrarily and that the verdict is false.

Myth and revelation

So the question becomes how the scapegoating event gets written down, and it takes one of two forms: myth or revelation.

Myth is the common case, and it explains things like witch trials and public stonings. The group suffers some ill (a plague, a famine, internal feuds, whatever), picks a blameless person nobody will stand up for, and discharges its tension on them through violence. Witch trials picked women with no family ties and burned them at the stake. The written account of the event is a myth in that it sides with the crowd: the crowd genuinely believes the scapegoating worked, that the victim was the true perpetrator, and that punishing them cured the ills. The key thing is not that myth is primitive. A slick, modern, sophisticated story can be pure myth. The key thing is that it sides with the crowd and treats the victim as guilty.

Revelation is the rarer and more interesting case, where the account sides with the victim. The quintessential example is Christ. He bears the cross for humanity’s sins, yet nowhere in the Bible is he actually blamed. He sees the others as sinners and forgives them, and his forgiveness comes from a position above the sinners in the narrative. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do” is why he is a messiah, a true savior. He would not be one if he believed the accusations levied at him. The other example is the Book of Job: Job suffers, his friends insist he must have sinned for such suffering to befall him, he denies it, and in the end it is the friends who are rebuked. The scapegoat mechanism runs on everyone believing the victim was guilty, and what makes the gospels revelation rather than myth is that they refuse that belief. Christ does not validate the mechanism. He breaks it by being the one scapegoat the text insists was innocent, which makes every scapegoating before him visible as the same crime. The victim is placed above the crowd, and the machinery is shown for what it is.

Arc 3 is myth

Arc 3 of Re:ZERO is myth, not revelation, and the sting of that is that a story this elaborate is doing exactly what a witch trial does. The myth that Subaru alone was in the wrong is maintained throughout the story in how information is presented to him, the victim. Subaru is no Christ figure forgiving downward from moral high ground. He apologizes upward, to people who sinned against him while the story paints them, in the background, as far worse than he ever was. He is not a messianic savior but a broken kid, in the sense that he believes he was the sole sinner and that the sins committed against him were justified. This is exactly what Typhon points out to him in arc 4.

The royal selection as a stoning

What happens during the royal selection ceremony? Subaru is picked as the weak, wounded, strange outsider, without status or support, to discharge the crowd’s tensions and sins. Emilia publicly disowning him was the nail in the coffin: it marked him as a target the gathered sinners could burn at the stake. The victim is someone the crowd can hurt without real consequences. Julius’s house arrest was a joke, and unlike Subaru he suffered no reputational loss. In Virtuousness before the Theatre we even learn that Julius went around hushing things up afterward. The narrative depicts this as something done for Subaru’s sake, when in reality it only kept Julius’s own name from being tarnished further, because Subaru became a national hero days later. Had the news spread, given Subaru’s fame and his rise to knighthood from common birth, it is the royal guard’s reputation Julius saved, not Subaru’s. The story adamantly keeps the myth.

Gluttony and the information quarantine

The story then puts Rem’s and Julius’s names in Gluttony’s belly. Other people’s lost memories, plus the absence of Rem, who stood by Subaru’s side and saw what Emilia’s abandonment did to him, work together to maintain the crowd’s myth. And not just in the crowd’s mind, but in the victim’s mind too, where Subaru believes he alone had been in the wrong. The information architecture of the story is constructed so that the arc 3 status quo, Subaru rather than Emilia as the one most in the wrong, is maintained in all the relevant minds.

Emilia’s narration always protects the verdict

Emilia never brings up Puck and Roswaal’s ruse, her own repeated failures as a liege and friend, Julius’s blood-and-birth rant at Subaru (which went against her own beliefs and what she sought in a knight), or the actual violence committed against him, which went far past the point of necessity and earned Julius a house arrest that is never mentioned again in the main story. Neither is the royal guard. In a story that values names and gazes so much, the royal guard and the noble attendees, besides Rickert Hoffman, are never given either. They were stage props in an isolated play, whose role was to hand Julius a justification to punish Subaru and to let the author tell the reader: stone this wounded kid who several people owe their lives to, for he is the bringer of ills, and let us deconstruct the isekai protagonist. The medieval sociopolitics is never a coherent system where consequences are tracked and recognized in a proper way across the series, merely an aesthetic the author uses according to his whims to stage his plays where he puts his MC through the wringer for the sake of his doll.

Emilia always escapes responsibility in her narration. The narration is often touted as unreliable, but the unreliability serves the myth. It is the Doylist tool with an in-world justification: Roswaal’s Gospel, and probably Pandora and her Authority’s influence on the story’s very narrative. (If the Pandora part is intentional and true, it would redeem many of the story’s issues so far.) Emilia always says, “You get hurt for my sake,” and never, “I said horrible things to you in the throne room and hurt you, you got upset and accepted the duel Julius came to offer, he pushed you past the point of necessity, you got sad that all those people were jeering at you, so you used magic, my promise be damned.”

She does not come off as the Emilia who gave him the lap pillow at all, and no realistic person, who would tend to be far less kind than Emilia, would react to Subaru getting hurt the way she does. Nothing goes through her mind besides broken promises and how they resulted in Subaru getting hurt. She thinks like a child, refusing to grapple with actual cause and effect, and Tappei writes this as some profound failure on Subaru’s part, which is Roswaal’s Gospel’s doing. Subaru takes the burden for the root issues of the arc (Emilia’s inability to accept people and how it made her treat him, Roswaal and Puck’s incompetence and negligence, her irrational attitude about promises that she never explained) and apologizes for them, instead of forgiving down from the higher moral ground he actually occupied.

The crowd that never objects

Neither Emilia nor even Felt ever engages with the systemic issues of the Kingdom and how directly they relate to Subaru’s suffering during the royal selection, despite both owing him so much. Felt is the sharpest example, because she is a slum girl whose entire platform is hatred of the aristocracy, and she never once connects that platform to what the aristocracy actually did to the boy who saved her life. The one character ideologically built to object stays silent like everyone else. Even in the “killed by praise” scene in arc 5, Julius describes Subaru’s heroics as “making up for his shame,” and nobody steps in to say it was not that shameful, that he was wronged, that he was right to stand up for his liege. Subaru is constantly gaslit by the story, and so is the reader. Why? To preserve the myth of the scapegoat.

Double transference: from stoned outsider to national hero

Girard calls the next stage the double transference. The crowd first demonizes the victim, then, once peace returns, sacralizes him. The scapegoat becomes a god. Subaru goes from stoned outsider to national hero in days, and the text treats these as unrelated events, when in Girard they are one mechanism completing itself. Hero worship that never revisits the verdict is the second transference, not a correction of the first.

This is best reflected in Julius’s dynamic with Subaru, which I find twisted and ugly beneath the glitter. He brutalizes Subaru to appease the crowd, then comes to view him as the mythic hero risen like a phoenix from the ashes. Despite also being a “fool full of idealism,” he roleplays the wiser knight guiding Subaru, while we as readers know Julius would fold upon learning the horror of Subaru’s Authority and who exactly gave it to him. We get a taste of his Pride and arrogant roleplaying in Virtuousness before the Theatre, where he reflects on how thorny Subaru’s path to knighthood had been, as if he were not the one responsible for the thorns, and that Pride is punished when he loses his Name.

Reinhard, meanwhile, legitimately holds the position that Subaru had been in the wrong. Reinhard’s belief system is twisted, and it makes perfect sense why Tappei would want you to see him as a villain, if Tappei is being intentional about where I think the story is going: turning the myth of Re:ZERO into a revelation.

The scenes that were never written

If not, then Tappei, and much of the fandom, fell for one of the oldest patterns in stories and myths. We never got the conferral of honors ceremony, where Emilia was supposedly embarrassed at being praised for things she did not achieve, because writing it would have forced Tappei to violate the myth. The conversations needed to make that scene realistic would have forced the characters to engage with the systemic problems on display in the circus that was the royal selection ceremony, and that would have painted arc 3 Subaru in a far better light: a commoner rising to royal candidate’s knight in a matter of months, contracting a Great Spirit, unheard of before, and taking down the Whale and Sloth.

Somehow Subaru is a national hero and Emilia a prospective ruler, and we are to believe neither visited the capital or spoke to a single noble or royal guard in the entire year between arcs 4 and 5. That is not a small gap. A national hero and a royal candidate having zero contact with the capital’s institutions for a full year is implausible on its face, and implausible in exactly the direction that protects the myth. Had Subaru met Miklotov again at the conferral of honors, Miklotov would surely have commended him once more for standing up for his liege.

Arc 10 keeps the verdict alive

Tappei wants us to ignore Emilia’s failure as a liege and read her failures as the product of a tragic past, while Subaru’s failures are ugly things he had to “correct” through hellish, traumatic trials in which he is forced, over and over, to view himself as the sole sinner. Again in arc 10, right as Subaru thinks back to Miklotov’s praise in arc 3, the conversation he was about to have with Miklotov is denied to us. Emilia, Beatrice, and Rem all semi-bully or tease him about arc 3 for some reason, and Subaru thinks of Emilia’s reason for her response back then as “cute,” while internally acknowledging how horrific its effect on him had been. The one event that pushed him to the brink and nearly broke him, the event that sent his hero complex into full swing, Emilia’s words and actions at the capital in LN 4, is the one event he seeks sympathy for deep down. He is constantly denied it, in how people talk to him about it, chiefly Emilia, and in how little she registers the cost he bore.

Why? Because of Tappei’s need to preserve the myth of the scapegoat, in which the victim is made to believe he was a sinner who deserved what he got. Subaru thinks “the me back then,” which is horrifically, heartbreakingly self-punishing. This broken kid, pushed to take everything onto himself, compares his public confession of love for a half-elf denied love to a literal terrorist leader’s obsession with Satella, and the text treats it as a profound moment of self-reflection rather than as a mind twisted to maintain the myth by Roswaal’s Gospel.

Why the apologies don’t count

Julius apologizing to Subaru privately in arc 6, or Emilia apologizing properly in Taste of Death in arc 4 after she had gone insane, do not count for much, because neither the public myth nor the victim’s own beliefs changed. Subaru considers what Julius did to him on the training grounds in arc 3 a debt to be repaid for “teaching him a lesson.” Subaru truly thinks like a Witch. If Julius had seen From Zero, he would hold himself responsible for pushing Subaru to the brink and nearly driving him to abandon the Kingdom. Emilia would give up her candidacy out of shame and end the contract with Puck permanently.

Emilia’s arc 10 setup

I believe everything we have seen of Emilia in arc 10 is about her learning a lesson regarding reality, about taking Subaru’s competence for granted, much as she was punished in arc 3 (by seeing Subaru get hurt) for taking his kindness for granted. The reasoning she gives in response to Bordeux’s comments is childish and evasive in the same way her arc 3 accounting always is, deflecting onto everything except her own conduct, which is exactly why it reads as setup for a comeuppance.

Arc 6-54 is often praised as Emilia’s From Zero moment, but it is not. Not only does it occur in a failed timeline, Subaru never thinks back to it the way he does to From Zero. Emilia’s memories during that scene are shoddy, and once again she plays the author’s mouthpiece (somewhat), whitewashing what she did in arc 3, which was betray Subaru. Her narration acknowledges the great betrayal exactly once, in LN 9, when she is not facing Subaru. In arc 6 she says, “I didn’t want you getting hurt for my sake, pushing yourself,” but that was not the message she sent him in arc 3. Had she possessed her memories of both Rem and Julius, she would be far less forgiving in how she describes her own actions, which is why I believe Gluttony will spit the Names back out in this arc, just as in arc 9.

This sets up the third trial line in arc 10, where unlike in arc 6 or arc 9, she will have properly realized her feelings for Subaru, come to terms with what she has been taking for granted since arc 3, and stopped whitewashing her own conduct in her internal narration. And then Subaru and Emilia will part ways again, for reasons echoing arc 3. Arc 9 ended with the two not facing each other, Rem’s morning star crushing Subaru’s skull, and Emilia’s feelings still unplaced. Arc 10 will end as the inversion: Subaru and Emilia facing each other, her feelings finally placed, unlike in arcs 3 and 9, but the two forced apart anyway.

If that is how it plays out, it would be implicit confirmation of this essay’s reading.

The fandom as crowd

Arcs 3 and 4 do not leave a good taste in my mouth with how they end. They scream “bad for Subaru.” Say Subaru was justified and Emilia bore more responsibility, and you get downvoted to oblivion. That is not a counterargument. That is a crowd defending the author’s myth, insisting the stoning was the setup for redemption. Watch how the fandom handles the promises: Emilia’s attitude toward them, and the way she coerces them out of Subaru, is a colossal character flaw, yet readers stay hell-bent on blaming Subaru for breaking them. The blame always follows the person who acts. I would argue Subaru being a promise-breaker is one of his best traits, because it pushes the people around him forward and forces them to face what needs facing.

Read properly, arc 3 is Emilia’s arc, the story of her inaction and its consequences rather than Subaru’s actions and theirs. It was a reality check about using her privileges to escape her responsibilities, the most basic of which, for a liege and prospective ruler, is learning to accept people and place faith in them. Her failure at that utterly basic task is the principal reason Subaru felt the way he did and the reason he got hurt.

The wager

So here is the real question, the one the rest of the series is going to answer. Right now Re:ZERO is a myth. What needs to happen, beginning in arc 10 and running to the finale, is the breakdown of that myth. Can Tappei go against the mould of typical scapegoating stories? Can he properly recontextualize for Subaru that he was wronged, and break the myth down for Emilia too? Return by Death, as the Chekhov’s gun, might be playing exactly this role. Pulling the trigger properly, unlike in arc 9, would be the true breakdown of the scapegoat myth. The entire remaining story is the test of whether the author can turn his myth into a revelation. It is just annoying that he is taking his time with it, more than a decade now.