#dice guy

— dice guy

Uh... You want it?

×holds up to Cyn×

The dice gave him a stanley

I have not seen Bubble. I'm honestly awful at watching new stuff as it comes out, though like everyone else I am currently watching Frieren (and I saw Oshi no Ko last season).

As far as Urobuchi goes, I've honestly not been too impressed by the rest of his oeuvre. What I've seen includes:

Fate/Zero: Falls off hard in the second half, though the reason for this might have more to do with being a prequel than any particular decisions Urobuchi himself made

Phantom Requiem for the Phantom: Ignore the awesome name, this is so boring, also has a terrible Dice Guy villain (I'll explain what this means); however, the ending (like the last five minutes) is strong

Psycho-Pass: Another outrageous Dice Guy villain, slow start, though it picks up near the end

Saya no Uta: I actually like this, it's good

Now what is a Dice Guy? This is a term I coined when watching the extremely bad anime Akuma no Riddle. In this anime, there is a character who barely ever interacts with the plot, but rather stays in the background, sitting in a shadowy room, from which he ostensibly exerts some puppetmaster-style control over the events unfolding. The show frequently cuts to this character as he monologues to himself about deep-sounding philosophical topics such as the nature of fate and chance, topics he emphasizes by a fixation with a pair of dice he constantly rolls. For instance, at once point he might say something like "Fate is... a roll of the dice," and then roll his dice. (I parodied this specific guy in Cockatiel x Chameleon via the company boss Harper meets near the end of the story.)

Though it's not always dice specifically that the Dice Guy plays with as he rambles about intellectual-sounding topics in the most surface-level ways imaginable, the core conceit is similar, and Urobuchi loves this type of guy to no end. Psycho-Pass's villain, for instance, is constantly monologuing about and quoting literature; Phantom Requiem for the Phantom's villain has a similar fixation with theater, likening the events of the story to performances in a play.

I hate these guys. They're insufferable. And they plague Urobuchi's work. Kyubey would probably have wound up a dice guy if the necessities of Madoka's plot structure didn't leave him only ambiguously villainous for most of the story. He does, after all, fill the role of a shadowy puppetmaster. I'm imagining a world where Kyubey's speech likening magical girls to cattle isn't a one-off moment but the core defining motif of his character, and I shiver.

While a lot of fans in the space attribute Madoka entirely to Urobuchi, I like to point out that Madoka also had an auteur director at the helm with his own distinct creative vision: Akiyuki Shinbo, the mastermind behind everything produced by Studio Shaft. I think Shinbo and Urobuchi both limited some of the other's more indulgent practices, and it is specifically in their collaboration that something as uniquely special as Madoka Magica could come about.