#re zero analysis

In this post, I’m going to go over all the stuff that I’ve written about on Tumblr to see what episodes, games, TV shows and movies I’ve enjoyed and enjoyed writing about. I’m still learning because I’m not a professional critic or a journalist but a novelist. I started this as a means for a portfolio to build-up work and I couldn’t be bothered messing about with making a website because I’m not exactly tech-savvy. This has been a lot of fun and I look forward to doing so much more. So much in fact, that I will have eventually written about everything ever.

Perfect Blue

I really loved Perfect Blue and I was very happy with what I wrote about it because it’s not exactly an easy film. I barely scratched the surface but I personally feel that it is one of those movies that isn’t really meant to be “got”. It has multiple layers and “reading too much into it” is a concept that the film itself makes comment on. The art allows you as a viewer to make what you think out of it and it’s a double-edged sword because at one end, it does mean that it’s an expertly crafted psychedelic, psychological thriller that achieves this mystery in the plot but on the other - in this modern age of post-grad, new-media analyses - people want to declare that their interpretation is exactly what the art is about. If you look up write-ups and reviews of Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue, research is riddled with all sorts of angles on the ideas that the film presented which is great but it’s frustrating that ultimately no-one really knows for certain what was real and what isn’t and that is the point of the movie but no-one can really accept that. Everything has to have conclusions and I tried to avoid that as much as possible in my post but just to talk about themes.

Having said that though, if I was to re-do it again right now, it would probably be completely different. In short, I still love the movie and almost everything about it. I do think it is ever-so slightly overrated and overstated. To date, it’s my favourite animé movie. If you want to read it, it’s here. It’s a biggun, mind.

Re:ZERO / Starting Life in Another World from Zero

i’m ups and downs about Re:ZERO and I still am. It was exhausting to write about every single episode of this fucking show because you don’t expect the world to be so complicated because of the silly way that it begins. Writing about it was not like anything that I had ever done before and I was thrown in at the deep end but in a lot of ways, I thrived from the challenge. It was my first real foré into animé that was outside my jurisdiction, as it were. Compared to what Japanese media that I absorbed before (Danganronpa, Persona, A Silent Voice, Madoka Magica and Steins;Gate), it was pretty out-there. I was still new to animé (I still am) so it was a little overwhelming. I routinely got things wrong, confused one episode’s contents for anothers and spelled character’s names wrong. Not only was I ill-experienced with animé, I wasn’t terribly interested in medieval fantasy either. In fact, I hate medieval fantasy.

All that being said, I still enjoyed my time writing about it and embracing the challenge. I like that there is a lot that I can say about most episodes despite what I actually think about it. Even though I’ve wrote two summary write-ups about the both seasons, I still don’t really think that I’ve settled in my opinions about it. It is one of those things that is admittedly quite good but there is just that certain thing that you cannot put your finger on for the life of you that would just make it that bit better.

For brevity, my favourite episodes [to write about] were The Sound of Chains, The Outside of Madness and The Witches Tea Party. There were more good episodes but they were so good in fact, that it was too hard to write about them. I’m not Vonnegut, you know.

To Your Eternity

I really loved the first few episodes of To Your Eternity. I was blown away by the weirdness of the concept and how they executed it in a really larger-than-life way. Although that I’m having a tumultuous time with it at the moment, I still think the first six or seven episodes were really good at doing everything it is that you can think of and then some. It was great at storytelling, building mystery and suspense, drama and fight scenes. Fumetsu no Anata is an incredibly competent show and the universe outside of the brewery is something that I’d love to explore for myself. I’ve not been too invested in anything for a long time and I’m going to stick with it despite the problems I’ve had with it in recent weeks. I upload a To Your Eternity write-up every Tuesday after the newest episode has come out and Episode #11 came out yesterday on my blog.

My favourite episodes are The Rambunctious Girl, A Small Evolution and Those Who Follow. This has to be the asterisk that these are my favourite episodes so far. The series is far from being done.

INSIDE

I loved Bo Burnham’s INSIDE as did everyone else but I felt like my write-up could’ve been a lot better after sitting down to read what everyone else had to say about it and it was all far more clever, poetic and beautfiul compared to me. It’s probably why I pre-emptively prefaced it with the adverb Gushing to implicate senseless rambling by a blogging idiot who doesn’t know how to properly review a film or what to say about music. I still do enjoy it and I wish that I could sit and write four hours and be incredibly dissectant in how the piece is put together. But my dissertation is on the way and I don’t really have time to be surgical for fun.

My favourite songs were White Woman’s Instagram, Welcome to the Internet, Comedy, Problematic, Sexting and Goodbye.

Berserk

I very much loved writing about all of Berserk from the original and iconic animé to the much maligned 2016 iteration. After rejecting a lot of it initially, the more and more I think about it, it grew on me. I had to go back and rewatch everything once Kentaro Miura died and I discovered that I actually, genuinely loved Berserk and I don’t know what I was thinking. It was nice to write about something so certain and so plainly obvious. Like I said in the original article, I don’t know what else I can add. It was just a lot of fun to express how I felt about it if it was ever so brief.

Persona 4: The Animation

Persona 4: The Animation has been present in my life for what feels like forever and I was bound to write about it once I started doing this i-have-an-opinion-blog thing instead of concentrating on my novelist pursuit. It’s something that has stuck with me ever since I first seen it and to me, it was my first animé that I ever watched and could remember all the way through. But it had been a long time since then so I decided to sit down and watch through it all again to see how it would fair on my now slightly cynical brain.

Now,

it wasn’t as great as I remember BUT, I still had a good time watching it. I found new favourites in the series and new things to like about Persona generally. I also found new things to utterly loathe and despair at the sight of it in the 26 episodes. To be fair, some of those certain things that I now hate about it are things that I would hate in all animé and they are disappointingly common things that you aren’t allowed to express distaste for because “it’s just an animé thing” i.e. Treating women like property, making fun of gay men, trying to find comedy in borderline sexual assault ETC. At the risk of putting myself in front of the cannon of annoying patois and verbiage from the terminally reclusive, I have to say that all those tropes had soured my friendship with Persona 4: The Animation but not enough to break the bond completely. Now, P4 is that friend who crosses paths with a different friend group of yours one day nd you sit there clenching your knuckles until they’re snowball white because you're constantly worried that embarrassment or offense might be caused at any point. You know it’s capable of it but you just hope the charm shines through all the cringe.

My new favourite episode was The Anniversary to Become a Family which you can find my write-up of here.

This episode was fine although I was intoxicated whilst watching it so I don’t know if that has altered my experience or not but I can’t say that Garfiel is a character that I’m particularly fond of having around. So this episode being all about him isn’t exactly going to have a lasting effect on me anyway.

So Subaru gives Garfiel the talking to about his overprotective complex in the sanctuary and how about he isn’t letting them go because of his abandonment issues relating to his mother which is something that was only bought about in the previous couple of episodes. He transforms into his fat cat form but Subaru uses the power that he shouldn’t use because then his gate is open. Still not entirely sure what that means but whatever it seems to do quells his ability immediately and stops him dead in his tracks. It should be noted at this point that Subaru stops Emilia from using her power here which she is willing to use so that he can do it himself so he still has tendencies towards the protagonist complex.

Garfiel punches Subaru really hard in the face but he doesn’t flinch at all or fall over or anything which I thought was a little silly because Subaru is a scrawny boy. What happens next was strange but Subaru is able to defend himself by the unseen hand emerging from his chest and uppercutting Garfiel which is interesting because it’s a sign that Subaru is evolving in some way - thank God for that.

To get to the point, they conquer Garfiel and he admits defeat but doesn’t admit that he was necessarily in the wrong. Patrasche gets involved and headbutts Garfiel at one point but I really can’t remember the actual context I’m sorry. It’s just nice to see Patrasche.

The pair of them black out and wake up and Emilia is comforting Subaru whilst Ram is briefly comforting Garfiel before he wakes up and then leaves him in on his arse immediately. Garfiel forces himself to go through the trial and you find out that his mother abandoned him and Frederica and because Frederica was a bit older, she was tasked with looking after him. Garfiel hasn’t grown up properly and had a confused upbringing by his own sibling so he traps an entire village so they can’t leave; a tale as old as time.

Garfiel is nice now and now him and Subaru are getting along. It is also revealed that Garfiel is actually thirteen so I think that the foreseeable future is going to be a lot of bro stuff between the two.

Great...

I jest. I’ll just have to wait and see what happens with that before i pass judgement on it. A lot of development has occured over the previous few episodes and it feels now that they’re finally building blocks towards the final push to the end of this arc. I’m grateful for all of this because it is about time. There’s ten episodes left so I hope they make good with the time they have.