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This Week in Anime - The Best and Worst Moments of Re:Creators


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|comicchaser|



Joined: 05 Feb 2013
Posts: 54
PostPosted: Fri Sep 22, 2017 9:49 am Reply with quote
I agree with most of the criticism, although I love the series to death and it's now one of my favorites.
However Jacob mentioning

Quote:
Black Lagoon never had this kind of chessmaster storytelling style...


makes me think that he hasn't watched the Roberta's Blood Trail OVA or we have a different understanding of chessmaster storytelling. Because in my eyes that is as chessmaster-y as it gets.
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pip25



Joined: 22 Sep 2017
Posts: 145
PostPosted: Fri Sep 22, 2017 9:58 am Reply with quote
zztop wrote:
On the failure to stop Altair's OPness, Aoki Ei remarked in an interview that this was meant to symbolise the harshness of reality; that one can still fail despite all the effort put into an endeavour. He also says that as a Creator it can be very disappointing when the audience doesn't want to accept what you felt was interesting or cool, although they can't blame the audience for that.

I can of course understand their disappointment, but such a reasoning (and it's not the first time I come across this) tends to annoy me to no end, because it tries to excuse the execution with the concept.
I, as a scriptwriter, could also illustrate the harshness of reality by dropping an anvil out of the blue on a random character's head every episode, but no matter how "deep" my symbolic intents with that plot device might be, those intents would not make the story even a tiny bit better by themselves.
You can't say: this part was written horribly because I wanted to illustrate this and that. Bad writing is very rarely an effective artistic tool. It's just bad writing.
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yuna49



Joined: 27 Aug 2008
Posts: 3804
PostPosted: Fri Sep 22, 2017 2:53 pm Reply with quote
Key wrote:
yuna49 wrote:
My biggest complaint about Re:Creators is how useless and irrelevant much of the cast turned out to be. Blitz, Hikayu, Sho, Yuya, and Rui could all have been left out of the script, and little would have been lost.

Have to entirely disagree with that. Each of Blitz, Hikayu, Yuya, and Rui represented different aspects of the creation for anime/manga/games, and being short any one of them would have left the series feeling incomplete.

I know what they represented, but to me they seemed little more than cardboard cutouts inserted into the story line to make sure all the major sub-genres were included. What did Blitz actually accomplish? Could we have had a story without him? Of course. The same holds true for most of the characters I listed. Hikayu was entirely useless and seemed included only for fanservice reasons.
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DangerMouse



Joined: 25 Mar 2009
Posts: 3980
PostPosted: Sun Sep 24, 2017 3:35 am Reply with quote
angelmcazares wrote:
I supposed it bugged me that Selesia spoiler[died] because I liked her personality and character design.


Yeah, she was easily the character I liked the most. And gradually became surprisingly underused.
And like this mentioned if she was going to spoiler[die] they could have done it better at least.

Did it anyway but I guess it probably doesn't really need to be spoilered by either of us since it's in the article itself and this article is all about looking at the show after it's over. Laughing
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CrowLia



Joined: 24 Feb 2012
Posts: 5500
Location: Mexico
PostPosted: Sun Sep 24, 2017 4:32 am Reply with quote
I just can't buy the notion that the audience would so happily accept and root for Altair when she has nothing that makes her an interesting villain, at least in the eye of the in-show audience. Of course, because the show just vaguely tells us they've "written the spinoffs and background story" we don't know what the audience knows about Altair, but given that there was barely enough "acceptance" to introduce Setsuna, I assume their actual story wasn't really revealed. So Altair is supposed to be a super niche character that appears out of nowhere, is extremely conveniently OP and actually kills at least three beloved and more widely popular characters. The comparison with Aizen in the Deicide arc is actually extremely apt. Aizen was a beloved and unique villain until the Deicide arc that made him idiotically OP and had a bunch of exciting battles with the most popular characters, all of them ruined with a fake-out ending. Deicide is what began the decline in Bleach's popularity, yet we're supposed to believe the in-show audience would be oh so happy to cheer for Altair after she got Selesia killed? Sorry, but you don't get my "acceptance" for that
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DuskyPredator



Joined: 10 Mar 2009
Posts: 15433
Location: Brisbane, Australia
PostPosted: Sun Sep 24, 2017 9:44 pm Reply with quote
CrowLia wrote:
I just can't buy the notion that the audience would so happily accept and root for Altair when she has nothing that makes her an interesting villain, at least in the eye of the in-show audience.

It was all in how Altair acted in the fight, that she did so in a very deliberate way. She purposely made her actions very flashy, and or kind of cool in acting OP. She quite often kind of turned to the audience and called it all a show for them, playing on the audience's ego I think, while claiming that it was all because of her and for them. She did not randomly try and kill the heroes one by one, instead trying to disarm them, she knew what she was doing at keeping up her role as a charismatic villain that the audience would want to watch until she could take down the opposing force.
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Animerican14



Joined: 19 Aug 2006
Posts: 963
Location: Saint Louis, MO
PostPosted: Fri Sep 29, 2017 7:14 pm Reply with quote
I suppose it's fortunate that I consumed episodes 4-21 within the week leading up to episode 22, instead of on a not-quite week-to-week schedule, as I hardly had the problems that others did with the pacing or "technobabble" Re:Creators doled out. Nor did I really have a problem with the creations' highly archetypal nature and sometimes "cardboard cutout" nature, because the show seemed more centered anyway on the creative process and the creators behind these creations.

Thus the final long battle, while it may have arguably not resolved thematic threads that suggested by all the individual creations or 'completed their stories' in some ~deep~ (and thematically unifying?) way a la Fate/Zero, was in itself the culmination of all the creators' hard work and planning. And as showcased throughout those episodes, in the struggle against the overbearingly OP Altair, all the hardest work in the world can still not be enough to overcome. Such is the struggle of any creator, even the most experienced ones.

It's kind of funny, really-- in one sense, it's a battle of Altair versus The World, the "king of the weak" versus a world often cold and unforgiving, but for the creators battling her, Altair is The World.

Feature wrote:
Then Hikayu gives Selesia that motivational speech about not being indecisive, implying that indecisiveness was her major struggle through the show, I guess? News to me.


I never took Hikayu's "motivational speech" to Selesia regarding her 'indecisiveness' as an implication of a major struggle through the series as much as... primarily what was happening in the most recent episodes themselves? Selesia was naturally shocked at the sudden appearance of Charon from Vogelchevalier, never mind indecisive at the immediate prospect of having to fight her beloved, so it makes sense for Hikayu to comment on that.

However, Hikayu also talked about Selesia remembering her role in the story that is the improvisational Elimination Chamber Festival. What I took from this was that Hikayu was trying to remind Selesia that she has a supporting part to play: though Selesia may have been the heroine from her original story and thus (as the "heroine" ) may be able to 'selfishly' have things done her own way with the results that she desires, she is NOT necessarily the heroine in THIS story that is Elimination Chamber Festival. This may have been part of Alicetaria's downfall; she may have thought herself as the heroine that could finally avenge Mamika's death and bring forth the "Golden Ending", and so she tried to solo the OP Altair, only to die a death that utterly brought no gains to her team and no losses to Altair.

If Selesia was fighting Charon over a fatal misunderstanding in a strictly Matsubara-penned "Vogelchevalier" story, she (as The Heroine who has her God's Favor) would likely be able to resolve the misunderstanding with Charon, or at least not die as a result of it. But alas, neither ECF nor Re:Creators overall are "her story", and thus things aren't wont to go her way all the way down the line. If Selesia wants ECF to reach its Golden "Happy" Ending, then she must be willing to be a team player and make sacrifices to achieve that goal should that need arise, even if that means sacrificing herself and her lover. And so she does, determining that "this is how her story goes."

(And then of course viewers of Re:Creators ought to be in on Selesia being a "supporting role" at this point herself-- she hasn't had a particularly large presence as the cast kept on expanding, as much as she may have been the very first Creation viewers met and were able to sympathize with. How meta!)

It is somewhat disheartening that Selesia wasn't given more to do in the show and went out as sudden as she did, but in the grand scheme of Re:Creators, with the above understanding I elaborated on above? I think it works. As Hikayu said in the end, supporting roles are also very important to a story, too.
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Darren Laudat



Joined: 08 Apr 2018
Posts: 1
PostPosted: Sun Apr 08, 2018 8:01 pm Reply with quote
CrowLia wrote:
I just can't buy the notion that the audience would so happily accept and root for Altair when she has nothing that makes her an interesting villain, at least in the eye of the in-show audience. Of course, because the show just vaguely tells us they've "written the spinoffs and background story" we don't know what the audience knows about Altair, but given that there was barely enough "acceptance" to introduce Setsuna, I assume their actual story wasn't really revealed. So Altair is supposed to be a super niche character that appears out of nowhere, is extremely conveniently OP and actually kills at least three beloved and more widely popular characters. The comparison with Aizen in the Deicide arc is actually extremely apt. Aizen was a beloved and unique villain until the Deicide arc that made him idiotically OP and had a bunch of exciting battles with the most popular characters, all of them ruined with a fake-out ending. Deicide is what began the decline in Bleach's popularity, yet we're supposed to believe the in-show audience would be oh so happy to cheer for Altair after she got Selesia killed? Sorry, but you don't get my "acceptance" for that


Pretty much when I was watching the ECF it was something I was thinking, there's now way Altair should have gotten so much acceptance let alone this fast, every other creation had a long established story vs what is a random OC that popped up from nothing from a amateur creator who was mocked for it not to long ago. If that wasn't the nail in the coffin the fact that what should be their eyes Altair pulling OP after OP powers from nowhere, stomping other side without breaking a sweat. That should have pissed a few people off even her own fans, seen many OP villains get hated for pulling same stuff or half as bad so doubt her would be exception more so when example Alice fans rage after seeing her get smacked around. Wish the shows writers acknowledged that and made that play a role in possible defeat I agree it felt like writers ignored logic for the sake of Altair gaining acceptance. Not helping despite how show paints her she can be unlikable and obnoxious for many.

Sorry for posting so late btw.
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