The following assumes familiarity with the reviewed material. Spoilers below. I dont need magic to create. All you need is passion and practice. Fate will decide the rest. Meteora sterreich Re:Creators Episode 22 Explicit metafiction is fairly rare within the anime medium and only marginally more common in manga. For how much of anime good and bad relies on recalling older formulas and character archetypes and bringing them into the present this is somewhat surprising. What then to make of Re:Creators an unashamedly meta anime with a fairly impressive pedigree that had supporters calling it a classic in the making and detractors decrying it as pretentious schlock right from the very beginning of its run? Lets start with the facts: Re:Creators is an action anime about fictional characters sourced from alsofictional light novels anime manga and video games come to life. Our nominal protagonist is geeky shutin Souta Mizushino joined at first by Celestia who hails from an anime that seems like a modern take on The Vision of Escaflowne and Meteora a mage from a JRPG who serves as an expository character both in her doublyfictional game and within the show itself. This cast balloons significantly over the course of the shows 24episode run to the point that listing every characterboth Creationthe shows term for these refugees from fictionlandand Creator the well creators thereofis an exercise in pointless listmaking. But lets back up for a moment what about Altair RCs main antagonist and also in a very loose sense its actual hero? Altairs character arc is to put it mildly very unusual and her design is among the most brilliant in the past decade of the medium. Altair is a white haired girl clad in a bizarre amalgam of different 19th century military uniform styles. She has a shako cap a Spanish cavalry coat that tapers into a wide skirt strange highheeled spur boots and her eyes are doubleset a ring of red around blue and her pupils are square. For the first half of the shows run I wasnt entirely convinced that this design being as ridiculous as it was and it is ridiculous was intentional or not but over time it becomes clear that its a definite deliberate decision. A lot happens throughout Re:Creators but one of several main story throughlines is about Altair herself and how she came to be. This is by far the shows strongest narrative thread and is the one best carried to conclusion. But there are of course others. There is Celestia and Meteora coming to terms with being fictional there is Magane the gleefully wicked light novel antagonist who continually throws a wrench into the plans of both the pro and antagonists theres Mamika the idealistic magical girl who gives her life for those same ideals at the end of the shows first quarter. There is the ridiculouslynamed Aliceteria February whose knuckleheadedness make her an antagonist for the shows entire first half and theres the also ridiculously named Blitz Talker a cyberpunk deuteroganist hellbent on avenging his daughters death by killing his creator. All of these are handled better or worse. Mamikas death at Altairs hands is incredibly welldone and maybe unintentionally a sneaky metacomment on the state of the mahou shoujo genre postMadoka and Blitz makes up for a slow start with a fantastic conclusion near the shows end. Celestias is not quite resolved as well her death at the shows end being underdeveloped and sudden and Maganes is not really resolved at all. Other characterslike Yuya Rui and the second cour introductions Hikayu and Syodont really have character arcs in the first place and serve more secondary roles. This is without even getting into the creators themselves who form an entire secondary cast. Nonetheless no parts are played poorly in Re:Creators save perhaps that of Hikayus creator an obnoxious bucktoothed otaku whose inclusion does ultimately pay off but remains questionable. Altair is eventually revealed to be a doujin character created by Soutas deceased friend Setsuna which puts her design into a very specificand very interestingcontext. Her overdesignedness is the product of deliberately trying to create a character that breaks the rules of what a good character design should look like. Shes a doujin character designed by a teenage nerd so of course she wears a ridiculous outfit of course shes unflappably cool but that actually hides a deep reservoir of inner rage of course her weapon is a ring of sabers and a Russian machine gun she plays like a violin that can effectively do almost anything. These are the traits of OCs. Mary Sues to use an old piece of internet terminology that has largely fallen out of favor. Altair is overpowered evil and always in control. That her design works in references to Black Rock Shooter her general color scheme is BRS own inverted white hair with red highlights in contrast to BRS black hair with blue and Akame ga Kill her outfits general fascistevoking but nonspecific look just seals the deal. Altair is a DeviantArt drawing come to life and that is ultimately a really interesting character concept and its explored quite well in her arc. Altairs motives arent entirely clear until she kills Mamika who she furiously lashes out at for presuming to be able to help her. Her lines in this scene especially I will destroy everything. Destroy destroy and destroy more until this world disappears. That is the reason Im standing here today. would be downright comedic if they werent delivered with such utter disgust and the subsequent howl of rage as she impales Mamika makes one pity her voice actor and really sells her total burnitall nihilism. Her arc takes a bit of a strange halfturn in the shows second half. As she fights the other creations who barring the showsupjusttodie Charon have all united against her at this point during the Chamber Festival she seems increasingly more bemused than anything else. Again this is what an invincible character of her type is supposed to do. Almost nothing the protagonists throw at her offers her a genuine challenge not even her own counterpart Sirius introduced late in the show as a last ditch effort. The final few episodes really are about Altair more than anyone else and while they do often boil down to essentially shonen fight scenes with the usual form of fighting spiritbabble replaced here with technobabble about audience acceptance levels its a real joy to actually watch. But where things get truly strange is in episodes 20 and 21 the end of the former reintroducing Setsuna in the form of a creation herself albeit and its only here at the shows very end that Altair starts displaying emotions other than rage and smugness. Its a long long buildup to that and understandably its not for everyone. Episode 21 in particular wherein Altair essentially surrenders now that shes reunited with Setsuna and in doing so crosses the Creation/Creator boundary conjuring an entire world of her own making is thick with a very deliberately sappy sort of character development. Altair arguably gets the happiest ending of any character in fact with most of the others leaving the real world to return to their own or having died before that point. So what the finale ends up ultimately being about is how well can you sell a happy ending for a character that by conventional standards doesnt really deserve one? And the answer is that well it depends. If you found Altair annoying at the start of the series the ending is not likely to redeem her for you since on a literal level she more or less gets away with everything. On the other hand if we take Hikayus comment about Altair being the real hero into account were left with an interesting view of things. That Altair did not act in a moral right by any conventional standard is indisputable but whoboth inuniverse and outended up being the target of the most discussion good and bad fan art and so on? Altairs character arc working or not hinges almost entirely on how believable you find the idea that in order the inuniverse audience reflects the preferences of the out of universe audience and that that preferenceAltair as the most interesting and therefore main characteris valid. Its an interesting narrative trick and one I might go so far as to say is entirely unique. Certainly it is nothing I have seen pulled off so well before. Altairs redemption if it can even be called that works because the audience wants her to be redeemed. Heroes dying to help save the world after all is nothing unexpected. Villains voluntarily stopping themselves after a good talking toeven under extraordinary circumstancesis much rarer. For a certain kind of person it is certainly a hard pill to swallow for anotherand I fit myself into this campthis particular piece of narrative origami is so fascinating that I cant possibly fault it for not being a simpler happy ending. Altairs arc is such a strange rollercoaster ride that it does make me wonder if the characters dark horse popularity wasnt planned for from the start. This isnt to say of course that at the end of the day Re:Creators has no flaws. Indeed it has quite a few. For one thing there are funnily enough simply too many characters. The cast could be trimmed by a third the script rewritten and no one would notice. Several exist mostly as background fodder or only to facilitate dumb jokes. For another there are also too many episodes around the halfway point the show enters a serious slump with a trio of episodes that focus primarily on the minutiae of setting up the Elimination Chamber Festival. This is in a word boring. The various creators are perhaps unsurprisingly the least interesting characters in the show and their interactions with each other bring little to the table. Matsubaras awkward father/daughter conversations with Celestia earlier in the series and Suruga outwitting her own creation Blitz later on are much more compelling because they involve a creation character too. On their own the creators dont do much of interest and this section drags the entire show down considerably that it immediately follows an admittedly funny recap episode doesnt help. In addition while Altair getting a happy ending is not itself a point of contention for me at least the fact that two other characters die in the last few episodes is a little disappointing. Lateinshow character death is of course a tried and true trope but it is exactly the sort of thing that RC should have strove to avoid. Celestia and Aliceteria both biting it in the leadup to the finale does compromise Altairs own redemption since the deaths are fresh in our memories by the time we get to that point. Finally theres the issue of Megane who is herself a very interesting character but after she tentatively flips to the protagonists side in the shows final quarter she more or less up and disappears leaving her character hang in the air unresolved. Its a strange decision especially given how much closure were given with Altair and while it does fit her personality to an extent the fact that were given not even a small hint about where she mightve gone or what she might be doing after the main story is over is undeniably frustrating. But none of these caveats even come close to ruining the show. Perhaps in another world where it does not have them Re:Creators might well have been the classic that channel Mothers Basement famously prognosticated it might become. With them it is more of a future cult classic a key point of difference. Really one gets the impression that Re:Creators own creators are the sorts who would prefer to make a cult classic than something with unanimous critical acclaim anyway so perhaps its all for the best. One last thing. The shows 22nd episodeits lastis the sort of bowonthegiftbox affair I wish more anime could learn to do. Most of the characters return to their own worlds returning much of the setting to the status quo but Meteora notably does not. Of course in a show this shamelessly selfindulgent it is perhaps no surprise that she becomes a novelist and ends up writing a book calledwhat else?Re:Creators. What you end up with at the end of the day is an anime about the creative process itself and while Re:Creators is far from perfect the fact that it even tries to broach this subject with a mix of seriousness and humor makes it an easy recommendation for anyone who wont mind the bumpy ride. You really dont see too many like this one.