Rewrite Anime - Episode 13 "The Promise I Exchanged With You"

Key Discussion
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I don’t know if this episode was actually good or I’ve just given up.

My opinion goes something like:
+10 for tying back to the opening monologue
+20 for Esaka v Kotarou
-10000000000000 for Sakuya transforming into a still picture
-30 for the hard to follow jumble that is the middle (I don’t even want to think about that…)
+20 for slow version of End of the World
+50 for Salvation
+50 for Yami no Kanata e

Probably just because I read the VN, the salvation scene had quite an impact on me. It did a pretty good job of unearthing all the feelings I had while reading the VN, while showing us what happened to most of the cast. I liked the really subtle things, like how Nishikujou was left by the tree, and showing the setting where Kotarou sits in the first OP. No telling, all showing.

Also, what happened to the 6th route? I refuse to believe that they can call mashing all the routes together a separate one.

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Actually, it’s only going to be 11 episodes, though if there is a episode double the time like the first season, it’ll be better.

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But it’s not simply mashing them together.
The next section spoils everything in the Original and some of HF so everything is in spoilers.

In Episode 1, we see the Ending CGs from all other heroine routes. Implying all five routes already happened and we’re currently on Moon, then Moon!Kagari kindly boots(or should I say, slashed) Kotarou to this new route.

There are several key differences in this route aside from all the possible plot points from various heroine routes being merged into common route.

  • Kotarou did not choose a side. And that didn’t mean answering “Don’t know” on the survey but literally not choosing any sides, neither Guardian, Gaia or Kotori. One can argue (actually, most of the common ideas in the Chinese sites are) that he choose Kagari side a la Terra but ultimately lacks the resolve and knowledge to do things right.This is hinted in this episode in Esaka’s remarks and Kotarou’s inability to kill Kagari during salvation. Compared to the end of Terra where Kotarou ultimately did kill Kagari because of Both!Kagari and Moon!Kotarou willed that to happen, symbolized by the only choice that you can click on among all others.
    …And no, “I just want everyone to get along together” is not resolved enough on such scale. Hence both Sakuya and Esaka’s remarks. He also lacks knowledge, or is kept in the dark, about a lot of things.

  • Kagari revealed herself due to various reasons and situations. Due to what I coined, “Anime Viewer Convenience” (which I’ll go into detail later), she is more active in this route than in other routes, even appearing in plain daylight. This allows her to capture more knowledge and personality from OKA-KEN, the tiny meteorite may also contributed but IMO close inspection of Kotarou and friends shaped HF!Kagari and caused the “HF Invasion” as I often called. This personality and attitude shocked both Guardian and Gaia members (namely Lucia and Akane, though Akane’s didn’t last) and created a pseudo-Moon scenario where OKA-KEN members from both Gaia and Guardian works together in favor of Kagari, too bad that didn’t last due to reasons.

Which naturally brings us to the next question: Why did this route still fail with a full salvation? Kotarou’s resolve problem aside, one of the core factors is that Akane got overwritten by the Gaia Saint’s will and restarted the Song of Destruction. The reason of that happening is because Akane got transferred the Saint’s memories from Kashima. This did not happen in Terra as well since that link is broken by Kotarou.

tl;dr of the above:

  • We just witnessed a failed Terra. or an incomplete Moon route in Anime, while the remains of OKA-KEN is regathered through many hardships, Kotarou’s own doubts and his lack of knowledge and the Gaia Saint’s will ultimately started and completed salvation and bring the timeline to an end as a failure.

  • Yes, Lucia, Sizuru and Chihaya defected from their respective factions but it won’t matter anyways.

What did happen in Terra that fixes the problem, is that Kotarou is resolved to work for Both!Kagari’s will, he need extra time (by not doing foolish things in front of Kagari and get ribbon’d) and some outside help (those campfire motifs) from Moon!Kagari to be strong and knowledgeable enough to get to that goal. The heroine’s life also need to be changed, namely Akane’s memory transfer cannot come to be, the life of heroines are getting derailed in Terra anyways due to the time factor.

Now. let’s talk about the "Anime Viewer Convenience“ I mentioned earlier, as you guys can see, I need this big wall of blurry text, together with my own fact checks against other people that read the entire original story (thanks, @HeliosAlpha on Discord and Exocet in my Chinese group) to piece together what really happened in this route. You simply can’t expect an Anime viewer who never read the original work to understand the story from the spoiler perspective.
What does the average anime viewer carve those days? Conflicts and Fanservice!
That’s why Kagari gets screentime so early and the HF Invasion and the boob and feecof jokes keep coming. You simply can’t adapt the 5 heroine routes due to budget, you also cannot adapt Moon and Terra directly. The only way left is to introduce us to the characters, the settings, and the consequences of what did wrong and right. Then use Season 2 to show exactly what went wrong and how to do things right.

Due to the above reasoning, I gave this episode and the whole adaption a 4. I get what this adaption is trying to do, but it’s from my preseptive as someone who 100% both the Original and HF. My friends who only watched the Anime has their share of questions but I don’t see anything that cannot be explained in Moon and Terra. Yes, the pacing has issues, the fanservice are a bit too much but this is necessary evil.

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You, sir, have made a most enlightening post on the whole Rewrite series, and for that, I thank you! This is why I like the Rewrite anime, despite its issues. Too bad about it pandering to the average anime viewer with fanservice and other mandatory things to keep them watching! I really hope the second season will make things clearer.

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holy crap I didn’t realize this

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Something I just realised… Spoilers from character routes are blurred.
Lucia kills Nishikujou, who considered herself as a mother-figure for Lucia.
Shizuru kills Esaka, who raised her and always thought of her as of granddaughter.
Akane kills Kashima (and, probably Tsukuno as well, thought in case of Tsukuno that looked like a suicide), the one with whom she was close on a level of Saint’s successor. They’ve shared a deep connection, it is stated in Akane’s route, that the love she felt for Kashima was, actually, a love for oneself. She saw herself in Kashima.
Chihaya tries to do something on her own. This one is a bit different… In case of Chihaya, she was binded by her own indecisivness, or I should say her trauma instead. She was always going on the way that others decided for her. She never really considered leaving Gaya (but in Shizuru and her own route), she never really accepted Gaya’s teachings either. In this ep we see, how she at least tries to do something on her own…
Then Kotori. Kotori doesn’t really fight, nor kill anyone. In anime this was represented badly, but she is forced to break from her own shell. She is captured by her fear of Kotarou being a familiar. She fears that all of Kotarou actions are actually something, that Kotori herself desired and ordered him to do. She basically lost everything as everyone else.
They all have craved for this “everyday life” that anime Kotarou so longed for. And they all have lost everything that was precious to them in process. Shizuru lost Esaka (and Touka), Lucia lost Nishikujou. Akane basically killed herself and went crazy. Sakuya died for Chihaya. Kotori lost her parents and Pero again. Neither of girls has even managed to get Kotarou’s attention in the end.
And here we go to Kotarou. What exactly did he lost? He blindly tried to protect what? Yes, it was touching, that he couldn’t kill Kagari in the end. But, at the same time, that just showed that he was unable to sacrifice something for his friends. Useless training with Sakuya (who didn’t even try to make Kotarou stronger), half-assed battle with Midou…

Well, if anything, this anime originial route was a complete opposite to Chihaya’s VN route.

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Overall, I really liked this season and it was loads better than expected, but unfortunately those last two episodes really showed how little time they had.

It was pretty interesting to note that the first episodes really took their time fleshing everything out, but the last two just had to cram a lot of stuff together. While it was not bad (the original content was top-notch and I thought the way they were adapting all 5 routes together in the middle was actually pretty ingenious), my fears were unfortunately realized: they just had 13 episodes to try to cram everything in, and that could never work. We lost way too much route-specific content and the revelations at the end weren’t nearly as impactful as they were in the original VN, especially regarding the Kotori route: Chibimoth being Pero was completely tacked on, hell, the average viewer has no way to know who Pero even was, unless this is somehow brought up again in the second season; They had to totally gloss over the fact that Kotori rejected Kotarou’s confession back in middle-school because she was afraid he was just acting the way she wanted him to as her familiar, even though the first episode had a foreshadowing of it.
It’s somewhat forgivable for those of us who have read the original as this anime played with our expectations quite a lot, but anyone that’s in it for the first time was more than likely either confused or kinda pissed at how rushed this last episode was.

Such a wasted opportunity. The anime had the chance to retcon all the inconsistencies found in the original VN, but instead it just kinda glossed over the lore and left it at it. In all fairness though, they surely did the absolute best they could with the cards they were dealt, to the point where I was honestly hopeful and looking forward to what they would do once the original content rolled in. I was really satisfied by the middle (and, to an extent, even the episode before the last) where they mixed in all the content so cleverly that it was honestly impressing: the character interactions, the choices they made regarding situations and the way things played out actually made perfect sense and quite a bit of the route-specific content managed to be inserted without it feeling rushed or tacked in.

This project sure had talented writers, but unfortunately they couldn’t do it justice with so few episodes. I understand the new “production company system” the anime industry is utilizing to reduce risk and all, but I sure miss the old days where 24 episodes were the norm and not the exception. Heck, quite often we were even treated to series that spanned 50 episodes or so WITHOUT any breaks between seasons, it was a straight up 50 episode series that aired once a week until it ended. The last time this ever happend was with FMA Brotherhood as I recall.

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So I finished the Rewrite anime about a week ago. After taking quite a bit of time to really think about what I had watched, I think I can now hold a fairly reasonable discussion about it without vigorously shitposting about how strongly I disliked it. To that end, I’ll start with the things the anime did that I actually liked, which is admittedly not much.

For starters, I liked the idea of making Kagari a bit more interesting in terms of personality. She was frankly a little uninteresting in the VN and pretty much a walking macguffin, so being given more reason to be a little invested in her certainly isn’t a bad thing. In all reality, this is probably necessary for a Kagari-centric character route.

This also ties into something else I liked about the anime, in that Kagari having a more human personality also allows her to sort of “cover the hole” of the missing okaken for Kotarou. It presents a pretty interesting alternative to the Gaia/Kotori/Guardian perspective where Kotarou instead aligns with the Key directly.

Finally, the process of salvation was pretty interesting and seeing Kazamatsuri being destroyed in animation form was actually pretty impressive.

I think it’s worth mentioning that I was totally on board with the idea of an anime original route centering on Kagari - it was an interesting way to present the thematic content of the original VN without dealing with the hassle that trying to adapt the events of the original visual novel to a different format. It even presented an opportunity to flesh out a character to heights the VN never even came close to, and really deliver on an interesting alternative to the original routes. Most of my problems stem from the fact that this didn’t really happen, or at least not in the way I imagined it. I thought the anime was going to be FAR more original than it was, and the fact that it wasn’t caused it to suffer greatly.

The entire anime just felt like they were going through a checklist of things to include from the VN, as though they had to be there. This came at the cost of the original material in a variety of ways, starting with the fact that the original VN material was simply too much to be stuffed into a single cour. Kagari ended up just being a comedic caricature in personality, with the events of the original VN and the other heroines backstories seemingly taking precedent over making Kagari legitimately likable. Given that Kagari was supposed to be the focal point of the route (and that the character routes in the VN, well, focused on their respective characters), this makes no sense in any capacity.

This also resulted in the material of the original VN being adapted with insanely shoddy pacing, which I think has been mentioned at least hundreds of times by now. The material from the VN was watered down and weak, and took up so much time that the anime original material also became watered down and weak. Much of what they included from the VN (especially in the second half) didn’t even end up making sense, like Treekuya’s appearance or Midou controlling the Earth Dragon.

Overall they should’ve just really stuck with their guns in regards to making an anime original route, but they wanted to have their cake and eat it too. Even the general sequence of events was just a hodgepodge of the other heroine routes with some original material here and there, so it doesn’t even really function as a Kagari-centric character route, it’s more like a “okaken sans Akane” route, where they all just happen to focus on protecting Kagari.

I’m not sure if I even want to get started on the emotional delivery of certain scenes, because it makes me cringe just thinking about it. Kotori’s VN material was especially hilarious, with the drop that her parents are familiars and them getting zapped off occurring within roughly 2 minutes of each other, and then just before she fades away they suddenly bring Pero up.

The comedic timing was just generally awful. I got a few snickers here and there and that was about it, and the rest of the time the shitty jokes were just actively making it difficult to continue watching. All of this culminates in that godforsaken groping scene in the last episode, which singlehandedly restarted my cycle of grief in regards to this anime after I had finally managed to reach the acceptance stage and just learn to deal with what it was. I cannot even believe they would implement such a shitty and stupid joke into a scene as serious as salvation, and the occurrence of such a scene almost made me want to believe Rewrite was just a deliberate ploy on par with Mayoiga. That’s honestly what it felt like to me.

The action scenes were awful. They didn’t look good, the CGI didn’t look good, the camerawork is awful, and basically none of them except for Kagari’s first fight in the beginning make sense when imagined from a still camera angle. There’s not much to say here, they were just…bad.

So overall the original VN content was a mess, the anime original content was a mess, the action scenes sucked, it wasn’t funny, and it looked like shit. I liked the idea behind the original route, but the execution was absolutely horrid and the themes poorly carried as a result. Easily one of the worst watches for me this year.

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This sums up my feelings on the rewrite anime pretty well, thanks

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