What a great Episode! I love how they-
I’ll see myself out.
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Oh please do elaborate. Let’s see a bit more positivity in this topic!
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@Aspirety can we have a Rewrite Anime Bookclub just so we can hear @Kanon do the 30 second recap please? 
But otherwise… Episode was pretty unimpressive if I say so myself. Lightning fast pace, some of the most dramatic and memorable tracks from the OST that could have been used to good effect were just slapped in for Shizuru’s backstory, all of which felt horribly shoe-horned in for the sake of rinsing out emotions from the viewer… But… These things need build up. Something we didn’t get.
I don’t really know what else to say, other than it was nice to see Imamiya animated 
30 seconds cannot even begin to describe the issues with each and every Rewrite episode.
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I didn’t go into detail before since the overall reception seemed thoroughly positive at that point, but now I feel like I might as well explain further as to why I liked this episode.
More than anything I’m very content with how they handled Shizuru’s backstory in this new context. Shizuru is not the focal point of this anime. Her backstory is not overall important to the plot. But what it does do is it helps establish the setting. Rewrite’s setting has superpowers, organizations and a lot more that hasn’t been shown yet. And while that much could’ve been gathered without Shizuru’s backstory, what it does accomplish is it shows us how these setpieces affect our main characters directly. It’s one thing to just say there are superpowers in this setting, it’s another to actually show us how there being superpowers has an effect on the main cast as well as other inhabitants of Kazamatsuri - in other words it shows that there was actual thought put into the setting, and it makes it feel very much “alive”.
I’m glad that they used Shizuru’s backstory for this purpose. She’s a main heroine at this point and the audience cares about her to a degree. But not to the degree that this type of backstory is already a tearjerker. So it’s just about perfect for exposition. It’s not a particularly emotional moment, and some may have hoped differently. But I feel the way it went was pretty much perfect, it shows us that this sort of shit is commonplace here. THIS IS NOTHING SPECIAL, that’s exactly the point. And having the characters brought closer to us even when they’re not the focal point of the new plot developments is something I very much appreciate. I imagine they’ll be handling Lucia, maybe even Kotori, in a similar fashion.
Personally I didn’t feel like the directing was off for the majority of the episode. Probably the weirdest part was Kotarou sprinting to the clubroom after his encounter with Kagari (which was fucking glorious by the way) and Shizuru somehow catching up to him while walking. The talking felt perfectly natural to me, and Shizuru telling her backstory was actually pretty damn good.
Koibumi was mainly there because this is their only plausible opportunity to play it. Which is fine, I’d rather have it here than not at all. It’s the last time the anime will be focusing on Shizuru to this degree, if my speculations are correct.
Oh… and then we get to the post-credits Lucia scene. Horrendous directing everywhere, nonsensical conversational flow and reactions, and such a stupidly strange contrast to the Shizuru focus from before. And a literal non-ending (it just fades to black in the middle of a scene!). Yeah I got absolutely nothing, that part was terrible.
Still, apart from that ending, it was everything I wanted it to be. The first episode I’m giving a 5/5.
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I first heard your thoughts on this on discord and, to be honest, that’s something that I really did not consider myself. It pretty much blows all of my qualms out of the water, thus allowing me to see it’s purpose from a new light. I thank you for that.
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Damn, @Karifean coming through with that defense.
Complaining about us not having gotten enough Shizuru up to this point is odd not only because of this, but because we’ve seen her quite a bit up to this point. She’s been present for a lot of scenes and we got to see some of her always fantastic interaction with Kotarou. Considering she’ll be a supporting character at most this is fine. [quote=“Karifean, post:65, topic:2998”]
it’s another to actually show us how there being superpowers has an effect on the main cast
[/quote]
Even having read the VN I’m getting excited seeing Kotarou interacting with supernatural things all the while trying to hide his own superpower. The anime is doing a phenomenal job at showing how normal Kotarou is despite his power and I’m looking forward to the drama this will inevitably cause later. It’s portraying the “normal slice of life” side of the story while simultaneously juggling it with the supernatural elements.
Rewatching the episode the talking is a bit fast at around 15:00, but I didn’t notice this the first time because I mostly focus on subs. The rest of the episode was fine though, all other talking was at about the pace of a normal conversation.
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This. I’d also like to add that, depending on the purpose of an emotion-heavy scene, being able to emotionally invest to a character may not exactly be that important.
Take for instance the Nina Tucker subplot from Fullmetal Alchemist. Something bad happened to her in just the next episode after she appeared (both even happened in the same episode in Brotherhood). No one would have been emotionally attached towards this character, but a lot of people were really sad about it.
This example is quite similar to Shizuru’s backstory in that, both their purposes are expository in nature, as they’re trying to establish something. For FMA, it was a moment that changed Edward’s overall attitude on alchemy. In the VN version of this scene, it established the source of Shizuru’s attitude to herself. In the anime, perhaps what Karifean just said.
Incidentally, they’re both potentially sad, but it’s definitely not because a character we like suffered. Another review of this episode explained this better though (in paragraph 3). And even by then, there’s already enough Shizuru moments in the anime that a sad backstory is fairly excusable.
On another hand, what was brought up somewhere to be potentially problematic in this episode is that, Shizuru didn’t really have a compelling enough reason to open up to Kotarou (that or she didn’t have a clear enough reason), so it came off as rather contrived. To be honest, this is actually something that I’m willing to dismiss since I don’t feel like that this is an important point, but I’d like to bring up anyway. >:3
On my hand, that can still be excused by the fact that (1) Kotarou and Shizuru already know each other for, I guess, two seasons already, and that (2) it’s implied that Shizuru perceived Kotarou’s “embarrassing” story to be a really big secret that may have been hard for him to divulge, so she wanted to divulge a hard secret in exchange.
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How are you not attached to that character after 10 seconds? If you’re not attached to Shizuru at this point, would more common route stuff really help? It’s just more of the same. “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” and all that.
When you like someone, you tell them details about yourself, and you trade information until you know a lot about each other. That’s just how you interact with people. Shizuru is a really simple, honest person, so why overthink things?
Now that I don’t agree with. It’s very basic, but there is a logical flow between practically every scene unlike every other episode where things just kinda happened.
- We start on a somber flashback that rounds off with Kotarou coming to eat like we’ve seen before.
- Because of his immediate goal, Kotarou takes the okaken to search for Esaka.
- But they’re not in the park, so Akane tells Kotarou to search on his own.
- Kotarou searches downtown because he was told about the store.
- Shizuru is in the store because we know nothing else she could be doing outside of school.
- She picks up a CD for basically no reason, but that triggers the next part of the plot.
- Kotarou lends her the Ipod along a story about his past.
- Shizuru wants to share her past; therefore, cue garbage exposition.
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I disagree with that. One needs more time to get used to a character (even everyone’s favourite Shizuru) and get attached to it than 10 seconds (I mean, the very few minutes where the anime viewers got to see Shizuru…). At around episode 4, there’s only one character that an only anime viewer could maybe get attached to and that is Tennouji Kotarou since he’s pretty much the protagonist and he’s a great one too. Some anime only viewers would barely remember the other characters’ names (much less get attached to any of them). They would maybe remember them by something like “That cute blond Loli” for Shizuru or “That Tsundere Classrep” for Lucia but nothing more than that unless they have an amazing otaku memory…
And can you imagine the WTF reaction of someone when watching Rewrite that has barely begun suddenly telling the tragic backstory of a character they had barely noticed? Me, I’ve pretty much seen it on some of my friends’ faces… I think I’ve also had it myself even tho I’m a VN reader and I like Shizuru a lot and I’m as attached to her as the other characters.
But giving more common wouldn’t help. The mistake isn’t really in how much time they had given Shizuru to show up before getting to tell her story. It’s the “telling of her backstory” itself that is the mistake. If they had so much time to waste on making such a fanservice and telling her backstory, they could’ve at least made the pacing of the anime less rushed and more confortable.
Anyway, “anime” making the watcher getting attached to a character is a hard and a pretty impossible task in itself unless the anime is really long but telling a character’s story so suddenly is still a ‘no no’…
The anime feels more like it’s made to be watched especially for the VN fans rather than to get more people who haven’t read the VN to enjoy Rewrite and I find that pretty sad… Right now, those who’re still watching it and haven’t dropped it yet are either Rewrite the VN’s fans, Key animes’ fans and the minority of those who’re partient enough to keep up with this mess of an anime.
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I half agree on this. But that’s because the anime already have adequate moments for Shizuru at this point, each of then having a little bit of insight on her character. And they’re not so few. And also because the familiarity to the character is only really important if the story mainly wanted you to feel sad for the character.
While the backstory was admittedly a bit earlier than I expected, I personally think that it’s at least excusable for the anime to show it, regardless of the amount of Shizuru moments, mainly because it was an exposition to begin with. In the visual novel, this scene was used a set-up for Shizuru’s route. The anime, if it’s not really going to adapt the route, is likely a set-up for something else, which is hard to judge because the anime is still ongoing. But the discussion on it earlier being a part of worldbuilding is an interesting point.
The scene itself can be potentially emotional because the story is inherently sad and they even coupled it with emotional music, but being sad isn’t the sole purpose of this scene.
((Interestingly enough, I’ve seen some viewers (unfamiliar to the source material) who actually became more intrigued to the story because of this interesting piece of exposition this episode. I guess it just all boils down on how people took that scene.))
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For what it’s worth, I’ve been watching Rewrite with my housemate and he seems very intrigued. He’s usually quite disinterested in anime, but I’ve convinced him to sit down to this one, and he’s had no complaints to voice. He’s genuinely looking forward to each episode.
It must be doing something right
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I was going over Rewrite with a friend, who has seen me play Rewrite occasionally but never played it himself, and I pulled up the 2nd opening and found these guys!
Surprised to see that they made it from here to the anime looking nearly exactly the same
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Not really: Tensho did the character designs for the OP.
That still doesn’t invalidate his comment…? It is surprising that they reused all the designs here!
Why spend time redesigning minor characters? They probably needed quite a bit of updating without starting from scratch.
Well I went to watch this again with actual subtitles and heeeey my opinions have totally changed when I know what they’re actually talking about >_>
But yeah, in all fairness, what they did introduce through shizuru’s backstory makes a lot of sense. It showed how Kotarou isn’t the only one with superpowers and heavily implied that all those monsters that he’s been encountering might actually be real! It does quite expand the world a bit and I am thankful for that. Yes I was being a dumdum and was only thinking about how it showed Shizuru’s tragic past and nothing else. I apologize
I still don’t quite appreciate the use of Koibumi, but as @BlackHayate02 pointed out, the lyrics are quite appropriate for the scene. I guess there will just be a disconnect between anime-only viewers who just see it as a “nice insert song” whereas VN readers will forever see it as the song that rips your hear right out of your chest and smashes it to pieces.
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