Rewrite - Moon Arc Discussion

Discussion topic for the Moon arc in Rewrite. Feel free to discuss anything from the route, but mark any comparisons to events after the arc (Terra) with the [spoiler] tag. Common/Heroine routes are fine.

What would you rate this route?

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The beginning dragged on a bit for me, but getting into the middle and end was the fun part. Goddamn, Shizuru is fucking best girl. Also, Sakuya is forever a bro

The mind fuck was real on this one…

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Oh hey, I was just talking about how much I love Moon and you went and made a topic for it.

I’m a sucker for mindfuck stories. Moon really delivered in that area. It’s abstract, every line of text pushes you to think hard to understand what’s going on. And I love it XP

Also, I know it’s a weird thing to talk about, but I really love the dynamic between Kotarou and MoonKagari. Their relationship is very… otherworldly. She doesn’t speak any English Japanese, but they somehow manage to form a deep connection, arguably deeper than any Kotarou had experienced in his life. She understood everything about him, and chose to accept him unconditionally, but only after he dispensed with all his masks and let his true feelings be shown. It’s strange, but the bond they share is beautiful. And it makes the parting all the sadder. The forgotten twin sister who sacrificed her only companion, dooming herself to a life of isolation to save everyone. It’s a bit of a parallel to later events in Terra. Moon Kagari is best girl ;;

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After going through the Chihaya and Akane routes just before, I was pretty tired when reading Moon, so the slow start was a bit painful xAx I probably missed a lot of the fancy meaningful stuff because I wasn’t very attentive at the time, and the fight at the end just seemed like a cheap excuse to get a group battle scene into the VN, but this is the route where Yoshino finally won me over. He’s a pretty cool guy.

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Oh definitely. The second half is all gratuitous fanservice, but it does serve the point that all of Kotarou’s lives did contribute to something - protecting the future they found in Terra. It’s kinda shitty writing, but we all know Rewrite is full of problems. It’s still enjoyable :stuck_out_tongue:

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The moon route ties all routes together. It’s the conclusion of the five previous routes and the preparation for Terra. It answers many questions while also introducing new ones. Not all of those questions are answered directly. The player is given the information he needs to arrive at the answers.
And I like that. I like having the opportunity to find the answers rather than just gulp them down as they’re served up on a plate. And while there are some some things that I’d prefer to be explained by the authors, giving the reader things to think about is the strong point of Rewrite.

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Hmm I feel pretty neutral about Moon’s route. Not gonna put my thoughts but I kind of want to summarize my memories on this.

So, basically, Moon Kagari wanted to find a chance for humanity’s survival. She traced all the possibilities involving Kotarou, so she played all, but not limited to, the routes that we played. Eventually she did find a way to save humanity while Kotarou was defending her with TESTOSTERONE-FILLED ACTION. Then Moon somehow instigates the next version of Kotarou (Terra route Kotarou) causing him to complete Terra route and essentially save humanity.

Did I get that right? If there are any corrections, please tell me

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That seems to be the gist of it. Basically, Moon Kagari understood that she had to shift her focus to before Kotarou and Earth!Kagari met in the forest, and change events from that point. It was Terra!Kotarou’s devotion to Earth Kagari that changed the course of events and lead to happy memories. That was the message that Moon Kotarou left behind: that he wanted to be with Kagari. It was imprinted in Terra!Kotarou before his birth, and caused him to take the path he did, devoting himself to Kagari and saving the earth.

That’s my take on it, anyway. I need to re-read it.

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This route was pretty short, but it hit all the right notes.

I suppose this could be considered the Kagari route, because there’s a huge focus on Kagari in this route. However, a good deal of this route is full of fanservice (and it’s not the lewd kind). The Occult Club, Sakuya, and Yoshino and his gang all come back, and it’s so refreshing to see them again. Seeing them die almost as quickly as they arrive is especially painful.

That aside, the whole point in this route was to show what Kagari was actually trying to do during the events of the common route, which was find a means of allowing the Earth to live on without compromise. We also learn that Koutarou has many different versions of himself from many different scenarios, which explains the multiple routes. Kashima Sakura is alive for some reason, and seems to be the only source of conflict in this route other than trying to find a way for the Earth to live on (which would have been boring by itself, admittedly). What I don’t get, though, is that for some inexplicable reason, the solution to the future of the human race and the eternal salvation of the planet lies in one simple thing: Tennouji Koutarou’s name. Why is that so? Is there something I missed? Does Terra explain it? I hope it does…

I’ve heard many people claim how amazing the animated opening is for Moon, and I have to admit, I agree with them. If Rewrite ever gets an anime adaptation, hopefully White Fox will be free enough to do it, because I can’t see any other animation studio doing it.

Moon feels like a setup for something bigger, something I can’t even begin to comprehend yet. Hopefully Terra delivers on that, because I want to see a happy ending for Kagari. So without further ado…

Let’s begin the harsh culling.

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The way I understood it, and this sounds really corny, is that, during the Moon route, Tennouji Kotarou fell in love with Kagari. Because he is in love with her, he would be the only being willing tl create “good memories” for her.

While I’m on this topic, could anyone remind me how Kotarou got on the moon? XD

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I don’t think they ever gave a reason, but it’s kind of an impossibility to explain due to the nature of moon. A lot of that route is literally just “it’s beyond human, so we can’t actually say anything about it.”
Moon Kagari is constantly running simulations of Earth, in hopes of finding one with a future. Unlike the Earth Kagari, whose actions are left marked in history, Moon Kagari never really leaves a mark on the Earth.
My theory would be that, at some point in time, probably around young Kotarou’s life, Earth… stopped. Moon Kagari took over, and every route in Rewrite (plus the other mentioned non-route lives) didn’t actually happen; they were just failed equations of Moon Kagari.
Earth Kagari’s moments continue through time. Moon Kagari’s moments reset time after hitting a fail-state.
The combined collective of every imagined Kotarou appeared to help Moon Kagari, however all of those Kotarous only existed within Moon Kagari’s equations.
Essentially, Moon Kagari got stuck, and subconsciously created something that she didn’t understand, in order to see a new perspective beyond what she knows. A tool to re-explore everything she knew from a different mindset.

Moon Kagari may have known Kotarou from her trials. She may have known how he behaved, and what he ended up doing… but she only set it up and watched it all happen. She could only manipulate variables.
She didn’t understand the people she was imagining. Her imaginations could.

Pretty crazy idea, but I think it’s funny and it makes sense~

Now we take into consideration that some old woman was able to see beyond the imaginations and transport things that wouldn’t be alive.

That’s Moon Kagari too. An alarm clock of sorts.
The creatures summoned slowly lost their form as Kagari lost hers.
Sakura didn’t have a form, she was a name attached to a checkpoint in understanding. Something to mark a significant area for when she, under the guise of Kotarou, explores the understanding of existence.

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My guess was that he was drawn to Kagari through their bond. Kotarou was closed to the Kagari on Earth than anyone else, through the aurora coursing through him and his various interactions with her. That’s how he found his way to her in the end.

Also, while they’re called simulations, I don’t believe any of them are fake. It’s already been explained that a property of the aurora is that, when it faces extinction, it spreads into infinite alternate universes to try and find a way to prosper (ie. good memories). The Kagari on the moon is like a system which searches through those universes to find a possibility of survival. She’s not the one creating fake worlds, she’s merely observing the possibilities.

This but most importantly Terra spoilers Kotarou having a part of Kagari’s ribbon inside him is what causes him to end up there. It’s clear that bonds play an important role when Kotarou summons the other members there too. I believe, similar to Aspirety, that all the simulations were real and happened, and that Moon is some kind of higher dimensional plane that can create and observe the infinite possibilities. Thus with each simulation, Kotarou’s accumulated bonds with Kagari grew, and after millions/billions/etc. of repetition, it reached the level where the bonds with her were able to sort of birth his existence into Moon. His “deaths” on Moon simply adds to this accumulation of bonds and his existence is rebirthed in a positive feedback loop.

I guess I can link my take on Moon route here. It doesn’t cover all my thoughts though, due to my target audience.

Haven’t heard about moving to other universes. The memory explains how the multiple worlds form because the Aurora on the Moon is too dense due to lower surface area than the Earth. Kagari does have some control, like Kotarou & co, she can spend Aurora points to build her civilization to an extent. [Like Shizuru’s Hercules crabs][1].

I see the heroine routes as Kotarou’s memories. The biggest contradiction in that theory is when the perspective switches to someone other than Kotarou, but that doesn’t happen in Akane or Kotoris’ routes. I just think it fits too wel with this line to disregard.

[1]: http://puu.sh/haStn.ogg

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I should’ve checked out the ‘new’ posts here sooner.

Ok, folks, let Dr. Naoki explain the moon route and Aurora to you * gets on his high horse *

If the Aurora is too dense due to a low amount of surface area of a celestial body, it has the property to create parallel worlds. That’s what the previous routes are - parallel worlds. Unfortunately, all of them ended the same way: Regardless of whether salvation happened or not, the earth’s Aurora kept running out until it wasn’t capable of sustaining life anymore, so it traveled to the moon instead. It might help to think of Aurora as a plant that needs soil to grow. When there’s new soil, Aurora can thrive and multiply. When the soil gets used over and over, it becomes bad so eventually, no new Aurora can thrive from it. However, if you leave that soil unused for a while, it can recover and Aurora can be planted there again. The Aurora “waited” on the moon for the earth’s “soil” to renew just enough for one more attempt (no parallel universes this time).
Check out the Memory section articles about Kagari(Earth) and Kagari(Moon)

While the Aurora recovered a little bit on the moon, Moon Kagari was looking for a way for the Aurora to thrive on earth. She figured that Kotarou would be the key element to enabling such a scenario for many reasons and she also needed someone to keep watch while she was working on her theory, so she re-created him from the Aurora.

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Umu umu. That is correct. Well, the last part about creating Kotarou is speculation, but it does make sense.

This is the part that continues to throw me off. It’s as if time doesn’t work in a conventional sense here.

The reader is kind of told to not think too hard about ‘time’ right at the beginning of the route.
Personally, I assume that a span of time ranging from centuries to millions of years has passed during moon route. If I remember correctly, there was a part when Kotarou just sat down to think really hard about something, and by the time he stood back up, plants and moss were growing on him, or something like that.

I wonder, though, where did the Aurora begin when it returned to earth? Did it create life from scratch once again, following the exact same route? Or did it perfectly re-create everything on earth the way it was at a certain point in time, like Kotarou’s birth or when he was a certain age? If it’s the latter, scientists monitoring space would probably have noticed that something’s off…

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Yeah the whole ‘recreating the world’ thing is really weird. The way it’s described really seems to bring to mind the image of the Earth being reborn, but I don’t know if that’s meant to be in a literal sense or not. (Terra) The world we see in Terra is exactly the same as the world before, which makes things odd. It’s like the world is less concrete and more abstract here, something that can be destroyed and recreated so easily. Like, even assuming that the world retraced all of the steps it took to reach Kotarou’s birth, it’s hard to believe that the world could be exactly the same. We know the geography of the Earth has changed over billions of years, so are we to expect that even that can be completely reset through Aurora shenanigans?

It’s all very odd.

Here is my interpretation:

We know Aurora has the power to create parallel universes; is it a stretch to think Aurora also has the power to bend time too? In some theories, time is a lower dimension than parallel universes, so I don’t see why not. Thus, when Aurora is on the moon, it is manipulating the passage of time in ways far from conventional methods, basically making moon an isolated existence in time. I would liken it to DBZ’s hyperbolic time chamber but infinitely more extreme. This allows Kagari the time she needs to find the path to salvation. All her theories and parallel universes “started” at a designated point in time: when the Earth was ready for its last attempt. After the events of Moon, Aurora exits this “bubble” of time and travels back to the Earth, where time has not passed in the same way it has on the moon. Again, think an extreme version of the hyperbolic time chamber. Regardless of how long Kagari took, Earth’s time did not change.

Furthermore, I am also of the opinion that even this final attempt did not succeed with 100% certainty. It merely opened an option and bumped up the chance from 0%. I interpret the entirety of Rewrite as only “one” multiverse in infinite parallel multiverses, where infinite Terra routes actually do fail. Particularly the part in Terra where you can choose to attack Kagari and repeat the previous failures. Rather than simply a “if you didn’t realize already, this is pre-common route!” scene, I view it as a “welp after all that work, we still failed” note So, my answer to “is everything being replicated perfectly?” is nope, not at all. We only see the version where it succeeds.