Forum - View topic

EP. REVIEW: Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- [2020-07-13]

2. Where’d the knife come from? He mentioned Petra’s handkerchief and then voila, there was a knife. I really can’t make the connection.

Also, it seems that I might end up being proven wrong about Echidna yet again.

1. Don’t know about you, but Satella looked JUST like Emilia to me. Even Subaru thought as much since he went into that fright fit when he woke up, saw Emilia, and immediately remembered Satella.

2. Where’d the knife come from? He mentioned Petra’s handkerchief and then voila, there was a knife. I really can’t make the connection.

Od has been brought up a few times before. Even early in season one. To be honest even reading the novels I didn't fully understand what it was supposed to be but I found this description on a Wiki that might help.

Od (オド): Od is life energy that dwells inside of a living being from birth, making it the opposite of mana, which is magical energy that exists in the environment. It varies from person to person in terms of quantity and size which represents the lifespan of an individual. It also serves the purpose of storing some portion of mana that flows through the gate, so having a large capacity is especially beneficial to those who can use magic. Od can be used in place of mana to cast magic, however unlike mana, using Od is like using your own lifespan, and so it isn't recommended.

—I’m assuming Subaru has chosen the “flee/hide” option for dealing with the mansion assassinations. He convinced Frederica and Petra to leave and hide (presumably taking Rem with them), and now all he has to do is convince Beatrice to leave the mansion. It might work to at least get him to a different save point without anyone dying, but that assassin still has a job to complete...

I can never trust the good intentions of a character whose ultimate goal is immortality.

Immortality through cloning. I guess you can't know literally everything if things are still happening when you die.
Although there's the cruelty of trying to overwrite the sould of Ryuzu Mayer. Or was the first one also manufactures? What's the deal with "Mayer" sounding so similar to Mathers? Why a half-elf specifically?

I had to double-check, but she still looks exactly like Emilia to me. Same ears, same eyes, same bangs, same voice, same every recognizable feature under that heavy filtering.

Huh. I always understood Od to be some sort of mana bladder. And Puck having it chockfull of mana in Memory Snow meant he had to wildly release mana.
I guess I got it partially mixed with the Gate.

Lots of questions after episode 35:
—Even when Satella causes the events leading to Subaru’s demise, Return by Death takes him back before those events. How much control does Satella have over the cursed power she gifted Subaru? Does this mean all witches have limits to the powers they bestow

Ryuzu Meyer was a real person that Echidna put in that crystal stasis thing. She then used her being as the basis for the empty husk clones she was researching, with the intended goal to create a good enough vessel to fit her soul, so it's not that Echidna was trying to replace Ryuzu's soul with her own, the copies she created already came soulless. The problem she ran into is that her soul was too grand for the intended vessel so it would overflow, the first time she tried she ended up creating something altogether different. By the time she died, Echidna was looking into soul compression but then, as they say time ran out. (this last part was skipped content from the adapted volume).

Just my interpretation but I assume she just didn't deem this result worthy of having it stick. She didn't set out to completely ruin the sanctuary and kill everyone permanently, but rather to make a show of force and prove to Subaru that nowhere, not even Echidna's castle of dreams, is safe to talk about RBD in.

now I'm even more intrigued about how the save points are set.

Echidna explained the save points as being points where Subaru isn't "trapped" by death, meaning they'll be as early as necessary for him to be able to figure out how to escape death and move on, and he will never be stuck in an impossible loop to overcome.

One thing I wonder about this loop is whether Subaru's save point updates to after the second tea party. If not, then Echidna et al would lose the knowledge of the second tea party (if he dies again), as currently the reset point is set directly after the first tea party.

Well, yes, that explains the intent of the save points but it doesn't fully explain how.
I mean, for those specific points to work that way, Satella (or whatever is acting as her agent) needs to know that Subaru will be in mortal danger soon and that it's still far away enough to work it out. Which means that Stella has some powers that are more impressive than "can lead the world to ruin". It means that either:
1-She has extreme clairvoyance about the future, being able to know its ramifications and from where it's possible to reach the optimal conclussion. It isn't too farfetched, considering the gospells basically tell the future.
2-compatible with 1, she actually exists out of time, living both in the present, past and future all at once (which might explain her present obsession with Subaru?) which is quite some god-level existence.
3-She can time travel and is pretty much bringing knowledge from the future back into the past. Although this feels like a more hands-on approach to setting the save points.

On a tangent about Satella's consciousness, her warnings/punishment don't feel so much like a conscious choice ("Subaru is blabbering out right now, must scare him") as a curse placed on top of a curse, so it triggers automatically wehenever the first curse is alluded to, making itself stronger the stronger the transgression is, funneling out more and more of Satella's smelly dark magic.
What were the rules about curses in this world again? It also is kind of a smart move: if the second curse prevents Subaru from letting anyone know about the first curse, then he can't have someone like Beatrice removing it.

Curses require being placed by physical contact and can only be safely removed before they're activated and/or by killing the caster. Curses are also the product of Shamans, which fwiw, Satella is not known to have been. I admit its an interesting theory tough, if we stretch the definition of what "physical contact" means alittle.

We already know that Echidna knows what Subaru knows.
In the previous episode, we learned that Echidna has witnessed everything that Subaru has been going through across several timelines, including his deaths and Emilia's many failed attemps.