mikesnppr

The premise of this show is simple and has been done many times before. You have your average otaku guy who gets suddenly transported into a generic fantasy world.

There is not much point in me talking about the world itself since, as I said, it's pretty generic fantasy we have seen many times before, and there isn't inherently anything wrong with this. It is possible to tell a compelling story without reinventing the whole fantasy wheel along the way.

This is going to be a long one, so strap in.

The supporting cast of characters is not great nor terrible; they are decent side characters, although none of them really stand out. The ones I liked most were the twins and Beatrice, it was nice to see that they weren't just typical bland "harem waifus" but had unique personalities.

My main problem is with the main character. He basically ruins the show, which is a problem since the protagonist is the one character that is in nearly every scene, so if he sucks, the show becomes hard to watch.

The protagonist, Subaru, is a flawed loser. He has been designed to not really be special; he isn't strong, fast, or smart, just an average guy tossed into a world where he is at the bottom of the hierarchy.

This by itself is not an issue. Instead of having a typical power fantasy where the hero becomes the strongest there is, we get to watch a somewhat more "realistic" depiction of what would happen if a typical "weeb" was tossed into a situation like this. An interesting story can be made out of this for certain.

But here comes the problem: the fact that the protagonist is the epitome of average also makes him very bland and uninteresting to watch. There is a reason why protagonists are usually special in some way; they are either very strong (Luffy, Goku) or very smart (Light Yagami, Lelouch) because it makes for a fun spectacle to watch them operate. But Subaru is an average guy doing average things, and it's not really fun to watch.

In these cases, this can be somewhat salvaged by the underdog effect, since he is so below everyone we would be rooting for him as the underdog, so when he does get a win, it feels rewarding. But this doesn't happen here because of the second problem with him.

Subaru is completely insufferable. While he is mostly a good guy at heart who wants to help people, he is also an overly emotional rage baby.

And yes, I have heard this before: "Well, you are missing the point; he is like that on purpose, he is deeply flawed and that is what makes him interesting." Well, not to me, not in the way the show presents it to us.

I actually really like flawed characters, since their flaws make them interesting, but Re:Zero just does it in an unfortunate way. I have seen both seasons, and this is what we get most of the time:

Subaru rages and screams at people when things don't go his way.

Subaru breaks down and cries.

Subaru gives someone a 10-minute pep talk/emotional dump dialogue.

Subaru receives a 10-minute pep talk from someone.

Rinse and repeat this over and over again.

Basically, most of the runtime in this show is filled by Subaru just screaming, raging, crying, talking about what a loser he is, etc. And I get it, he is a deeply flawed character, fine fine, but jeez, having to watch this over and over again in nearly every episode gets repetitive and boring very fast.

It felt as if I was the one stuck in a time loop, having to rewatch the same thing over and over again. Every time we got yet another 5 minute long ragefest/screamfest it made it harder to keep watching because of bored of it I was at that point. Was that the 10th time? 15th time I was seeing that by now? I have lost count by now. It was the same thing over and over again.

So to summarize, Subaru's problem isn't that he is weak and flawed; it's the fact that the way they are showing this and repeating this makes him boring and tiresome to watch. And a show simply cannot function with a bland and boring protagonist. Even if the protagonist was made unlikable on purpose, that doesn't change the fact that him being unlikable means you don't care about it, or what happens to him and thus aren't invested in the story.

So, can the rest of the show redeem itself in some other ways? Not really. As I said above, the fantasy world this takes place in is very generic and thus not very interesting. The plot line itself is split into several mostly self-contained arcs, which are various degrees of mediocre. Out of about six or so main ones we see in two seasons, I think I only enjoyed two of them; the rest were just... meh. In the second season, it's mostly one big arc split into two locations, but the interesting location gets a minimum of screen time, and the boring location gets most of it, sadly. And on top of that, because of the one special ability the protagonist does have, the stakes never feel very high.

I made myself sit through the whole 2 seasons, because of how popular and usually highly rated this show is, so I wanted to see if it gets better at any point, but it didn't.

Due to many other people giving it high marks it's clear they enjoyed watching the story being told in this way, which is fine, everyone's opinion is subjective, but even after giving it a fair chance I simply wasn't able to like it due to reasons I wrote above and that is the reason for the low rating I am giving this.

It's not great or terrible. Just super average. I just don't understand why it's being praised this much.

I enjoyed the final 2 or so episodes, but rest of them are just this sort of episodic content, where each episode is self contained with its on plot and honestly most of them aren't very interesting. I was actually straight up bored at times.

There is very little character development, everyone stays pretty much the same and as I said, most of episodic adventures they go on range from mid to boring, with very few exceptions. A lot of the episodes just felt like straight up filler, during some of them I wasn't even sure I will finish watching the show.

So in the end its a weak 5/10 for me.

This movie doesn't over-complicate or tries to reinvent the typical evil dead story line .

It just starts off in the typical evil dead style we know from the other movies and then keeps the pace going. It manages to maintain constant suspension through the movie, where you feel like something can happen at any moment and it often does.

There were no boring parts, just a nice dark, creepy atmosphere with lots of blood and gore.

The main lead lady was bland I have to say, where I didn't really care that much if she ended up chomped up or not, rest of the cast weren't all that charismatic either, but I did enjoy the performance from the mom and the youngest daughter.

I went in to see an evil dead movie and that is exactly what I got.