Offbeat Steps Under the Moonlight

Today is the final episode of Re:Zero season 2. The earliest broadcast starts at 10:30 PM, so if you can watch it, enjoy! As usual, the author will be watching while commenting from 11:30 PM! Please stick with us to the very end!

All right! And with that, it's the final episode of Re:Zero season 2! The anime has reached 50 episodes! Season 2 was hectic all the way through, and especially in the second cour they kept it up with the incredible effort of running at 29 minutes 30 seconds the whole time! Our thanks to all the staff and cast! And with that said, please stay with us until the very end!

Last time, they magnificently succeeded in getting Beatrice out of the mansion, and everyone miraculously converged for the climax. Subaru and Beatrice's first battle begins!

Throughout the whole series, the Great Rabbit holds first place in Subaru's "worst ways to die" ranking. This is the final battle!

This is Minya, which was also used on Elsa, and it's one of the few offensive yin magic spells. You can think of it as magic that stops the target's time and makes them an incredibly fragile existence.

As for Beatrice's claim that "it's not as if there's no upper limit," I think the upper limit in the settings was around 80,000. Even if it splits infinitely, it won't increase beyond that. But up to that number, it can multiply again and again.

Beako being carried with intense focus.

Subaru often ends up running around carrying various characters, but the girls in Re:Zero are, according to the settings, all as light as feathers or as light as angels, so there's no problem.

Al Shamak is the highest-tier version of Shamak, which is basically Mr. MVP for Subaru, and since Shamak is a spell of "isolation," you can think of it as Beatrice blasting the Great Rabbit off into another dimension.

The endlessly multiplying Great Rabbit was sent to another dimension by Beatrice's magic, and with no prey there, it will continue an endless cycle of cannibalizing itself. That's how the Great Rabbit is settled.

By the way, before fighting the Great Rabbit, Beatrice asks Subaru, "Are you afraid, I wonder?" But back in the White Whale battle, Rem also asked Subaru, "Are you afraid?" It might be interesting to compare how Subaru's answers differ.

Entering the tomb and meeting once more the one who rests there sleeping was also Roswaal and Beatrice's cherished wish. That said, Beatrice did not know all the details of Roswaal's circumstances, so she didn't realize the true meaning of that encounter in the tomb until they spoke directly here.

In Roswaal's Mathers family, the head of the house inherits the name Roswaal generation after generation, but what they are inheriting is also the soul of the first Roswaal... Roswaal A. So Roswaal L is the same Roswaal who spent time with Beatrice in the Sanctuary 400 years ago.

Of course, Beatrice didn't know that, so she was basically thinking, "This guy named Roswaal is so obsessed with my mother, whom I never even met, that it's honestly a little off-putting..."

According to the setting, the Echidna Subaru frequently encountered in the tomb was around 18 years old. The Echidna sleeping inside the grave should be imagined as an adult about 10 years older than that. They look alike, but maybe feel like different people... that's the impression I'd ask you to have.

I like Subaru and Emilia's conversation here.

Also, this couldn't be explained in the anime because of time constraints, but Subaru and Beatrice's duo was strong enough to defeat the Great Rabbit because Beatrice lavishly spent the mana she had stored up over 400 years in the forbidden library.

And since they used it all up, from then on Subaru and Beatrice are basically just a high school boy and a near-loli as a duo. They are properly weak.

Because of Puck's many offenses of putting basic education on the back burner, Subaru ended up having a rough time, but from then on Emilia's education is mostly entrusted to Ram and Frederica.

Garfiel, Petra, and Otto's settling-the-score attack landed, but basically, I think everyone there got a hit in at least once. Ryuzu-san and Emilia-tan too, probably.

Frederica may seem almost too broad-minded, but she herself feels a very strong debt of gratitude toward Roswaal. Part of that is that he kept watching over her younger brother and grandmother, but there are various other reasons too. Someday. Someday.

Roswaal's wrongdoing in Arc 4 was pretty severe, but in reality, thanks to Subaru and Emilia holding their ground, the current state is that "nothing happened." The fact that everyone is swallowing it speaks to how big-hearted they all are.

Petra, who properly got angry but then took it into herself, played a very important role. After that, Petra is consistently harsh toward Roswaal, but Roswaal considers that attitude of hers a good thing, and there's a part of him that feels saved by being blamed.

Even as the author, I wasn't sure what the right answer was for Roswaal's "I'm sorry," so I remember leaving it to Koyasu-san. By that point, I figured the Roswaal that Koyasu-san performed would be the right answer. That's that "I'm sorry."

Annerose Miload is still only 9 years old, but she is the head of the Miload family, a branch family of House Mathers. She was born into a very difficult environment, but she's so dependable that you wouldn't think she was only 9. Also, she's an extreme Emilia freak, and her affection for Emilia is probably second only to Subaru and Puck.

Roswaal's declaration that he won't give up. Four hundred years isn't short enough for him to give up just because a book burned. But he will change his methods. That is Roswaal's way of meeting others halfway. It's a change in Roswaal, who believed that not changing was a virtue, and one of season 2's achievements.

There isn't any particular set wording for a knighting blessing, so I think Emilia-tan probably worked really hard to come up with it. Subaru's reply was ad-libbed.

After two seasons, Natsuki Subaru has finally become Emilia's knight. At this point, nobody yet had any way of knowing that from here on, his main weapon would become that thing made from the materials of that powerful enemy...

The order of events was switched from the book version, but this was a wonderful change proposed at the script stage. Originally, the conversation with Roswaal came after the knighting, but since it was an important scene, they made use of it while also making sure it didn't get in the way of Subaru and Emilia's story.

Otto has a lot of scenes where he drinks himself into a stupor, but unexpectedly, he's actually one of the stronger drinkers among the characters, so the times he gets dead drunk are usually when his mental state is shaken. Like when he can't sell his oil and is on the verge of bankruptcy, or when he's giddy because his friend's wish came true. That's the kind of image.

Subaru and Emilia, dancing wildly without ever having been taught, stepping happily in front of everyone without a shred of embarrassment. Under the moonlight, it was a wonderfully haphazard set of steps!

And with this, season 2 of Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- comes to a close! Thank you for staying with it to the very end!

In the middle of the COVID pandemic, when things were truly difficult, thanks to the efforts of Director Watanabe and all the staff, who poured tremendous energy into this and even used every last second each time, we were able to make it all the way here. Thank you, truly, truly, for everything through to the very end. It started on April 1, Subaru's birthday, and ended on March 24, Otto's birthday. Originally it was supposed to end on September 23, Emilia's birthday, so in some ways that's a shame, but I'll take it as a sign of how amazing Otto is at stealing the best part, haha.

Once the date changed, March 25 was also Subaru VA Yusuke Kobayashi's birthday, so if you interpret it broadly, you could even say it "started on Subaru's birthday and ended on Subaru's birthday" too. That's quite a stylish bit of happenstance as well.

At any rate, this is the curtain call for Re:Zero season 2! Thank you for putting up every week with the noisy tweets of the original author! Please do compare the anime with the author's tweets and watch it a second or third time. You may find new discoveries or things that click into place. Enjoy the anime again and again!

Well then, thank you very much for all this time! Hoping we'll have another chance to talk like this again, today I will set down my pen... well, not a pen, so I'll set down my keyboard. All right then, thank you very much!

By the way, even though it ran for 2 cours, Arc 4 is only about one week long in total. After 50 episodes, only about three months have passed since Subaru came to this other world. Good work, everyone.