Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu – 07

Subaru is able to escape Rem by blinding her with his cameraphone flash, but only temporarily. She slices his leg off, heals it, then starts cutting him up until he’ll talk. She smells the “Jealous Witch” all over him, and so believes he’s a spy for Emilia’s enemies. She ignores his claims of innocence, and before he can tell her how much he likes her and her sister, she cuts out his throat, and he wakes up once more in that bed.

Unsure of what will happen if he dies a fourth time, he tries to switch things up by telling Emilia-tan exactly what’s going on, but before he can get the words out, some vile spectral hand clutches his heart and threatens to burst it. The sad part is, Emilia would have likely believed every word he said, if only he was able to say them.

But he can’t, so he has to try something else. When Beatrice visits him in his room to apologize for the first time they met, he asks her to protect him, and she forms a binding contract with him right then and there. He spends the final night before all his previous deaths in the forbidden library with her, and awakes the next morning, elated to be alive and having broken the loop.

But while the last time he broke the loop, everything turned out fine and dandy, this time Rem seems to die in his place, of the same energy-sapping spell that brought him down the first time he was murdered in the mansion.

While Rem was the sister who hunted him in the past loop to protect Emilia and her sister, this time an enraged Ram vows to avenge Rem by killing Subaru. Beatrice shows up to protect him, like he promised, and Emilia is willing to trust him as long as he explains himself…

…But he just can’t. He knows now if he even tries to utter anything at all about his predicament, he’ll be killed by that evil force clutching his heart, literally choked with fear. All he can do is separate himself from the standoff, but running only makes Ram think he’s guilty.

All Subaru wants to do is get away. Away from that house, where everything he said and did there was always under the suspicious pall of the twin maids, due to a smell and an influence he didn’t even know existed and still doesn’t understand.

He hopes by offing himself voluntarily over a cliff, he can undo all the suffering that he caused, directly or indirectly. Beatrice tracks him down and confirms really what he wants. “What’s lost can’t be reclaimed,” she says.

But…with Subie’s ability, can’t what was lost never become lost to begin with, and thus not need to be reclaimed? And is that not just a roundabout way of reclaiming something, namely a happy future for the occupants of the mansion? Subaru agrees there’s nothing he can do here, and as much as he hates it, he must endure the fact that the Emilia, Ram and late Rem of this loop simply can’t remember all the good times they had in other loops.

But he does remember, and they’re the same Ram and Rem throughout them all; the Ram and Rem he’s fallen for. Now that he’s saved his own life, he’s going to take it, in the hope that voluntarily resetting will enable him to save them. It’s a gamble, but it beats staying where he is.

Honestly, this show is so damn good. Breaking up its own pattern by making things worse even when Subaru breaks the loop, and giving him the added problem of not being able to properly explain what’s happening to him. The vice just keeps tightening for our protagonist, and while he hit some emotional lows this week, his old can-do self shined through at the end. I honestly don’t know how he’s going to save Rem and Ram, but I most eagerly await to opportunity to watch.