#Arc7 #MemoRZ Oh my god. Tappei, you cannot do this to me. I teared up at this scene, but the tears literally came from relief. I mean, “You are not a hero” is the sentence Subaru has needed to hear for a very long time. And this time it comes from someone he can’t wave away. What gives Rem’s words their weight is how she frames them. By naming everyone, from Rui to Abel to Flop, and insisting that they are “all people with our own will,” she exposes what Subaru’s self-blame has been quietly doing all along: if every loss is his fault, then nobody around him ever made a choice of their own, and the people he loves stop being companions and turn into people he has to shield. She gives them their agency back, and in doing so she lifts a weight off him that was never his alone to carry. That it comes from Rem, of all people, is fucking incredible. Ever since she held him at one of the lowest points of his life and called him her hero, that word has been a promise he felt he owed her, and he has been trying to live up to the hero she believed in. The Rem from Arc 3 gave him a reason to get back on his feet, and the Rem of today relieves him of the burden that has grown out of that reason. Both are acts of care; they just belong to different stages of his life.

#Arc7 #MemoRZ This is so painful to read. One moment Subaru tells Rem “I am sure you did the best that you could.” The next moment he takes all the blame himself. He frees her from her guilt by loading it onto his own shoulders, and he never once asks whether anyone has to be at fault at all. And look at how he twists Abel’s words. Abel said he only demands the best of someone’s abilities, and that demanding more is absurd. He even told Subaru that he isn’t his subordinate, so he isn’t “within the bounds of punishment.” Subaru ignores all of that and punishes himself anyway, for failing to do more than his best. That’s perfectionism at its worst. Anything short of the perfect ending turns into “a kind of bad ending.”