Roving Thoughts archives

One obvious thing characters in Re:Creators should be doing but aren't

(There are spoilers here.)

For the last couple of episodes of Re:Creators I've been griping about something on Twitter, first indirectly and now explicitly:

And the people in Re:Creators really need to stop allowing Altair to have a platform to build a larger audience & more powers with.

In the spirit of not doing all my blogging on Twitter, I'm going to write more here, mostly in the form of tweets with added commentary.

@UgokiGyokuyou: lol you want censorship? Take down all those fanvids/fanfictions and prevent new ones to be uploaded?

@cks_anime: Taking Altair stuff down would probably attract too much attention, but they could make sure that Altair-related content is kept quiet.
Eg have Altair stuff lower down on 'popular <X>' pages than it should be, and don't let new fanvids/etc show up very high no matter what.
The latter is especially important since we've been told that popular new fanvids can give Altair new, expanded powers. That's v. dangerous.

Re:Creators has essentially explicitly stated that Creations in general and Altair in specific derive their power and their abilities from having an audience see and accept things with the character in them (manga, games, novels, anime, art, fan works, and so on). Since Altair is a standalone creation, entirely based on fan-created materials, she has no 'canon' to shape, define, and limit her the way that other Creations do; instead, everything comes from fans watching fan-made videos and art on the in-show equivalents of NicoNico and Pixiv and making them popular. It's been explicitly stated that some of Altair's dangerous powers come from secondary fan videos, ones made not by Altair's initial creator but instead made as goofy bits and pieces by other fans, then given power by enough people seeing and enjoying them.

It's probably too late to wipe Altair's existing videos and art from the NicoNico and Pixiv equivalents; fans would probably notice, there would be a controversy, and you'd cue the Streisand effect, which is exactly what our protagonists don't want. A similar thing holds about actively blocking new Altair-related content from appearing at all. However, you can certainly do things to limit the damage. Visibility and popularity rankings are generally opaque and reasonably subtle manipulations of them are unlikely to be noticed and reacted to. So NicoNico and Pixiv could be coerced to slowly and quietly lower the ranking and prominence of existing Altair-related content, and especially to manipulate their systems so that new content would not be seen by a large audience by, for example, appearing at the top of 'hot new content' pages even if it normally should.

(New content is especially dangerous because popular new content can probably give Altair new and expanded powers, in the same way that secondary fan videos has already given her some that weren't in her original video source.)

This is not big or loud, and it's not fast, but the characters in Re:Creators are already playing a relatively long game with a six-month action plan. They might as well use the government power they have access to and this time in an attempt not just to build themselves up but to quietly undercut Altair's base of power, that being her audience. Every bit helps and they have an uphill struggle.

Concrete Revolutio: Raito Shiba as Jiro Hitoyoshi's tragic mirror

(There are spoilers here, in as much as I can spoil a show that's been over for a year.)

In the first season of Concrete Revolutio, one of the mysteries was what happened to Raito Shiba to turn him from a police detective into what he became instead (however you want to describe it). The first episode in Concrete Revolutio's second season finally answered this, and in the process it made Raito Shiba the most tragic character in Concrete Revolutio for me, because he is the tragic mirror to Jiro Hitoyoshi.

Both Raito and Jiro begin the show driven by the desire to follow justice and do right. This naturally raises the question of what is justice and rightness (this question is at the core of Jiro's self-definition), and the show spends a great deal of its run showing us that things in the real world are more and more complicated and more and more grey. There is simply not a clear, straightforward, general answer to the question. Justice, law, and right can all conflict with each other; attempts to use simple black and white answers can lead to terrible results. The truth, says Concrete Revolutio, is that concepts such as 'justice' are situational and even personal. You cannot boil them down to rules.

Both Jiro and Raito struggle with this over the course of the series. Both start out believing that this is simple and they can always see the way forward; they both find out that they are wrong. As the series progresses, Jiro becomes more and more willing to make situational decisions for the sake of his own personal sense of justice and rightness, and less and less willing to stick to rules and laws when they lead to a result that he feels are wrong.

The same conflict breaks Raito. In episode 14, "The Superhumans of November", he is fully faced with a messy conflict of justice where there is no simple morally correct answer. Raito knows it and admits it in his own thoughts. But rather than accept that the world is messy and complicated and not amenable to the rigid rules that he wants, Raito entirely rejects everything to do with the idea. He goes so far as to murder a sentient being in order to lobotomize himself, willingly locking himself into the shackles of a rigid black and white view of the world even though he knows this view is flawed (he rejects that knowledge, though).

This is what makes Raito the tragic mirror of Jiro (and a tragic character in general). Both faced the same issues and challenges, but Raito broke where Jiro made his way through. Raito shows both us and Jiro a path that a different version of Jiro might have taken, and I think that Jiro sees at least something of this and it's why he interacts with Raito as he does.

(Having locked himself into a black and white view of the world, having deliberately made himself completely convinced of the justice and correctness of his actions, Raito of course winds up reaching the morally horrifying decisions that he does in the third episode of the first season. If you make decisions based on logic and rules, with no regard for the reality of the world and the moral dimensions of what you're proposing, of course you wind up with horrors that you have perfect justifications for.)

(See also Emily's entry on Raito and Super Jaguar.)

(This is probably an obvious observation, but it's been on my mind for some time and so I'm writing it down to get it out of my head. Even a year later, Concrete Revolutio is still not a forgettable show, even if I feel it was a flawed one.)