At Otakon 2016, I showed up at the P.A. Works booth with a Yasaburou cosplay and some broken Japanese to stammer out my appreciation for their amazing work on The Eccentric Family, one of my all-time favorite shows. The company president, Horikawa Kenji, took a good chunk of time out of his schedule to humor me with a discussion on Benten, the show's iconic presence. His take on her character struck me deeply, and so I still remember how he talked about her from the creator's perspective: she is everything that is out of their reach, the essence of perfection they always strive to create but can only hope to ever understand. But when I heard his take, my immediate thought wasn't of Benten in The Eccentric Family, but rather of Emilia in Re:ZERO.
Its second cour airing at the time, Re:ZERO was making huge waves in the western anime world; at Otakon alone I saw dozens of cosplayers wearing the distinct jumpsuit of the hapless protagonist Natsuki Subaru, often accompanied by one of his two love interests, the half-elf Emilia and the demon maid Rem. One reason the show achieved so much popularity, if I had to guess, is how controversial it was. Every week a different anime blogger would share their take on the show, and there were generally two categories: the show is perhaps the best work to ever come from the isekai genre, or the show is borderline unwatchable. The reasons for the former were varied, while the latter seemed to all come back to the same place, namely Subaru himself.
The setup is a standard variation on the general isekai formula. As he is walking out of a convenience store with instant noodles in hand, the hikikomori Subaru instantly finds himself transported to Lugnica, the capital city in a fantastical world of magic, knights, and dragons. His transportation is instantaneous, and his adjustment to the world only slightly slower. He exists to break the fourth wall, talking about fantasy worlds, his protagonist status, and so on. But he isn't blessed with supreme magic as he expected from the fantasy setting; his defining power is a time reversal that activates on his death, bringing him back to an earlier point in the day or week with absolutely everything reset to that time. Furthermore he can't mention it to anyone. Whatever information he gleans, he has to spin it into the world using his wit and powers of persuasion.
Before discovering this power, he is vulnerable and alone in this fantasy world, and is saved at his lowest point by Emilia, who goes out of her way to save him from bandits and treat the wounds they inflicted on him, even while she is in a rush to find a valuable insignia that was stolen. Subaru falls for her instantly, for her looks, for her ability to save a stranger at her own personal loss, and for the general happiness she brings to him just by smiling or talking to him.
The next few episodes are filled with subtleties about her personality, ones we won't be able to decipher until much later. She gives the name Satela and reveals herself as a half-elf with her head hung down, a tie to the world's feared Jealous Witch. Later we learn she has been discriminated against for the resemblance her whole life. When he asks for her name or to go around the town together, she half-jokingly accuses him of having too few desires. She always worries about Subaru pushing himself too hard for her sake, exposing himself to mortal danger, and eventually she makes him promise to stay behind while she goes out to an important meeting with her political rivals. It is her concern for him as a friend, and a promise that she doesn't take lightly. It also represents a desire for him to treat her normally, as a friend but with his own concerns and with self-respect.
In this he fails her repeatedly, being unable to process his love for her. He breaks his promises, puts himself at too much risk, and never asks for anything but her unconditional understanding that what he does is all for her. After breaking the promise to stay behind, they have a fight. Subaru is forced to avoid telling her about his time traveling, instead begging her to trust him. She counters by saying he never gives her reason to trust him, and never treats her as an equal. The discrimination and political turmoil have led her to want nothing more than normalcy, no unequal treatment in either direction. She also accuses him of having an image of her that doesn't match reality, an image of perfection that he is content just to bask in. In other words, he treats her as an ideal, never understanding her flaws nor confiding his struggles in her.
To me this fight was revolutionary, because it spoke not just to Subaru, but to the archetypal protagonist whose footsteps he follows in. Subaru is funny and fast-talking, with a heart only for loving Emilia and enjoy his life with the people around him. He seeks to protect them all, even as he is incomparably weak. He says that Emilia's smile is worth protecting, and he also says that men are made to protect and women are meant to smile. He boasts and comes up with self-sacrificing plans left and right, and at the end of the day he asserts his place with the powerful women around him by trying to make them happy in whatever way he can.
In other words, Subaru is a misogynist. He is the same misogynist as Kamijou Touma from A Certain Magical Index, who defends and controls powerful magicians and espers even as a powerless man with no sense of self-preservation. He is the same misogynist as Emiya Shirou from Fate/stay night, who asserts his untrained sword skills in a battle of holy warriors on the basis of wanting to protect a woman's smile. He is the same misogynist as Eren Yeager from Attack on Titan, who yells "shut up and let me shoulder everything" after being saved by the highly skilled Mikasa. The only difference is that Subaru ultimately fails.
There was one other woman in the show for whom Subaru's charm worked, a servant named Rem. She and her twin sister Ram serve Emilia's political backer, but Rem has an idolization of her sister that rivals Subaru's image of Emilia, despite Rem being much more competent as both a maid and as a demon than Ram. We learn that she is crushed with self-loathing on account of her kind and loving sister being a former prodigy child who lost her powers in a brutal attack, to Rem's involuntary momentary delight. When Subaru gives her a place to exist as Rem, not as the shadow or replacement of Ram, she finds happiness and love. This is the one thing Subaru can give her, an efficient and powerful demon. And so while her emotional baggage being resolved by his naive cheer was a bit unfortunate, it makes sense for who she is and what that baggage led her to become.
She in turn saves him after a drawn out sequence of failures following his falling out with Emilia. Convinced that she will someday see him for the savior he is, Subaru sets out to move mountains for her safety just by force of will, dying in increasingly sickening ways over the course of a masterful four-episode sequence. His emotions unravel at all ends, and his controlling self-pity shows in every failed attempt to change something far out of his control. If the obvious signs of misogyny seem to stop, the patterns only become more blatant, compounded by the fact that he is too weak to even back up his useless pride.
At the depths of it all, Rem in turn gives him a place to be the human being known as Natsuki Subaru. “I love your eyes, I love your ears, I love the way you smile;” everything she says is rooted in who he is as a person, and in her understanding of him. It is a different form of idolization than what Subaru does to Emilia, because it acknowledges him as an equal, not something for her to unilaterally protect. It is the only speech that would make sense at that point, to pull him out of his depression.
Yet from the moment she fell in love with him, I couldn't stand what Rem meant for Re:ZERO. She is a maid, a subservient entity who is only meant to lift her master to higher peaks. She is a foil for his anger and misogyny, acting as a perfect model of rationality and peace, but everything she does is in service to Subaru's whims, or in taking responsibility for their consequences. Her love is unconditional, and it allows her to play into his power fantasy without complaint. Even in accentuating his failures, she also enables them.
When people claim that Rem is the best girl for Subaru, it comes from a number of places. Her rival Emilia has comparatively little screentime, and so the image of her as Subaru's idol makes her the less worthy candidate. The way that Emilia speaks with Subaru is so ordinary it's extraordinary, at least by anime standards. Rem is better able to love Subaru for who he is, and more able to give him a stable life. So the arguments go.
And so as I walked around Otakon and saw countless Subarus with Rems on their arm, I understood why so many people hated him not just as a person but as a character, and hated the show as a consequence. The pairing of Subaru and Rem is an extreme realization of the framework he is built upon, the misogynist with manifest destiny who dominates so much of isekai and other fantasy in anime. His tantrums are just the extension of that personality when things don't go according to their fantasies; his ramblings and grandstanding are less worthy than those other protagonists' solely because heaven never gives him the power to justify it. Rem's subservience only makes all these facts stand out enough for genre fans to see him differently from every other version of him who they revere.
By contrast, Emilia represents both the absent yet omnipresent ideal woman who Subaru created from his fantasy and the fantastic nuanced human who is willing to be happy alongside him in the real world. Her existence peels back his facade layer by layer, and ultimately his true personality hurts her deeply. It makes no sense for him to love anyone else, because he is a person who has defined himself around loving her, and that very fact is what makes Re:ZERO so potent, even beyond the brutal fights and political intrigue of his time loops. To assert Rem's place as his ideal woman is to assert his misogyny as correct, and to dismiss the show based on his misogyny is to dismiss the reason he was designed with it in the first place. Loving Emilia the way he does is the wrong thing for him to do. But it's the only way his character is allowed to love. And those two facts together aren't an oversight; they're a statement.