#sloth:if

[sufferu]

Thinking about the Anastasia Camp in Arc 3 because holy shit, practically that entire camp was legitimately going out of its way to try and yank Subaru back to his senses and he has NO IDEA.

Julius is obvious, everyone knows at this point that his entire duel was him trying his best to prevent Subaru from getting dragged out and slaughtered in the street. But like, Anastasia did not have to go THAT FAR out of her way to try and teach Subaru a lesson. Girl literally set up the most obviously identifiable trap in the world with all of the tells perfectly aligning with the flaws she believed she saw in his character, told him to his face where he screwed up and what he needed to work on in order to not screw up next time, and then made a show of walking out as a group with all of her mercenaries just to point out the very obvious signs that the flaws she had just pointed out had prevented him from noticing. And also — someone else pointed it out, but it’s arguably implied that she only decided to do that after hearing that Subaru had picked a fight with Crusch Karsten like THREE DAYS after Julius had apparently completely failed to teach him that very necessary lesson about MINDING YOUR TONGUE. Which is just — she heard about that and went “Od Laguna that boy is legitimately going to get himself murdered ten times over if I don’t do anything to stop him isn’t he” didn’t she?

But it’s not just them because Ricardo was ALSO fucking in on it. We don’t see him until the final loop, but when we do he seeks Subaru out almost immediately and starts subtly gauging him out, seeing how he reacts to him mentioning Julius and the Royal Selection Ceremony and the White Whale and everything, clearly weighing his conclusions about Subaru’s reactions to all of that to the story he obviously heard from either Julius or Anastasia after the Incident at the ceremony. He even starts giving Subaru bits of advice because it becomes clear that Subaru is SO fucking stupid. Like, Subaru asks him what is. Probably a really racist question about whether he feels weird about riding a Liger — being a demihuman and all — and Ricardo makes a show of being very casual as he answers it by saying that “ah, well, this is an animal and I’m not, so there’s that” before moving on to basically say “word of advice: never ask anyone that again” and he does it nonchalantly enough to not make a big deal about it while also getting across that what Subaru just said could very easily be taken as an insult worth fighting over. And then he goes out of his way to save Subaru from the Whale at one point, getting his mount sliced in half and himself very seriously injured in the process.

And then to top it all off, the minute Julius sees Subaru again he gives him such an obvious test that Mimi almost ruins it by calling him out on it, in a way that very much mirrors the test Anastasia gave him in that failed loop, goading Subaru into a negotiation about Why the Anastasia Camp should continue to help them fight the Witch Cult without telling him that they were already planning on doing exactly that anyway. He even ends by nodding and saying that he’ll give Subaru’s efforts a “passing grade.”

Like, the Crusch Camp was helping Subaru a bit more explicitly — healing his gate and all — but that was very much a transactional exchange, with Crusch even explicitly stating that she will only ever help Subaru with his endeavors if there is something in it for her and her Camp. Meanwhile, for someone known as the Merchant Princess, Anastasia and her companions were being way more altruistic in their attempts to actually do Subaru some good. Aside from Rem, the Anastasia Camp may genuinely have been Subaru’s closest ally within that entire Arc, from start to end.

(Fuck, even in the IF route connected with this Arc. It might say something that Halibel is the one who houses Subaru and Rem (and even helps Subaru land a job) in Sloth:IF, considering that he’s got very strong ties to Anastasia.)

[sufferu]

You mentioned that one of your favorite elements in BTZ is that things can always get better, and it's never too late to make things right. Do you think the cast has a chance to fix any of the IF story Subarus, assuming they see those IF stories?

Please have Pridebaru as the comic relief no one takes seriously, and Slothbaru trying to help in between showing everyone pictures of his kids for the 15th time today

I’m gonna assume that these IF!Barus got sent back in time with all their. Issues.

Ayamatsu: They’ve kinda got to take him seriously enough to make sure that he doesn’t Do That again, and it’s not really comic relief anymore if he’s Right There and not just something out of a bad fanfiction. But — yeah, they might be able to. They’ve just got to get it through his thick skull that the world he is in is real and populated by real people whom he should be treating with respect. This isn’t something that would happen immediately, and they’d probably need to keep him under lock and key, but they might be able to figure it out eventually.

Oboreru: They capture him and release him into a maximum-security cell decorated with a large bed, plenty of blankets and pillows, and an army of soldiers right outside the door. If they can make Subaru feel that this room is safe and secure, then they can eventually use it as an anchor from which he can be escorted out and slowly readjust to the world around him. Wrath!Baru main problem is that he is this paranoid mess of a man that is constantly afraid of being betrayed, and his main threat to them is his Pleiades organization. If they can put him in a position where he can’t leverage his criminal organization against them (because it doesn’t exist), then they don’t have to worry about him killing them and can focus on helping him recover. And if they can construct an environment that is quiet, secure, and predictable, then recovery may indeed be possible.

Sloth:IF: Honestly Sloth!Baru never even really did anything wrong, his only real sin was that he could never come to terms with what happened that day he left. Even if he had never gone back in time they could help him: just get him in therapy to confront his inner demons and realize that 1) the Witch Cult was not his fault and 2) him running to the other side of the world to live a long, safe, and happy life with Rem is EXACTLY what Emilia would have wanted him to do, and he doesn’t have to feel guilty about keeping himself safe. The main issue is honestly that if he goes back in time he loses his wife and kids and — the grief from that would legitimately break him.

Kasaneru: I actually think that things can still be fixed in canon!Kasaneru. Nobody is dead, and so things can still be fixed, because healing is always possible so long as you’re not dead yet. I actually really like the idea of Greed!Emilia learning about RBD and — instead of letting it break her further — finally finding the strength to grow and break free of her chains on her own, leading everyone against Subaru so that he can finally be forcibly resigned and put to rest. In a time-travel scenario, meanwhile, their main issue is keeping Greed!Baru away from anything he can use to kill himself and making sure someone is watching him at all times as they force-feed him therapy about the value of his life. Constant surveillance and plenty of security measures and they indeed might manage to pull it off. —And also they’d need to destroy his connection with Echidna, if possible.

Tsugihagu: If they had the proper context as to why the fuck Subaru is like this, then they’d probably be able to solve it just by having a conversation with him about who he is to them, why they like him, and how any Subaru is a good Subaru, memories or not. The main issue would be the Books of the Dead and how he now has schizophrenia and also an unnerving amount of knowledge about half the cast, which. They could probably deal with that with time but it’s kind of unnerving at the moment.

[sufferu]

I think one of the funnier realizations about myself that I’ve had recently is the fact that Sloth:IF is genuinely my favorite IF Route.

[sufferu]

I have to point out that rem and subaru were married for a while in sloth if and it went well for them the sloth if was a bad ending for Subaru’s heroic development

Sloth:IF wasn’t bad because Subaru stopped being a hero — in fact, he arguably DID still become a hero in some form or another by fighting off Zarestia and becoming a well-respected member of his new town. Sloth:IF was bad because Subaru and Rem enabled each other’s worst habits in perpetuity and never ended up acknowledging anything as they repressed all their guilts, regrets, and insecurities for the rest of their lives — eventually passing ALL OF IT onto their son, Rigel, who gets to deal with being a one-horned oni, a closet crossdresser, and the son of one of the most respected men in his town who’s image he may never be able to fully live up to (complete with the same haircut that Subaru copied from his own father, thereby continuing the cycle symbolically).

Subaru’s main problem in Sloth:IF can be seen at the moment when Rem finally, for the first time since they left Lugunica, asks him if he regrets the choice they made that day while she’s giving birth at the climax of the story — and he doesn’t answer her. He has one chance to actually confront his feelings about the Witch Cult and Emilia and everything else, and instead he ducks it entirely in favor of talking about how it was all worth it because now he’s going to be a father and that’s all the matters. And throughout the entire IF story, Emilia’s name never even comes up once. (Even while Rem is emulating her long hairstyle in an attempt to fully take her place).

The problem isn’t that he didn’t save everyone — he had no responsibility to do so. Hell, him running to the opposite side of the world with his tail between his legs is pretty much EXACTLY what Emilia would have wanted him to do — concern for his safety is the whole reason she ditched him in the first place. The problem is that he never confronted anything that was bothering him ever, refused to acknowledge his insecurities or self-worth issues, and crawled back into the persona of Natsuki Kenichi’s son to never come out again.

[sufferu]

I like to think that, in Sloth:IF, Julius and Subaru eventually end up being friends.

Subaru is literally living with Anastasia’s dad, and I doubt she’d just — never talk to him again. So like, if she were to visit Halibel one day with her knight as her attendant, maybe after the Royal Selection ends, they’d have a very strong chance of meeting each other again. And that would be a hell of a shock for all parties involved lmao—

Subaru, greeted with a ghost from the literal worst week of his life, which he has been trying very hard to repress: You’re here?!

Julius, literally seeing a ghost, because he thought Subaru died to the Witch Cult alongside everyone else in the Mather’s Estate: You’re ALIVE?!

It probably wouldn’t go great at first. Maybe Subaru would automatically just — leave, make an excuse about taking up more shifts at work, and try not to look like he’s running away, but that’s exactly what he’s doing. He probably wouldn’t pick a fight, he gave up on that a long time ago. Maybe Julius would try to give him his space, because yeah, if their roles were swapped, he wouldn’t want a reminder of a week like that either. Or maybe after a while he’d decide that him terrorizing Subaru by basically chasing him around town via accidentally showing up where he tends to be is simply unsustainable, or at the very least entirely unfair, and eventually manages to get him to sit down and talk for a while.

They probably don’t Actually work everything out. Maybe Subaru refuses to acknowledge the lingering resentment he feels about something he knows was basically all his fault, fails to tell him that he’s still angry with him like he does when he sees him again in canon Arc 3, and Julius doesn’t know how to get him to acknowledge something like that. But they can make do.

There are probably a lot of things they don’t talk about. Not the duel, or Julius being a knight, or the massacre that chased Subaru all the way to Kararagi in the first place. They don’t talk about how Subaru looks at Julius sometimes, either. But there are other things they can discuss, especially as they start seeing one another more often. Rem is a good cook, and Subaru likes to show her off. Anastasia and Halibel’s dynamic is fun to watch, because seeing Anastasia act like a daughter and Halibel like a father feels so unnatural and peculiar that they may as well be seeing two entirely different people. Julius thinks Rigel is growing up to be so much like his father it hurts.

(In truly spectacular typical Julius fashion, Julius makes a sly joke about how he hopes he doesn’t need to repeat history with Rigel. It’s one of the only times he ever brings up their duel, and Subaru’s reaction to his comment is a large part of the reason why.)

Julius is older, but Subaru dies first. He makes a joke on his deathbed about finally managing to beat him at something. Julius finds it much less funny than he feels he ought to.

—Subaru wakes up some fifty, sixty years earlier, a teenager all over again, his son and daughter and grandchildren all lost to time, and it shatters him.

(When he sees Julius again, they don’t beat around the bush this time around. Subaru had fifty, sixty years too much of that.)

[sufferu]

Hello, was reading your take on the Sloth IF and while I do see the themes of repression, I feel like you're selling Slothbaru short here.

When Rem asks him "Do you regret it" she's talking about having a kid (With all that happening, she had this confession. …Did he want this child to be born?).

And Subaru responds honestly, about how he tried to be a perfect husband to make up for running away (But, I can’t..show you that I am. I……I brought you with me. I’m the one who brought you with me. I wanted to give you everything I had to make you happy. I told myself that I had to do it……).

...and faces his insecurities and self-worth issues head on by accepting that he'll always be afraid, that his fear might never go away (Subaru, as someone who couldn’t look at his parents in the face, always had a fear of becoming a parent. He still does. It wasn’t gone. It probably would never go away... But, at the same time, Subaru knew something. He knew the love of the best role model parents in the whole world.) He thinks of his parents for the first time since he came to this place, admits that he wasn't a good kid, and remains determined to love his kid anyway.

It's essentially everything he was meant to say on the rooftop in From Zero, just filtered through the lens of being a parent. Sure, it took him over a year to get there, but he did face his issues in the end. Thematically, the story wouldn't have ended with that exchange between Subaru and Rem, as well as how he handled Zarestia/Reese, if the story was about him avoiding his problems and succumbing to Sloth.

I really don’t agree with that, to be honest — for starters because Rem’s question about if he regrets it or not is explicitly stated, by Subaru, to be the first time in a year that either of them have actually acknowledged the decision made in the Capital that day to run away. Even if you want to make the argument that Rem wasn’t asking about that (I’d disagree but if you wanted to make that argument) — it’s still very explicitly how Subaru interpreted the question that she was asking him. At the very least, the question of the child is the culmination of “Do you regret…any of the decisions that led to this moment?” In which case, of course, he’s only focusing on one aspect of the question — that being the birth of their child. Even as Rem explicitly grows her hair out in order to emulate her, Emilia still never gets brought up even once. He is ONLY focusing on being a parent and husband — and he’s making a commitment to that role, but in doing so he is avoiding everything else.

And, of course, he is committing to become a copy of Natsuki Kenichi, the man who’s shadow he never really managed to step out of.

This decision later reflects in his relationship with his son being the same as the one that he had with his old man, right down to him passing down that exact same hairstyle to Rigel. —Hell, Rigel’s whole character is just the culmination of all of the things that Subaru and Rem never really managed to properly digest. He’s a one-horned oni, he’s the son of one of the most respected men in his town, he’s even a closet crossdresser. Subaru never really figured out what Natsumi Schwartz was to him and never stopped emulating his father, Rem never stopped feeling guilty about being Ram’s twin and making it so both of them only had a single horn, and now Rigel gets to deal with all of it at once.

(Plus there’s the QnA detail that Subaru gets sent right back to Arc 3 when he dies, which is a pretty major hint that he really, REALLY never managed to come to terms with what happened that day.)

And also — just, on a meta level: it’s a Sin Route. It’s a little different than the others because it does not look all that bad on the surface — everything that makes it a Sin Route hinges on what Subaru specifically Does Not Say, and that honestly makes it look almost downright utopian at times — but it’s still an IF Route labeled after one of the Seven Deadly Sins. It’s marked as a Bad Ending for a reason, and it’s marked as Sloth for a reason, too.

[sufferu]

If u included all the if stories in btz what do you think would change about the casts behaviour if there would be any kind of change.

I don’t think there’d be any major changes tbh. The consensus would be the same: Subaru cannot be allowed to abuse Return By Death under any circumstances, and they have a duty to keep him safe from harm. I don’t think they’d hold any of the IF Routes against him, either because they’re too ridiculous to take seriously (Ayamatsu), so horrifically pathetic that it’s difficult to see him as anything but pitiful (Oboreru, Tsugihagu), or straight up just the Worst Case Scenario that they’re avoiding at all costs (Kasaneru). They might be more keen on getting him acquainted with Halibel, though, considering their amicable relationship in Sloth:IF.

[sufferu]

How do you think the Dogshow cast would react to the Sloth IF? I know you mentioned that it'd be incredibly mixed, but honestly, I feel like they'd just be relieved that there's a Subaru that managed to just live a normal life. Sure, they wouldn't exactly be fans of Rem, especially at the start when it's revealed that she ran away with him, but I think it'd be overshadowed by seeing Subaru raise a family, get a job that suits him, and become a valued member of the community without ever dying again or being in danger (except Zarestia but that was just bad luck).

That’s why it’s mixed, lol. Because — yeah, they’d basically all be fine with that outcome. Even EMILIA would probably have seen that as Subaru doing exactly what she had wanted him to do when she first left him and Rem in the Capital: running far away from trouble and living out a happy life with people who love him. Sloth:IF is the exact sort of ending that all of these people would…at the very least they’d be FINE with him pursuing it.

But like, Sloth:IF has an insane amount of subtext regarding how Subaru is never really able to come to terms with his core issues, and how he and Rem keep enabling one another and disappearing into each other so that they don’t need to face their insecurities, and how they pass ALL OF IT onto Rigel. And the idea of Subaru disappearing with REM, specifically, would probably really set everyone on guard — especially after they all listened to Rem go on about how she wanted to kidnap him away from everyone so that she could have him all to herself for the rest of her life.

It’s still not a BAD situation, arguably. But it’s…a little uncomfortable to watch, I’d say.