The biggest weakness of Re:Creators is that several characters are, at first glance, just shallow, tropey caricatures. Now, no show is immune to this problem, but perhaps it’s more obvious for a meta anime like this. However, I contend that this might also be a strength for Re:Creators.



Yes, Magane is over the top evil.

Yes, Alice is a one-dimensional fantasy protag.

Yes, Meteora is a walking info dump.

And they’re supposed to be that way. That’s how they are in the fictional source material. Only time will tell if this is a legitimate explanation or just a cop out. But, so far, it appears legitimate and consistent.

What’s more, it seems like the complexity of the “character descriptions” for any of the creations also ties to their ability to grow in the real world. Selesia, Mamika, and Yuya were well fleshed out characters and thus easily adapted to the real world.

On the opposite end of the spectrum… Magane was a one dimensional psychopath with no thought for nuance beyond devious wordplay. Alice was an epic fantasy protag, which almost never have depth, just a hero complex. And Meteora, bless her heart, was an infodump NPC in an RPG.

And I love this dynamic for a few reasons. First, it would’ve been hella boring if fictional characters came into the real world only to behave as rational, thoughtful people. Second, storytelling is all about dichotomies, and this is a new one that only a meta-story can explore. Shallow vs Complex. And finally, I love it because of the implicit depth of these originally shallow characters.

Meteora is one of the most compelling tragic characters in modern anime, and not enough people have realized it yet. She talks a big game since the real world interpreted her infodump NPC nature as being incredibly knowledgeable. And while everyone treats this as depth, it really isn’t.

“Hadn’t team protag confirmed that Meteora and her world were created with a lot of thought and complexity?” you may ask. Sadly, no. Only Meteora herself made that assertion. To which I ask a simple question: how would she know?

If she were made with depth and complexity, then upon entering the real world she would likely be able to distinguish simple works of fiction from complex ones. But if she were made thoughtlessly and without care, could she conceive of a world more complex than her own? On a scale of 1 to 10 she would have to view her source material as a perfect 10, even if, for someone born in the real world, it would fall much closer to the bottom of that range.

So then her self-assessment proves useless. What do we have to judge her complexity? As previously mentioned, the complex characters are able to change and evolve. Meteora, however, has remained static since we first met her. And some of her own comments support this conclusion. Food is better and more flavorful in the real world. Almost everything is better and more vivid. Translation: her world is lacking in detail, and by extension, perhaps she is as well.

Meteora believes, quite strongly, that she and her world are deep and complex.

And she’s wrong.

Adding insult to injury, this all makes her a compelling character in the story of Re:Creators, while being very simple and one dimensional in the world of the Re:Creators story. Put all of this together, and she’s the greatest tragic character in modern anime.