Management: This essay is meant to be less of a review and more of analysis of the show being examined. It contains plot spoilers for the Re:Creators anime.

Suppose you grew up knowing nothing but war. Savages run amok in your homeland, burning villages to the ground, putting innocents to the sword, and committing all manner of vile crimes. You enlist in the armed forces and fight your hardest to drive them out and protect what what parts of your homeland that you can. You witness friends and family die. On more than one occasion, you despair at the recurring thought that everything you’re doing is meaningless. The suffering of your people never seems to end. What creator, what god would allow these evils to exist and persist if they were not cruel or callous? And then it turns out that your world is the manga creation of some person from another universe meant to entertain people. Protagonists like Aliceteria February agonizes over the destitution of her beloved country, a destitution willed into her universe by a creator for the purpose of making a living. Aliceteria’s god sounds an awful lot of like a merchant of death.

Re:Creators has many things to say about the creative process in storytelling, but it also makes a few comments about the audiences who engage with these creative works. What exactly are we getting out of stories that make their characters gratuitously suffer — stories like Aliceteria of the Scarlet or Code Babylon or even Berserk? There’s obviously a market for this kind of material, which is why these stories keep getting reproduced for mass consumption. In Re:Creators, the first two aforementioned stories are popular. If, hypothetically, a character from one of these stories came to life and demanded to know why their lives were so shitty, what answer could we truthfully give them? Re:Creators realizes this scenario and offers two answers, the first by Shunma Suruga (who created Code Babylon) and the last by Gai Takarada (who created Aliceteria of the Scarlet). One answer is mundanely cynical. The other is meant to be inspiring.

Curiously in Re:Creators, of all the possible themes that the show could touch on given its set-up of fictional characters come to life, it doesn’t address so much the made-up nature of the fictional characters. Instead, the show addresses why the scenarios certain fictional characters were written into are characterized by suffering. The worlds of Aliceteria of the Scarlet and Code.Babylon were deliberately structured by their authors to be unfair to their protagonists. The protagonists struggle against this structural unfairness, and the drama and tragedy that results from their struggles that engages enough readers to make their stories popular have dual implications once transported to the land of their gods: (1) their worlds are sustained through their creators’ visions, and (2) their creators’ visions characterize their worlds as miserable places to live in. It may be true that without their creators’ visions, the protagonists would never have existed at all. But what’s the motivation for the protagonists to exist if their lives were deliberately toyed into constantly sucking? Their universes are sustained by their creators’ minds. These creators’ professions also happen to be sustained by the financial support of their readers.

There’s an argument floating around that storytellers should be free to write whatever cruel and callous scenarios they want for their characters. They argue that under the ethical conceit that whatever cruel and callous things happen to people in their fictions ultimately aren’t hurting anyone in real life. Readers can arguably rationalize away any guilt they’re supposed incur patronizing work that features characters suffering in some gratuitous way. Sociological objections and traumatic considerations aside, the excuse ceases to apply when these same characters burst out of the manga pages and inform readers personally of how much everything they’ve been forced to go through hurts them. What reasons can the audience offer them then for putting them up like gladiators in a Coliseum?

Shunma Suruga created Code.Babylon, a manga story set in a cyberpunk future. At one point, protagonist hard-boiled detective Blitz Talker kills his daughter as an act of coup de grâce. Blitz is transported to his creator’s world. He confronts his creator at gunpoint and demands to know why she wrote out such a cruel scenario for his kid. Shunma admits, bluntly, that she did it in order to engage readers more deeply into her story. She calculated that such a twist would prevent her readers from losing interest in her work, and maybe attract new readers if word of how enthralling her story was got around. She would continue making a living if her work continue to sell well, punctuating that point with an anecdote of how difficult it was to get to her current state of success.

Gai Takarada created Aliceteria of the Scarlet, a manga story set in a dark fantasy setting. Protagonist warrior princess Aliceteria February struggles to fend off attacks on her kingdom by malicious forces. The earlier introduction to this essay covers, in broad strokes, what life is like for her country and its people: not great. Just like Blitz, Aliceteria is taken to her creator’s universe. She abducts her creator and then demands to know why he wrote out such a cruel scenario for her land. He replies that he did it because he wanted to inspire readers to become better people. He crafted his tale of a heroine dashing herself against grim odds and a grimmer backdrop so that readers can take heart at her determination and righteousness despite her circumstances.

Neither Shunma or Gai ever imagined their characters coming to life and accosting them down the line when they first thought out their grim scenarios and set their pencils down. Stripped of the excuse to hand wave away Blitz’s and Aliceteria’s individual sufferings as “just stories” (under pain of getting shot or impaled), the creators offered their creations the following respective answers, distilled for simplicity:

1. People are entertained by the diversionary amusement presented produced by conflicts in stories. The gratuitous suffering sometimes attached to these tales could be a means to better immerse readers with the perception of gritty realism. It may also be a means to entice them with a higher sense of stakes. Some readers, twisted as it may sound, may like it for its own sake deep down.

2. People are also inspired by these stories, by the characters and qualities that the conflicts in these stories bring out. The real world, it turns out, can also be unfair to readers at times. The accounts of heroes in their tales keeping their heads up and fighting for what’s right despite desperate predicaments may be just what they need to get through the day and challenge them to become better people.

Fiction for the storyteller is both playground and laboratory. Scenarios imagined in storytelling avoid the physical and ethical problems people may run into when trying to replicate them in the real world. Futuristic and fantastical worlds, and cruel and callous worlds, are possible in fiction with a stroke of a pencil or pen or keyboard. Rarely are these stages and their actors woven into being by their creator-gods without purpose. In Re:Creators, a scenario was thought up and characters were given form to articulate these reasons. In a style and method meant to be fanciful and relatable, characters jumped out of the pages of their works to demand their creators and their audiences why. The reasons for their creation, like all forms of art, are multiple: to entertain and amuse, and teach and inspire. Indeed, some characters are put to the crucible by their creators for our enjoyment. Others are manifested by their creators to serve a greater purpose. In our laughing, crying, fuming, and hoping, our responses to fiction not only a reflection of these fictions’ creators. They are also a reflection of these stories’ audiences. Shunma smirked after cleverly manipulating Blitz. Gai bawled after learning that Aliceteria fell. My reactions, as a member of the audience, were mixtures of feelings similar.