Re:Zero -Starting Life in Another World-

Episode Count	66+ (25 for Season 1)
Season	Spring 2016
Genres	Drama, Fantasy, Psychological, Thriller
Source Material	Light Novel
Rating	TV-MA
Streaming	TBD

"Isekai" is practically a swear word in the English otaku community. Often synonymous with "lazy", "cookie-cutter", "trend-chasing" and "wish fulfillment", it's a genre that inherently feels incurious and formulaic to most, often characterized by shallow worlds, bland protagonists, a convoluted narrative with a lazy gimmick, and poor development for its setting or characters.

Which sucks, because most of them are trying to follow a series which does none of that.

Re:Zero is a rare piece of fiction where its influence is proportional to its quality. For everything its copies do wrong, it does them right. It's not wish-fulfillment (Subaru is an aggressively flawed protagonist with a tower of weaknesses), its world is fleshed-out and interesting, it set the trends that so many series after it lazily copy, and yet does all of them with greater success than you'd think. Before literally anything else, Re:Zero seeks to be good, unique modern fantasy. And that's a distinction that can't be overlooked or its importance undersold.

- CCharmanderK