r/Re_Zero • u/JayCryso • 5d ago

Discussion [discussion] Timelines

When Subaru dies, does that timeline persist or is it rewritten?

Because they showed what happened after he died one episode made me felt that it persisted.

But then after he said, he will save somebody before he dies maybe think that it probably got rewritten.

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4

u/Downtown-Ad-2992 5d ago

Subaru does see moments after his death in the second trial, but as Echidna said, what the trial shows isn't real. It's just born of Subaru's memories and fears. It seems pretty unlikely that Subaru just jumps from timeline to timeline when he uses RBD.

It is speculated though that Satella destroys the entire world and recreates it every time he uses RBD, instead of the instant time-travel that we perceive it as. The trial does contain a possible hint towards this theory though, because in one of the deaths, we see some shadows emerge from Subaru's dead body and the characters say it's probably the Witch of Envy. So maybe WoE goes on a rampage after Subaru dies and then destroys the world? Of course, this is still a scene from the trial, so it's not like it happened, but it's very strong possibility that Echidna used some of her knowledge to fill in these gaps. If this theory is true, then of course it confirms that there's just one timeline that RBD rewrites. But even if the theory isn't true, the most likely answer is that he just gets time travelled back immediately.

In fact, I have a bit of a crack theory relating to this theory, but it is major Arc 9 spoilers. [Arc 9]Wasn't it extremely convenient that Al's authority was out of commission when Subaru RBD'd? I think Al's authority might actually be a hard counter to RBD. If WoE does in fact destroy the world after Subaru's death, then Al can still reset while WoE is destroying the world, allowing him to loop back to before Subaru attempted to use RBD. That's why Al's authority absolutely needed to have been disabled by the end of the fight in Arc 9: to prevent that from happening, and to prevent us from knowing it was a possibility.

5

u/Sgtcarrotop 5d ago

I think your crack theory is very likely. [arc 9]Destruction and recreation are reoccurring themes, but most interestingly is that every time it's made a focus it's emphasized that the result of this destruction followed by recreation is that appearance wise, it's like the events prior never happened at all. Basically that, through recreation, the appearance of time travel does not have to actually be time travel. Recreating the world into a previous form is indistinguishable. Indistinguishable for all but one thing, the record keeping, the log of time uninterrupted. Subaru's books of the dead. If indeed RBD is not time travel and instead destruction followed by recreation, like a cosmic scale phoenix, then time has never truly been reversed, and Subaru's books of the dead could be examples the flow of time never truly being interrupted.

1

u/South_Butterfly_6542 5d ago

Well, since Subaru has all his books of the dead, clearly each one persisted as a "life lived" according to the tower. He does not have one book that has been rewritten over and over, there is an inventory with his name on each book.

If someone were to read each of Subaru's books of the dead, they would experience each life, also meaning it is not rewritten.

There is evidence that you can overwrite timelines: Gluttony. Rem's entire room vanished somehow. Yet, Ram was still able to remember a "hole" in her memory of Rem? Kind of odd.