"Enough. Stop second-guessing yourself."
Sora smiled as he spoke into the phone, his voice steady and easy despite the cold biting at his face. He was out with his team near an old district in Tokushima, overseeing location photography while discussing work with Sumire.
"The opening stretch of Re:Zero Season 2 was always going to feel slower. That has nothing to do with you. Even if I'd handled those episodes myself, people still would've complained."
"But…"
"There is no 'but.'" Sora cut in before she could finish. "This isn't your fault. The media, the anime fans - they're used to seeing Subaru die, restart, and overturn fate. That's what they associate with Re:Zero. The beginning of Season 2 doesn't have those familiar beats. It's all setup. Of course some people aren't used to it."
He paused only briefly before continuing.
"Give it a few more weeks, and everything they've been waiting for will hit all at once. And it'll be worse than Season 1 - more brutal, more hopeless. But Sumire, there's something you need to keep in mind. Season 2 is mainly under your supervision. Once the people online get tired of complaining about me, there's a good chance they'll start aiming at you instead. Be ready for that."
After the call ended, Sumire drew in a long breath and looked toward the trophy displayed in the company lobby.
Engraved across its surface were the words:
Best Animation Kantoku - Sora / Sumire
She stood there for a few seconds, staring at it, doing her best to sweep away the weight pressing down on her chest.
In truth, the way Sumire felt was far more common among anime Kantokus than people liked to admit.
When fans praised them, confidence came easily. But the moment ratings dipped, or criticism grew just a little louder, doubt would creep in almost instantly. Had they mishandled something? Missed some detail? Failed the work in some way?
Sora, however, was nothing like that.
He had something most people didn't: prior data, a sense for audience response patterns, and enough conviction in the works themselves that he didn't panic every time public opinion wavered.
After ending the call, Sora lifted his head and glanced at the old street before him, where snow still drifted down through the gray afternoon.
Wrapped in a heavy winter coat, he continued directing the team.
The place where he stood was on a slope.
At the end of that slope lay an abandoned railway line.
This was the age of high-speed rail now. The old low-speed trains that once ran straight through city centers had long since disappeared from service.
Even so, it had taken Sora a very long time to find a location like this.
And while the railway had been abandoned in the present day, it had still been operating fifteen years ago.
That alone made it valuable.
Using this place as a foundation, he could revise the screenplay accordingly: the point where the male and female leads reunited as adults could be shifted to fifteen years ago, while their elementary school years could be moved back to twenty-eight years earlier.
As for the cherry blossoms lining the slope in the original work -
That could be created in animation.
It didn't matter that, in reality, this road hadn't had sakura trees planted along it twenty years ago. That kind of thing could be shaped afterward.
Still, Sora hadn't stopped there.
He had already contacted the local authorities and made them an offer himself. Under the pretext of helping promote the district for the release of the animated film 5 Centimeters per Second, he proposed funding the transplantation of several cherry blossom trees to decorate the slope as part of the area's greenery improvements.
The officials had shown a great deal of interest.
Sora's popularity in the anime industry was already high enough that they couldn't ignore the possibility. If his film truly took off after release, it might bring in fans, boost local foot traffic, and stimulate spending in the area, even if only for a while.
For them, that was more than enough reason to cooperate.
The negotiations went smoothly.
When the film eventually premiered, if passionate fans really did come to make a pilgrimage to its real-world locations, then the imagined scene of cherry blossoms in full bloom would already be there waiting for them.
Later, those real locations would also be used as part of the film's promotional campaign.
The budget Sora had set for 5 Centimeters per Second was 140 million yen.
Seventy million would go toward animation production.
The other seventy million would be used for promotion.
With that kind of money behind the project, the cost of transplanting a few trees was barely worth mentioning.
"Take more shots over there."
"And Masato, see if you can dig up old photographs of this neighborhood from twenty years ago. We'll need them for reference."
He narrowed his eyes, still sorting through details in his head.
"And the most important thing - find out what kind of train ran on this line back when it was still active. The model, the design, the length of the longest formation. I want all of it."
As he thought things through, he continued issuing instructions to the people around him.
Because this adaptation was grounded in a real setting rather than a completely fictional world, many details in the script had to be adjusted as well.
In the original Japanese work, Takaki Tono and Akari Shinohara began in Tokyo, and before Akari finished middle school, she transferred away to Tochigi Prefecture.
To viewers who didn't really understand the geography, that separation could easily sound dramatic at first glance.
But in reality, the distance between the two places was only a little over one hundred kilometers.
If someone drove fast enough on the expressway, they could get there in under an hour.
Japan simply wasn't that large.
And because of that, no matter how painful the long-distance relationship in the story was supposed to feel, there was an upper limit to how overwhelming that distance could seem.
For Sora, a separation of only one hundred kilometers wasn't enough.
It lacked weight.
It lacked the crushing sense of helplessness he wanted the audience to feel.
So in his adaptation, he directly replaced the original Tokyo setting with Tokushima, keeping the emotional starting point intact while grounding it in the world he had already been rebuilding.
As for the city the heroine would later move to, he placed it somewhere in the north, roughly five hundred kilometers away.
For a pair of middle school lovers, in an era when mobile phones hadn't yet become widespread and the only reliable way to communicate was through letters, that distance finally felt cruel enough.
Cruel enough to hurt.
And because he wanted to use real scenery - and because he needed to faithfully recreate what these places had looked like twenty or thirty years ago, before development had caught up - Sora knew he would need to spend at least a full month outdoors with the team, gathering references and location materials.
Of course, before any of this, he and Sumire had already completed the storyboards.
The production supervision for Re:Zero Season 2, along with the review work for key animation, photography, and related materials on 5 Centimeters per Second, had all been left in Sumire's hands back at the studio.
The two of them were dividing the work.
Without that, there was simply no way they could push through a workload of this scale in such a short time.
Not even Sora could pull that off alone.
"Seven months…"
Sora glanced at the date.
There were fewer than ten days left before the New Year, and exactly seven months remained until the scheduled theatrical release of 5 Centimeters per Second.
Then, in February, the fifth episode of Re:Zero Season 2 aired.
And with that one episode, the atmosphere changed immediately.
The Sanctuary Trial wasn't a physical ordeal.
It was a direct assault on the mind.
After Emilia attempted it once, she emerged weeping and collapsed inside the trial grounds.
At the same time, details that almost no one had thought deeply about in Season 1 suddenly came rushing back to the surface.
Why had Roswaal, the chief magician of the estate, left just before the Witch's Cult attacked Emilia?
Why, knowing full well that Emilia would inevitably become a target once she entered the Royal Selection, had he departed without leaving even a single warning behind?
These were things most viewers had never seriously questioned during Season 1.
But in Season 2, as an enraged Subaru confronted Roswaal directly, all of it was dragged into the open at once.
And Roswaal's answer…
It was deeply unsettling.
He said that even without any warning from him, he believed Subaru would still be able to resolve the crisis.
That was his answer.
And at that moment, a terrifying suspicion began to rise in the minds of many fans.
Roswaal had figured it out.
Or at the very least, he had guessed.
He had guessed that Subaru possessed the power to return, to restart, to rewrite a past that should have already been fixed.
Because otherwise, who in their right mind would believe that an ordinary boy with almost no fighting ability could somehow foresee disaster, gather allies in advance, and save Emilia before the Witch's Cult arrived?
That unnatural trust Roswaal placed in Subaru -
That was the real problem.
By that point, many anime fans had already reached the same conclusion.
The true major antagonist of the Sanctuary arc in Season 2…
Was Roswaal himself.
The benefactor of Rem and Ram.
Emilia's ally and supporter.
And the man quietly standing behind it all.
It had taken five full episodes of buildup for the story to finally arrive at that point.
And then, at the very end of Episode 5, Subaru temporarily left Sanctuary to return to Roswaal's mansion, hoping to get crucial answers from Beatrice and Frederica.
There, he encountered an old acquaintance.
Elsa Granhiert.
And with a single slash across the abdomen, she killed him on the spot, leaving him to bleed out from a severed abdominal artery.
That fifth episode, airing just before the New Year, sent a massive shockwave through the fanbase.
People had spent weeks saying Season 2 was too slow, that Subaru was wandering around like some useless drifter, accomplishing nothing.
But the moment he finally tried to act -
He was killed immediately.
And by her, of all people.
"The first death in Season 1 was Elsa. The first death in Season 2 is Elsa too. What is this, some kind of destiny?"
"That familiar feeling is back. The real story's finally back."
"Oh, come on, Elsa's back and I'm losing my mind over it. Did you guys buy the first four BD volumes? Elsa in the Pride IF route is incredible - cool, tragic, unforgettable. I seriously hope she gets redeemed in the main story and ends up becoming one of Subaru's allies."
"What's the Pride IF route?"
"It's one of the alternate-world IF stories bundled with the BD releases. If you didn't buy them, it's fine. I checked Yume Animation's official site - they mentioned a standalone bound edition of the Pride route is coming out in June. It's just kind of expensive. Over five thousand yen."
"That's still way cheaper than buying all the BDs."
"This episode got me insanely excited. Elsa showing up again means the real plot is finally moving. In Season 1, she mostly just got unlucky and ran into Reinhard. But honestly? Elsa is ridiculously strong."
"You think she's stronger than Petelgeuse?"
"Personally, yeah. Stronger - and way more compelling."
"No way. She killed Subaru multiple times in previous loops. There's no chance someone like that becomes his ally."
"And Rem killed him twice too, didn't she? Look at how everyone sees Rem now. If Kantoku Sora wants to, he can absolutely pull off a redemption arc for Elsa in the main route too."
"Rem…"
"..."
"Damn it, why doesn't Kantoku Sora release two episodes a week? This is unbearable. I honestly don't even think Season 2 has pacing problems. I don't think it's slow at all. The only problem is that he updates too slowly. If he can work on two productions at the same time, then why not focus on one and give us two episodes a week?"
"I want to see Elsa become Subaru's girlfriend already… In the Pride route, they actually build some real emotional connection. She even gives her life to shield him from an attack at the end."
"So maybe Season 2 could go in that direction too? Like Subaru changing Elsa through courage and compassion? If that happens, I'll go insane."
As soon as Episode 5 aired, it brought an entire wave of Elsa fans surging back onto the internet.
Among the female characters in the series, Rem was still the clear favorite, with Emilia in second place.
But ever since the release of the Pride IF route on BD, the highly controversial Elsa had shot past Ram and climbed into third place in overall popularity.
At the same time, Roswaal's portrayal as a calculating and sinister mastermind, the implication that he might already know about Subaru's return-by-death, Elsa's reappearance, and Subaru's brutal murder all combined to push the show's ratings back upward.
They rose to 5.68%.
It was the highest single-episode rating Re:Zero Season 2 had achieved since its broadcast began.
And as fans across the internet expressed their excitement over the episode, casually leaking bits of detail and anticipation for what came next, many viewers who had been deliberately holding off until more episodes accumulated finally cracked.
Human patience, in the end, was always fragile.
Those viewers who had sworn they would stockpile episodes after suffering through weekly waiting in Season 1 had only lasted two or three weeks before giving in.
The very next day, the rebroadcast ratings for Episodes 1 through 5 on Seiun TV's southern regional affiliate spiked sharply. A huge number of those so-called "wait-and-binge" viewers had already started catching up, preparing themselves to follow Episode 6 live when it aired the following Friday.
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