As you might recall in Re:Zero Season 2, after Emilia passed all the trials, she was able to enter the room with Echidna’s corpse, which had a complex, interweaving spell emanating from it. On the surface, it may seem like she alone casted it, but upon thinking it over, I don’t 100% believe that’s the case if one thinks about one crucial detail in how Roswaal spent four hundred years traumatized by his defeat to Hector.
That detail is that Roswaal, Echidna’s most loyal follower, spent four hundred years imitating Hector’s speech pattern, showing that defeat by Hector’s hand caused him to see Hector as being power incarnate likely ’cause Hector caused him to lose the one most precious to him, Echidna. It’s possible Roswaal had trauma from that fight even if Echidna didn’t die as a result of it, but I’ll explain why I believe what I do.
Trauma can manifest in different ways and even different timeframes. One’s relationship to what/who caused the traumatizing incident, one’s relationship to other victims of the perpetrator, one’s stress levels at the time, one’s mental resilience, and one’s temperament all factor into how one processes difficult events in their lives. The question is whether Roswaal’s trauma manifested immediately or over time.
I know for some people, something as small as a bug bite can traumatize them. Whether one becomes traumatized has a lot to do whether the particular event(s) change their worldview. Is it likely for Roswaal to be instantly traumatized after his loss to Hector? I’ll try to answer this by showing why I don’t believe Echidna necessarily successfully repelled Hector from the Sanctuary without lasting physical injuries.
If Echidna had specifically repelled Hector from the Sanctuary, I’m not entirely convinced that Roswaal would see Hector as being power incarnate since Echidna would’ve defeated him. If Roswaal actually lost his beloved, it’d increase the chances he’d view Hector that way, but if Echidna successfully set up the Sanctuary and repelled Hector as well, there’s fewer reasons for Roswaal to worship him like that.
What I mean is that Echidna’s the world to Roswaal. If Echidna had successfully expelled Hector from the Sanctuary, would Roswaal really see Hector as being power incarnate? Smaller things have caused people to be traumatized, so it’s possible, but considering his relation to Echidna, I think Echidna dying by Hector’s hand or as a result of injuries from that fight would be more believable for the ensuing trauma.
We never saw the aftermath of Echidna and Hector’s fight, but there are three outcomes I can see having occurred in light of my proposing Echidna dying due to Hector making more sense, the first being Echidna died in her fight against Hector, the second being she was mortally wounded and cast the spell in her last moments, and the third being she received lasting injuries, dying from complications from them.
In the first scenario, there was no chance Echidna cast the spell in the tomb. For the second, it’s possible she did, but it most likely wasn’t since one’s mind deteriorates with the condition of one’s body, and I believe it’d be too laborious for a dying person to cast it. The third scenario best supports that she cast it, but if she were dying, she may also not have had the mental faculties to do it given the spell’s complexity.
Your mileage may vary, but this makes sense to me taking into account what a person on death’s door is capable of. Thus, given my theory that Echidna, Satella, and Pandora and potentially other characters from four hundred years are all in on a grand plan to steer the world to one specific future, I propose Echidna had assistance in casting the spell, and that person who assisted is a part of that group from the past.
Thus, sussing out who had the capability of casting it and the knowledge of Echidna making the Sanctuary her home may be a future clue to whether my theory about the grand plan to steer the world to one specific future with Subaru being the designated hero who does what all the previous heroes of the story refused to do, ending the cycle of the world being destroyed and reconstructed, is true.
In conclusion, I know it’s possible Roswaal was traumatized even if Echidna had survived with minimal injuries, but I wanted to explore what I described as a legitimate possibility and a genuine thought exercise. Of course future content could contradict this, but given how much of what the characters know about from the period four hundred years ago is false, I won’t yield easily unless a flashback contradicts it.
For the record, here is a list of info that is guaranteed to be false or highly likely to be false that has been spread throughout the story as of Season 3, and I will use logic to explain why the info is false:
- Beatrice and Echidna have said that Satella, the Witch of Envy, killed and devoured the other witches of sin, which is 100% false since if that were the case, there would be no corpse of Echidna at the Sanctuary. Echidna has likely been speading this lie deliberately to unite the world against Satella in the future, and she likely had Beatrice unknowingly cooperate with her by having her tell this to outsiders like she did with Subaru.
- Beatrice also said that legends say that the Witch of Envy doesn’t understand human language, which was proven false when Subaru said that he’d rather love Echidna than her, which had her flying into a rage. After rewatching Season 2 a third time, I believe the Witch of Envy and Satella are separate personalities given Subaru directly called the being that manifested in the Sanctuary the Witch of Envy, while all the dead witches aside from Echidna referred to the one who manifested in Echidna’s Dream Castle Satella, or Tella, in Typhon’s case. That would explain why she can only repeat “love you” and “love me” in the physical world if she’s a separate personality and why Satella is clear of mind and can speak normally in the Dream Castle as compared to the Witch of Envy that manifested in the Sanctuary. I’m not sure why there are two personalities though. Suffice to say, there is more than enough reason to believe that Echidna and others tried to pin the blame on Satella for everything, likely to unite the world against her at the end of the story.
- Ram previously indicated that folklore indicates that the great dragon that protects Lugunica lies beyond a great waterfall. Echidna said that Sekhmet, the Witch of Sloth, drove a dragon past the Great Waterfall all for a chance to rest. Why this info is almost certainly false is ’cause if said dragon really were trapped beyond the Great Waterfall, how would the Royal Family have entered a covenant with it? This fake lore is probably meant to keep people from seeking out the holy dragon.
- Crusch called mabeasts the creation of the Witch of Envy, but if mabeasts really were created by the Witch of Envy, of which Subaru smells like, why do mabeasts try to eat him? In Season 2, it was revealed that mabeasts were created by Daphne, the Witch of Gluttony, and that she and her mabeasts find Satella and Subaru’s scent irresistibly delicious, and there’s no way the creator would make beasts that want to eat her, which could have been sussed out in Season 1 with logic.
- Echidna said that Carmilla gave emotions to non-human beings, which is demonstrably false since insects likely existed long before she even existed, and we know insects can feel emotions.
- Hoshin was believed to have been one of the founders of Kararagi, where Anastasia and others who speak in the Kansai dialect live. In Season 3, buildings in Priestella were constructed with Japanese-style architecture with uniquely Japanese meals served with different names, and Priestella was also noted to be built by Hoshin, leading to Subaru believing that Hoshin was also Japanese, but given the Isekai Quartet movie revealed Alec Hoshin isn’t Japanese and how he indicated that problems from specific worlds should be handled by those who are natives to it, he may actually not have been one of the founders but somehow ended up being credited for the founding of Kararagi and Priestella since it’s an odd statement to make for someone who was isekaied.