Re:Zero Season 4 Episode 10

Character Analysis: Elsa Granhiert was more than just a bloodthirsty killer but also a sister in some sense

Posted on June 18, 2026 | by anicritic | Leave a Comment

While I guess Season 1 might make one think of Elsa as being nothing but a vicious predator, Season 2 had Elsa deliberately save Meili, her little sister figure, and Elsa revealed in Episode 48 that owing to her having been abandoned as a child, she came to love disemboweling people when she’d nearly gotten sexually assaulted in Gusteko with its very cold climate that both served to ensure that she didn’t think about things such as living well or being happy while potentially numbing her emotions due to your body doing what it can to preserve heat and served to alter the regulation of serotonin and endorphins in her body, so when she killed for the first time and felt the warmth of blood and innards, she thought to herself that if there’s happiness in the world it’s the warmth that makes one forget the cold, in essence sharing how she became the Bowel Hunter. Maybe this was a twisted happiness, but her horrible life up until that point is what resulted in her becoming what she was, and Re:Zero has a big emphasis on nurture versus nature.

But the Bowel Hunter isn’t all Elsa is as she was kind to Meili when she taught her how to be civil, allowing Meili to bite into her without retaliating against her, and while it may have been on Capella’s orders, I believe Elsa felt for Meili on some level due to them having both been abandoned as children. I believe Episode 76 showed that Elsa wanted more for Meili than just being a killer as she said that for anyone other herself, no number of lives would be enough, implying that if Meili took on enough jobs she’d eventually find a job too tough for her, showing very much that Elsa cared about her well-being, which is why she told Meili not to be Capella’s puppet, and they were very much sisters as Garfiel had called them in the relevant episode. Elsa also protected Meili when part of the ceiling was about to fall on her, and Elsa stopped her assault on Garf when she’d been in a winning position, so she definitely cared about Meili and wanted her to live on to put herself in such a bad position with a reset of sorts when she’d otherwise have won against Garfiel.

Elsa and Meili was also shown having a sisterly relationship in the Re:Zero Break Time Season 2 shorts, and given one of them pointedly had Elsa talk about how she hates Subaru’s eyes ’cause they show that he believes that death isn’t the end for him, Elsa may have alluded to this in some way between the end of Arc 2 and the end of Arc 3 or even between the start of Season 2 and before the pair began their duties later, leading to Meili having a curiosity about Subaru dying, which may partially be why Meili mused about whether a Book of the Dead would spawn if Subaru were to drop dead in Episode 71. I believe that Break Time content actually shows that Elsa values life on some level given her hatred for Subaru’s eyes, which demonstrates that she believes that you should live life to your fullest, whereas at that point in the story in Season 2, Subaru had been treating his life as disposable and a means to an end, and it’d also be why she treated Meili well, highlighting that she’s not just some monster even if she developed an unhealthy fixation on blood and innards.

I don’t believe Meili really would feel sad about Elsa, which is why she was the most likely candidate for having pushed amnesiac Subaru to his death twice, and look at him in anger during the recollection of her life when her Book of the Dead had been being read while tiptoeing in anticipation of killing him, if she had never once thought Elsa had ever genuinely cared for her, showing Meili felt shame about being caught caring, frustration over caring at all, and anger towards Subaru since she was indeed sad, and given she had never really properly processed her emotions aside from killing what stood in her way, of course it likely ended up in her desiring to kill amnesiac Subaru since he was no longer her big brother figure but the one who killed her big sister figure, who she had affection for.

A Re:Zero Theory: How did Subaru lose his memories given Shaula knows when tower challengers leave the tower, perhaps implying she can sense the quantity of higher-order beings in the tower?

Posted on June 14, 2026 | by anicritic | Leave a Comment

There’s been a lot of speculation on how Subaru lost his memories. Based on Eps. 74, 75, and 76 with amnesiac Subaru remembering “Memories are what shape a person.” which was said by Rui in Ep. 74 at 19:26, potentially hinting at her having possessed Subaru, his blacking out and waking up around a bunch of dead mabeasts he hadn’t killed himself and waking up having strangled Meili to death in Ep. 75, and Meili’s memories of what happened two days ago in Ep. 76, I believe this points to Subaru being possessed, but how did Rui (and potentially Lye and Roy) enter the tower given Shaula can detect who has left the tower since she knew amnesiac Subaru had left and given her prior warning that challengers to the tower cannot leave, which perhaps indicates she can sense how many challengers to the Pleiades Watchtower there are? Which means it may not be as simple as the Gluttony trio coming straight through the entrance even though the distortion and Sand Time had been dispelled.

“Memories are what shape a person.” may point to a second meaning in that those memories have been eaten can be claimed/possessed by Gluttony wielders. Perhaps reading the Book of the Dead of someone whose memories had been eaten by the Authority of Gluttony can result in a Sin Archbishop of Gluttony emerging to use his/her Authority against you, and that may be how Subaru lost his memories, ’cause they’d been eaten due to that deceased person’s memories being that Sin Archbishop of Gluttony’s possession, so Subaru likely read the Book of the Dead of someone tied to Rui, Lye, or Roy or perhaps even a previous Sin Archbishop of Gluttony (although I doubt this), and then the Gluttony wielder seized control of the recollection of the memories, using the Authority of Gluttony on Subaru. And I’m referring only to those who have had their memories eaten, not those who had both their name and memories eaten, leading to them being erased from the world. I know Rem appeared to be possessed in Ep. 74, but I have no idea what could explain aside from Rui teleporting from wherever she had been in during Season 3 before switching places with Lye in Ep. 66 when she swapped with Lye in the form of the green-haired woman (man?).

That’d be why Subaru had been reading many Books of the Dead and was normal when he interrupted Meili searching for Elsa’s Book of the Dead, and then when Meili returned, he was no longer himself as his memories had already been eaten, which is why he said that Meili’s face looks full of flavour, a very Gluttonyesque thing to say. It may not have been amnesiac Subaru, but the old Subaru should already have been gone at that point, which is why Meili thought to ask him about whether she could hold him to what he said last night in Ep. 75. This’d explain how Shaula, with her very keen sense of smell, didn’t smell other beings with high levels of miasma inside the tower aside from Subaru, and it’s that the Authority of Gluttony can be used when one is reading a Book of the Dead. Given Subaru by himself already emits a ton of miasma, Shaula may not have been able to detect a discernible difference unless she were really close by given miasma levels dissipate over distance like any other gas as shown by Ep. 69 by the ever increasing amounts of miasma as the group got closer and closer to the source of the miasma, not to mention she may have already retired for the night.

Feel free to share your thoughts on this.

A Re:Zero Theory: Shaula perhaps knew of Meili’s death much sooner than viewers realized

Posted on June 14, 2026 | by anicritic | Leave a Comment

Based on Muse Asia’s subs through Bilibili, Shaula replied that Meili kicked the bucket and that that sort of thing happens after the topic of her having died was brought up, and I believe that may have been her trying to diminish Meili’s death as possibly similar to that of an everyday occurrence to cover for amnesiac Subaru. While I acknowledge if she was with the Hero’s Party 400 years ago, they would’ve been accustomed to death, the way she spoke knowing of this Subaru being kinder compared to Flügel seems out of place since it seems she’d possibly been intentionally making light of the situation.

What may back this up is Shaula clasping her hands together and raising her leg at 4:46 in the episode, telling him that it’d be faster to read Meili’s Book of the Dead, which may have been her love language in trying to cover for amnesiac Subaru so that he’d read the book before anyone else given her insistence on it. She basically coached him into doing it with the reasoning she provided when Beatrice and Emilia had been against it, and she may have said what she said to ensure he would be the first to read Meili’s book before someone like Julius could decide to read it himself.

There’s also the prolonged shot of Shaula at 13:52, showing she was very attentive to him, showing she may have known that he was the one who killed her and how much suffering it was causing him, and given the question she asked later, it suggested that may have indeed been the case since she was implicitly asking amnesiac Subaru whether she should dispose of the corpse.

In earlier episodes, Meili taking to Shaula and basically clinging to her seems surprising to me. Shaula also said that she has a scorpion tail, and maybe that was what she was using to snipe Subaru with in Ep. 68 given Shaula means “the stinger” or “the raised tail”. Given Ram saw a magic circle from Earth anime and manga, which shouldn’t exist in Re:Zero’s fantasy world unless they were invented by people from Earth when she used her Clairvoyance, whatever Shaula was sniping with wasn’t a regular weapon powered by magic stones, which indicates that her creation may have involved somebody from Earth, such as Flügel, even if he didn’t outright create her on his own.

Shaula also increasingly appears to be a mabeast given her affinity with Meili with the teenager clinging onto her in Eps. 70 and 71, how Meili also never referred to Shaula by her name but as “naked lady”, which could be showing that Meili considers herself superior to Shaula, not requiring showing her the basic respect others get. A regular human even with eternal youth also wouldn’t be able to smell Subaru’s miasma like Shaula can. To top it all off, in Ep. 73, Shaula indicated she loved cooked food since her diet usually consists of raw mabeasts, not to mention she said that she had a mother to amnesiac Subaru in Ep. 75, and we do know there was a female Witch of Gluttony, Daphne, who lived around the time period of four hundred years ago, and given she created the Three Great Mabeasts, she could certainly create Shaula too if Shaula’s actually a mabeast.

Given many animals in real life have much stronger, potentially on the order of a few to several magnitudes stronger, senses of smell than humans do, that may also apply to mabeasts, meaning it’d be very well within Shaula’s capability to smell Meili’s corpse. Thus, it wouldn’t be out of the question that Shaula, if she’s indeed a mabeast, could smell that a corpse was in the tower itself, and that might explain her happy-go-lucky attitude with her saying that Meili kicked the bucket. Alternative, Shaula may have just been able to smell that amnesiac Subaru handled a corpse on his way to the library without cleaning up after himself.

Feel free to share your thoughts on this.