Fictional characters suddenly real in your world, furious that you made them suffer for entertainment, and they have a point. The premise is a gun aimed at every creator who's ever weaponized tragedy for a three-act structure. Re:CREATORS commits hard to the meta-cruelty of that idea, even when the execution stumbles trying to land it, because what matters is that the show genuinely believes characters can be wronged by their own authors.

Souta Mizushino is a high school student who hopes to become a creator himself by writing and illustrating his own light novel. While watching an anime for ideas, he is briefly pulled into a violent battle scene. Back in the real world, he finds that the show's strong-willed heroine, Selesia Yupitilia, has come with him. More fictional figures soon turn up across Japan, among them a princely knight, a magical girl and a merciless fighter. The most puzzling is a woman in a military uniform, known as Gunpuku no Himegimi, who knows far too much about the creators' world, though nobody knows her real name or where she comes from. Souta and Selesia join Meteora Österreich, a calm librarian NPC, to find out what lies behind these strange events, as the line between reality and fiction grows ever thinner. The result is a mix of action, drama, fantasy and mecha with a thriller edge, asking what fictional characters might think of the people who created them.