Review of Redo of Healer

I refuse to except a show is bad merely because it offends the social sensibilities of polite society. I understand this is a nuanced debate, but if you think about it, there is quite a lot of hentai and live action adult videos that technically feature rape. However, the tone of these films aren’t as soul-crushing as it should be, because ultimately, the purpose of pornography is to arouse the audience, not depress them. Yes, if you peel back the layers of what you’re watching on a literal level, the moral atrocity being depicted is just as atrocious, but it isn’t conveyed in a manneryou could call particularly realistic, so this way, you can still walk away from the experience—which you assumably jerked off to—still feeling like yourself and the rest of humanity deserves to continue existing on this planet. But, let’s say you weren’t just getting off to obviously fictitious, staged, and playfully produced pornography, and were instead watching content which aimed to look and feel as close to reality as actual first-degree rape does. Presuming you’re not at least a little bit of a sociopath, this uncomfortable, ugly experience would probably feel a lot like watching Redo of Healer, because while it itself surely stands as a piece of social commentary in a metatextual sense, its actual content is in no way thoughtful.

Given the infamy behind this show, you almost certainly know everything about it already, but there’s a reason as to why it’s more controversial than it is simply sensational. The main character Keyaru is a cleric in a generic fantasy world who is forced to be a healer in the party of a sadistic and psychopathic princess who physically and sexually abuses him as much as livingly possible until, through a series of convoluted light novel nonsense, he flips the script on her and gains the power to exact torturous revenge for his own personal pleasure, and the show takes great joy in portraying the single most debasing treatment of human beings that is able to be shown on Japanese television, because to satisfy the urges and angsts of the author about whom I dare not speculate, this world he created is just that bizarrely cruel. While the show quickly becomes a fairly standard harem anime, only one shameless enough to have the main character constantly fucking his waifus on screen, the show never fully escapes the unpleasant feeling it began with, not because of the silly gore or edgy plot threads it occasionally pursues, but because the original fetish became a permanent fixture of the plot when Keyaru lobotomizes the princess and keeps her amongst his ever-growing harem of manipulated, sometimes helpless, groomed young women.

The moral discourse fans of this series insist on entertaining is inherently reactionary because the only reason people started talking about this series to being with was how immaturely offended they were by its premise, and while I must stress I am not defending this show as a good anime, I do disagree with those claiming this anime is somehow a glorification or justification of rape, depicting it as if it can be used as a tool of justice, because if you ask me, this isn’t justice and isn’t trying to be at all. This is a barbarous show which I don’t see acting like a moral compass of any kind to anyone. You can try to have a discussion about whether Keyaru’s actions are right or wrong, but at the end of the day, it’s just softcore porn. Like, I’m sorry to undercut your image of this show as a socially provocative work of art—which is totally not just incel shit, guys, I promise—but that’s all it is. It’s for people who get off on the idea rape not as an action, but as a fetishized sexual encounter one can imagine for masturbation or (hopefully consensual) foreplay. It’s something titillating which you can’t have in real life with real women, because real women aren’t actually evil enough to deserve this kind of treatment, but you just have to indulge your frustrations somewhere, because I guess that’s how men blow off steam.

That is what’s so great about fiction, though. I’m not the kind of out-of-touch moron who thinks video games make kids violent or anything like that, but I still can’t help but feel somewhat relieved any average MGTOW can conjure up an over-the-top scenario such as this one to relieve some of the hatred they have for women without actually having to victimize anyone in real life. Don’t get me wrong. The people Keyaru takes revenge upon did equally heinous things to him first, and without sound justification, so if you expect me to shed even a single tear on behalf of their suffering, even the princess who he viciously raped, you’ve got another thing coming, but since not a single character is ultimately a good person, I still can’t agree with the alleged “fans” of this series who proclaim to actually enjoy watching it, because it’s just an uninviting chore to sit though. It has no goodness to offer, and the stark hatred it has for the world around it has nothing to say about anyone or anything. Keyaru isn’t against evil, he’s against these specific people. He doesn’t care about the countless injustices going on in the world around him, he just cares about bringing hell back to these people and making them alone pay not for their crimes against humanity, but for their crimes against him personally.

They were unquestionably evil to him, but now he too is a bad person who should not be celebrated by anyone, and while his story becomes a somewhat generic fantasy harem anime which is simply edgier than its contemporaries, the themes ultimately offer no moral contrast, hope, nor any meaning which could realistically be interpreted to imply anything more than the gross softcore hentai which it clearly is. There are other anime, grim masterpieces like Texhnolyze, Jin-roh, or Now & Then, Here & There, which are also about suffering and are purposefully miserable to watch, but those have a truly heavy subject matter and depict far darker aspects of humanity than this, and not only do they handle themselves with a deep, meditative, adult sense of maturity, but they’re also well-written and beautifully crafted. For some reason, Redo of Healer has one episode storyboarded by Koichi Ohata, director of Genocyber and MD Geist, and in this episode, he referenced Goya’s “The Third of May 1808” and Ilya Repin’s “Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581” to frame certain shots, so the show isn’t entirely artless, but putting small auteur exceptions aside, the production quality is overwhelmingly ugly and uninspired, and its awful writing is without exception, so whether it has substantive ideas or not, don’t worry. You won’t have to find it morally reprehensible to see it as the awful anime it is.

Thank you for reading.