Review of Redo of Healer

Redo of Healer tells the dystopian tale of "what if r/healsluts was reality?" Healers possess incredible powers, but the healing process is deeply traumatizing for them, so they're kept submissive and breedable through a steady stream of drugs, sexual abuse, and demeaning comments. It turns out that this isn't a particularly fun existence. The healer protagonist gets a chance to redo his life, to get revenge on those who had wronged him. The best way to do this in his mind... is to form a harem and have lots and lots of threesomes. And oh yeah, some revenge on the side might be justified. Youknow, in between all the threesomes.

If you've heard anything about this show, it's likely that you've heard it's halfway to hentai-town. It exists in this weird twilight zone where the sex scenes are gratuitous and frequent, but also heavily restrained in some ways. Anime boobs are frequently on display, but even the uncensored version refuses to show any dicks or vaginas. They're obviously heavily implied through shadows, character expressions, and conveniently-placed objects, but they're never directly shown, even with a blur filter. The sex scenes mostly just consist of jiggling anime breasts and girls making ahegao faces. Also, I'm pretty sure the creators have a foot and CBT fetish. This is all... fine? It's clear a lot of anime fans hate any amount of cleavage given how derisive discussions of "fanservice" typically become. I'm in the perhaps-unusual position of not really caring one way or the other. I don't find sex scenes gratifying, but I also don't recoil in horror when they happen. I mostly just find it funny to see how the show's creators try to have the plot bend over backwards to justify them, like how the catgirl character can only get stronger through creampies. Sometimes the writers didn't even try. I laughed no matter what. This inadvertent humor is the only type of comedy that anime can do well in my view, and this show has it in spades.

The revenge content was another lightningrod of controversy. There's a lot of noncon in this story, which is probably why the show had such a high proportion of female viewers. Rape is used as a tool of punishment and revenge, which enraged the fake feminists who claim men and women should be equal, but then turn around and demand old privileges like "women are precious little snowflakes who must never be harmed". As a Real Feminist(TM), I enjoy watching evil women get their shit pushed in just as much as the evil men in this series. I'm not a fan of gore, and the show veered a bit too close to that in some scenes for my liking, but it never goes completely overboard.

The show has a few problems. The action scenes, though infrequent, are just as boring as in any anime. The protagonist is a healer, but he also gains peoples' experiences when he heals them and relives their memories. Apparently this also translates to having the same physical prowess that they do? Furthermore, his "healing" magic can functionally do anything that the show creators want him to do at that moment, like mindbreak girls, break locks and weapons, and change physical form (but NOT his genitalia, of course). There's no tension in fights when the characters can just manifest as-of-yet unseen powers at any moment. Moreover, while the protagonist is fairly relatable (he doesn't kill people who haven't wronged him or gotten in his way), he's still unnecessarily edgy in some cases, like where he claims that spite and hatred are good qualities. I guess that makes sense from his perspective, but it nevertheless makes him seem like an angsty teenager.

I would have liked a better explanation for why the kingdom, and most of the characters that come from there, are so one-dimensionally evil. A lot of plot threads remain unresolved at the end of the season for what was clearly the setup for another batch of episodes, but unfortunately it looks like it will never get them. I'm not really sure how to judge the show in this case, as there could have been some compelling reasons for why most named characters from the kingdom are unabashedly corrupt. As it exists, the show just has them as evil cardboard cutouts built specifically for a revenge story and nothing else. There are flashback scenes to justify the protagonist's revenge, but it seemed like I wasn't being told the other half of the story.

Overall, I had a lot more fun with this show than I thought I would. It's the only anime I've watched so far without a dub, which is a pretty big impediment to my enjoyment, and yet I kept wanting to watch more whenever an episode finished.