Review of Redo of Healer

I had this at an undeserved 4/10, carried only by the creative use of the "cycle of abuse" theme producing this absolute freakshow of a villainous MC. Up until episode 12, I thought it had this one redeeming quality where it explores the question of what can be done to fix a world where assholes bring about newer, bigger assholes until the biggest asshole finally swallows the whole world order and shits out a new one... episode 12 was so fucking terrible, it motivated me to revise this thinking, and this is my first ever 1/10 review. Hard pass is recommended. The absolute must-know about Redoof Healer is that it revolves around setting up and depicting snuff films. Like a cheap imitation of Dexter but formatted as an isekai/MMO quest, and lacking any defensible reason to find the MC sympathetic. If you don't wanna see a bunch of violent narcissist deviants with super powers get every disgusting and perverted thing that's coming to them at the hands of the titular violent narcissist deviant with superpowers - don't.

Redo of Healer is fucked up, misfiled content that shouldn't be billed as an "Anime Series" at all. Especially after episode 12 which flipped a big fat double bird at everyone who may have been defending it because it adapts a surprisingly good though triple R, triple X rated Manga. What did they do? They inserted an "original" random orgy complete with demon voyeur which made no sense, ruins all the already zombified characters at once, wasn't in the Manga, and drops all pretense that production ever intended to tell a story here.

The Manga is a 180 from this rating and actually gets better over time despite the snuff content. I do not have such hopes for the series, and it deserves to be cancelled and forgotten for pretending to be something it isn't, sucking all life out of the surprisingly good source material, and randomly adding baseless and poorly drawn/animated hentai that serves only to bukkake all over their own reputations. Congrats, you fools.

I read the manga just to figure out why and how this show exists, and it turns out they've taken something that is quite solid as a story despite the ravenous depiction of hateful, sexual revenge and adapted it with the utmost incompetence.

So... what is SO bad about the show in the first place? What if you removed all the questionable snuff porn? Well, no. It still wouldn't work, and here's why. First, things don't look pretty. The depictions of the MC's maniacal nature and "OMG if only they knew what this crazy bastard was just saying in that internal monologue wow, WOW..." moments just... look like shit. Also:

Every. Character. Sucks. Like, we get that the main character has surpassed his abusers in the sick and twisted department - but the abusers' particular brand of sick and twisted, on a per abuser basis, just isn't developed adequately. Their motivations are lame, dynamics with other maniacs are... predictable, one-dimensional, oddly "normal" in the sense of an anime which doesn't fit the historically accurate medieval setting. There's no early game of thrones free for all, anything could happen vibes. They actually REMOVE scenes like that from the Manga in the "Anime", for example the fight against Hawkeye where we see perhaps the first truly uh-oh situation Kerayu has found himself having to solve, but facing it anyways because revenge = life. In the show, that is turned into a one-sided "you're 100 years too early" scenario except the punk kid is the guy who embarasses the supposed grizzled badass, and the pretty fantastic death scene of Hawkeye in the Manga is just... ommitted.

Also, ffs the entourage of sex slaves this guy starts picking up on his travels is just... shit. Aside from flare, where it was just so despicably evil what happened there and actually an interesting way to present the character of Flare as she might be without her upbringing and imply the "so then does Freia deserve her fate now that she is no longer Flare, and who is to blame for Flare turning out as she did?". But from there ugh - mentally subordinating the strongest fighters and tacticians and rebels with less difficulty than I face when I put my fucking socks on. These women are not just objects in the eyes of the main character, but also the production staff who drained them of all the bits of life and individualism they exhibit in the Manga although even there it's pretty dry.

What could be done to heal Redo of Healer as an Anime? Well, the mediocre artwork and production in general, boring supporting cast, and outside of the abuser circle jerk resulting in the greatest pool of abuse spooge a fantasy world has ever seen - our main character Kerayuga or w/e his name is - utter lack of interesting dynamics between characters and factions in this universe - just make it seem like this really is all a simplistic dark fantasy playing out in some guy's head. It should be more difficult, targeting all the most powerful, most evil maniacs that exist in the world literally on your own, even with OP abilities and without the burden of a functioning conscience. Really the delivery of the world was bungled, the Manga does a much better job of casting this story as one total fucking loney toon getting exactly the second chance at life he wanted and then starting to run into the issue of what comes next when he's run out of revenge fuel.

Go ahead, give us all the sexual violence and shock value you can muster - we can take it - but please don't forget we're looking to be entertained here. The entertainment value in this show, if plotted over it's runtime, would look a lot like that graph of where people start/stop watching porn videos. Having seen it for some reason, I can't imagine there is anything here you would want to see and I couldn't possibly recommend you waste your time on it.

Circling back to something the Manga deserves credit for - the "cycle of abuse" is the key theme in the story. An imaginiative premise, it explores how trauma can stick in the very soul of a person and become the force that animates them even if they do break free. Abusers do in fact "spread" whatever pathology afflicts them to their victims in some sense.

Being set in some medieval fantasy world where dastardly monarchies employ cultural myths, propaganda, and the sword together to keep the populace under their thumb, it made sense that the people best suited to rule in this environment are brutal killers, intelligent sociopaths, and two-faced backstabbing power addicts looking to write their legacy in blood. So basically a historically accurate fiction, though also with magic and shit. We see through the "Redo" of the world how even a shockingly successful annihilation of literally all terrible tyrants by way of a semi-omnipotent "healer" may very well just be starting the cycle anew.

What is so good about the story as presented in the Manga is that a contrast is drawn between our main character's abusers, who at least have some concrete plan for the world and semblance of connection to and need for it - and their former victim, who has through this cycle of abuse become such a raging narcissist that without a second thought he erases the existence of all living things and begins his journey as the fucking anti-christ. This guy mostly uses the carcass of his previous personality as a tool to convince people that he means well or can be trusted, and he has full access to that personality like a demonic posession or something - but that really isn't the guy anymore. He's not even angry, his desire for revenge is gleeful. He finds the pursuit of it sexually gratifying. This is artwork to him, his biggest dillema is deciding between which mode of revenge will make him nut the hardest, and this in light of the fact that there is a non-trivial risk of death and suffering if things go awry at least in theory... yeah... he has left the building and he ain't comin' back. To him, this is WORTH IT. He will do anything, risk anything, fuck anything, get fucked by anything - to keep the revenge train rollin'. Absolutely fascinating character to be fair, and I do see a large opportunity for development in the Manga which still has not given up an air of sophistication in this one aspect. The MC does have bits and pieces of whatever he was before he became this... thing... but they are afterthoughts and accessories to his all-consuming thirst for constructing elaborate "revenge" at literally every opportunity. He brainstorms with wild abandon potential ways to frame the worst people he can see around him as a target of his revenge, and once he can wishfully think them into the "abuser" role he cackles maniacally and begins to construct and execute daring plots to torment them with precision and poise. Wow, a piece of work indeed. What. The. Fuck.