As I get older, I find myself growing sensitive to violence in stories. Saw never used to trouble me; it does now. Redo of Healer troubled me with its violence and sexual abuse. The version of the anime I watched was censored, but that censorship made the rape and violence even worse. Redo of Healer explores Keyaru’s quest for revenge after he’s exploited, drugged, and sexually abused because of his abilities as the Hero of Recovery. All the destined heroes in the story act as villains, enslaving and otherwise abusing their power to indulge their every kink and whim. In fact, the sexual exploitation and violence becomes so over-the-top that I wonder if Rui Tsukiyo, the original author of the series, isn’t an edgy 17-year-old. The violence and misogynistic views of women become so extreme. The only good characters that appear as good merely so they can die to showcase the depravity of the Heroes. These side characters, especially the character Anna, act as plot devices. Some of this might be the run-time of the anime compressing things.
Of all the heroes, Keyaru becomes the most depraved as he enacts his vengeance. He justifies his actions and sees himself as a hero for justice since justice can’t be served in any other way. This provides a mildly interesting look at a sociopath’s worldview, and Keyaru is a sociopathic killer. The scenes of his revenge are brutal. He takes everything done to him–the rape, beatings, cuttings, and other cruelties, and multiplies them by 10.
Spoiler
When Keyaru gets his revenge on Flare, the princess who sets up his imprisonment, drugging, and abuse, he breaks her. He beats her, rapes her, and uses his healing ability to shatter her mind, erasing her memories and changing her personality to make her kind and pliable. She then joins him on his journey for revenge, seeing to his every whim–including sex every morning. In this way, he gets to continually savor his revenge on her. He later does the same with her younger sister Norn.
End Spoiler
Keyaru collects a harem as he works on his revenge because who’s more charming than a sociopath? Actually, each of the girls fall under Stockholm’s Syndrome with their dependence and fawning over him. Of the harem, Kureha makes the least amount of sense with how easily she falls for him. Rape in the story is not only a weapon, but it’s the path to love! Keyaru’s daily rapes–the girls’ consent isn’t true consent because of their mental situation–aligns with incel views and fantasies of women. To say I felt uncomfortable watching this anime is an understatement. I considered abandoning it (again), but stories like this need to be addressed. While I have no qualms about a story taking the side of a villain, Redo of Healer handles this in a voyeuristic way. It invites the audience to take pleasure with Keyaru as he rapes and tortures. You could see this as a purposeful way to make the audience feel uncomfortable about the dark side of their nature. However, because all the Heroes are shown as depraved and deserving, even when shown outside of Keyaru’s perspective, the story wants the audience to revel with Keyaru. Other than a few side characters, everyone appears as a villain. There’s no contrast between Keyaru’s perspective and the “narrator’s” perspective. I had the impression that the story wanted you to say “Yeah, get them Keyaru!” It’s not often I wanted to see a main character die in a story, and I wanted Keyaru to die.
The version I watched was censored with dark blobs over breasts and slow pans over the environment during the brutalizing scenes. While showing the scenes would’ve added to the voyeuristic element, censorship made the scenes even more horrifying. The scenes retained the sound and dialogue and sometimes broke into momentary cuts of the woman, always the woman, in some degraded position or tormented expression. Perhaps because I have a vivid imagination and have read far too much true crime and history, this censorship escalated the brutality. The unrelenting nature of these scenes, which lasted seemingly half an episode, will hook into unhealthy young men’s psyche. If you spend much time on forums with these troubled young men, you see they already consume such content. Keyaru could become the hero Keyaru envisions himself to be in the perspective of these young men.
Sometimes Keyaru’s self-righteous statements reveals the blindness to the evil he’s doing. He will make a statement about one of the other Hero’s depravity soon after tormenting that Hero. I’m uncertain if the story’s author and the anime adapter intends the the audience to see the irony or to strike a vindictive note. For every moment the story begins to feel as a commentary about evil, there’s another moment that invites the audience to celebrate and identify with Keyaru. This would be an interesting dynamic, if the Heroes and most everyone wasn’t evil too. The story’s message suggests evil can only be overcome with a harder evil, with the utter destruction of mind, body, and soul of the original evil doer. Redo of Healer, at the least, shows how ugly revenge can be. It looks deep and unflinchingly at the psychology of a villain who was made by the heroes. Villains exist because heroes exist; when the heroes are villains themselves, the villain becomes a demon. If Redo of Hero aims at explaining a villain’s self-righteous pathology, how it does it distracts too much. It didn’t have to linger so long on every instance of Keyaru’s revenge. When scenes step away from Keyaru’s perspective fail to contrast enough to make the story turn into commentary on evil. There’s too much edginess and, again, voyeurism to how evil is presented. Rape, slavery, and violence become plot devices and are handled without the care and nuance necessary to give them the weight they need to have.
Redo of Healer may be trying to analyze evil, but it’s a thimble filled with tea that’s trying to pass itself off as a teapot. Keyaru has no redeeming qualities, which makes him a terrible villain and anti-hero. The story is poorly handled, reducing characters and rape into plot devices, having an undeveloped, generic world full of one-dimensional characters that exist merely for Keyaru to hate and kill. Keyaru embodies evil that thinks itself good, but this isn’t developed with any finesse.
Avoid this one.
