Redo the Healer - Anime Review

I'm going to start by saying I am not going to be addressing all the controversy surrounding this show in the review because I just want to look at the show for what it is without getting into all the political and social discourse surrounding it. I think Redo the Healer deserves to be judged purely on its merit as art, despite what is going on around it.

Redo the Healer is a very dark show with visions of some pretty intense verbal, physical, and sexual abuse. The entire premise of the show is it starts after Keyaru, despite allegedly only being a Healer, manages to fell the Demon Lord and obtain the Philosopher's Stone. Using the stone he rewinds time and with his knowledge, he will gain incredible power and seek revenge on all those who wronged him throughout his first life. This is really where the dark aspects of the show kick in. If anything in the first sentence of the paragraph bothers you, I suggest stopping the review here because I can't talk about it without talking about some pretty graphic stuff.

Originally Keyaru refused to act as a Healer because of the nature of the power in this world, he sees the memories and experiences of anyone he heals. Considering he is healing people in the middle of a war, he is constantly bombarded with all types of horrible experiences. To get him to heal, he is beaten and abused, eventually being made addicted to a certain kind of drug to get him to heal in exchange for feeding his addiction. And as it turns out, the other Hero's are horrible people. He is constantly raped, abused, and degraded by the other Hero's. During this timeline, he makes sure to return the same abuse, and in many ways far worse, to his abusers. If there is a theme here, it's that a person can only be pushed so far before they snap, and the effects constant abuse can have on a person's psyche. And for a few episodes, it works well if you're able to sit through the horrible things Keyaru ends up doing in the name of revenge.

The problem comes when you realize that Keyaru is pretty much an irredeemable piece of shit. His perversions begin to expand beyond just those who abused him and he ends up doing horrible things to many other girls who he forces to become part of his little harem (In addition to a couple of those who originally abused him). On one hand, it does great to show how far his mind has fallen, on the other this show goes on for twelve episodes. By the end of the third episode the shock of his actions has pretty much worn off and the point has already been made. Why this is a problem is now the series is just watching him being a horrible human being in pretty much every respect.

You can't even root for his potential failure either though, because all of his foes are equally terrible human beings. The only good people in this show are manipulated into becoming part of his Harem and drained of anything that made them interesting as characters. It feels like the entire season ran out of commentary less than a third of the way through, which would be fine if there was at least something to help pick up the slack. And frankly, it doesn't come from the story or any of its other themes. It has some things to say about racism, but it's so blunt and lacking in any depth it doesn't feel like it matters at all to what's going on. It's more important that the viewer knows Keyaru forces sisters to have sex and alters the memories of one of his abusers to think she is his lost little sister so he can also continue to have sex with her. If you are starting to think this sounds like the plot of a Hentai full of taboo rape fantasies, you'd be right. Except this show isn't hentai, it's not trying to be sexy for the viewer. Meaning once the shock wears off it just doesn't feel like it has anything to offer. What makes it all worse is everyone becomes so over the top in how evil and depraved they are it becomes hard to take seriously. During his flashbacks to his previous life, he regularly suffered so much blunt force trauma to his dick from it getting kicked there it puts the testicular punishment of the 'Ow my Balls guy' to shame.

Even with all that, at least you can get by with some good action. Redo the Healer, however, fails here. While there are a handful of wonderfully bloody scenes, like the mass death of soldiers that take place within a magical barrier, the show weirdly seems to hold back on the blood and violence. Anytime Keyaru gets into a fight it's always when he is at such an advantage there is pretty much no chance of failure, so without at least having a spectacle to enjoy the fighting in the show is pretty much boring. It's so strange that a show willing to go this far to shock its audience just doesn't commit when the violence gets going, so you can't even enjoy an over-the-top spectacle as you could in all those old 80's schlock anime that coasted on that. It just feels like a show that didn't have enough to say to justify such a long run.

A final point I will criticize is this, and this will act as an apology for making fun of Naruto for years because of how liberally it used the term 'Ninja'. Naruto treated that term with more dignity and respect than this show treats 'Healing'. He can use his healing to change appearances, erase and rewrite memories, travel through time, mimic others' abilities, and multiple other things that you would not think to relate to healing. Also, Alchemy is the ability to touch material and cause it to fucking disintegrate.

At first, I wanted to like this show because it had a unique and dark premise. But in the end, the flaws just kept piling up one after the other, and it isn't long before the show just runs out of interesting things to say and feels like it just keeps hitting the same note over and over again. There is some solid animation, good art design, and a good premise that just never gets delivered on. The only reason I don't also go into more issues in detail, like the bizarre tonal shifts the show seems to go through, is because those just starting to feel like nitpicking. Were it not for the controversy surrounding this show, I honestly don't think it would have picked up nearly the attention it got.