WARNING – This is an angry review of a naughty show. Some things cannot be said without foul language.
The revenge plot is one of the oldest and most famed stories in fiction. The Count of Monte Cristo, written in 1844, is considered a great work of western literature, and is one of the most pure examples of the revenge fantasy, which has had perhaps countless imitators over the years. Of course, one could cite the Euripides play Medea, first performed in 431BCE, as being the true antecedent of the genre, depicting as it does how the former princess of Colchis took her revenge on the unfaithful husband who abandoned her, with the gods on her side even as she goes through many a terrible movement in ruining Jason.
But despite that legendary pedigree, the revenge story is also one of the easiest sorts of tales to get wrong. It is easy, perilously easy, for revenge stories to degenerate utterly into morasses of edge and skewed priorities that, rather than entertaining, leave a body baffled and often a bit upset.
Even in works that aren’t focused around the revenge theme, it’s easy to fall into the trap of making a protagonist who’s got darkness more and more horrid as though that will make them interesting, or in making the villains of the piece unrealistically terrible as though that’s going to get the audience more invested. The temptation is high for both in revenge stories, because the protagonist of a revenge story is almost always going to be playing in darker territory than your typical hero, given that their motivation includes spite whether or not it’s justified, and because there generally does need to be some reason to personally despise the villains.
Suffice to say, that Redo of Healer is a full-blown revenge story, and one that loves to be dripping in everything taboo. In its construction and in its tone, there are two elephants in the room which I have to address: The Rising of the Shield Hero and Elfen Lied. Be afraid people, be very afraid.
The latter is more of a general touchstone to measure what level of crapsack world we’re on, so I may not need it directly, but for the former, I feel like there’s a fairly direct comparison. Now recall for this, I kind of liked Shield Hero. In fact, I rated it quite highly, largely in respect of executing isekai tropes that should have been tired with the grace and competence needed to make them fun. It had its revenge plot elements, what with the titular character being an outcast pariah for most of the first season, and it had its moments of edge, but by in large I didn’t see it as “the revenge story” about an exiled and mistreated “hero” getting back at others (mostly because Naofumi never started the messes he got into, even if some ultimately ended in satisfying karmic backlash). However, it’s clear that some people did, and many of those who saw it in terms of a revenge plot seemed to find it… somewhere between troubling and revolting, depending on the exact perspective.
I’m not here to argue about Shield Hero, though. I’m here to talk about Redo of Healer. I bring this up, because Redo of Healer makes it clear from the first five minutes that it aggressively wants to be the ultra-taboo, ultra-edgy power fantasy revenge porn spectacular that people who didn’t tend to care for Shield Hero saw in that show. It’s like it took a good look at the controversy, said “hold my torture-rape beer”, and then decided to shout at the top of its lungs what folks accused Shield Hero of whispering.
At least it’s not going to surprise anyone with its nature, I guess. Now, on with the show.
We start with a somewhat disjointed opening in which we see our titular healer, Keyaru, briefly as some kind of psycho, then as a hopeful young man being driven by a mysterious voice in his head (which earns him an all-seeing spirit sight power), and then back in the first life that drove him insane, in which he served as a healer in the war against the Demon Lord. This was a bad experience because he was treated as an abused slave, and also because his healing forced him to experience everything his target had experienced, including all their pain.
As a side-effect of experiencing entire lives from healing people, though, he gained skills and abilities mega-man style, and eventually backstabbed the “heroes” who abused him to defeat the demon lord personally. Using her core, he rewound time, and once his past self got that all-seeing eye at his faint echo suggestion, he fully merged with the past self and became crazed with the desire for vengeance. His first target is set to be his primary abuser, the secretly self-centered and cruel princess Flare, who shows her true colors after he once again passes out in agony his first time regenerating someone’s limb.
His life, after getting the magic stat-o-vision, goes much the same: He’s recruited by Flare, goes through some gratuitous sex scenes with the palace maids (because screwing a Hero apparently lets people go over their normal level cap), experiences the trauma of healing that forces him to relive the target’s experiences (now with a greater focus on copying powers), and after the first time tries to refuse to do it. From there, Flare’s plan B (though she moves to it so fast it might as well be plan A) is to have him drugged, incarcerated in the dungeon, raped constantly, and made so addicted to a special cocktail of drugs that he’ll do anything, even heal, for the next hit. Being prepared for this, though, his lucid moments are much more focused and his drug resistance way higher, leading to him breaking the dependency in good time, regaining his will to take vengeance on Flare as the woman who stole everything from him.
He uses stolen alchemy powers to break out of prison, uses body sculpting to swap with Flare’s captain of the guard (off screen) to get into her chambers, kills her personal bodyguards, and then gets on with the revenge. He restores his face so she’ll know it’s him, drains her magic away, monologues, methodically breaks her fingers in a rigged game, and then commences with the raping. What, you thought this show wasn’t going to go there? This show loves rape. He even makes her beg for it with the threat of being violated with a red-hot poker as the alternative.
To cap this disturbing as hell pile of edge off, Keyaru uses his magic to change Flare’s appearance and rewrite her memory, fakes her death, frames the real captain of the guard, and makes off with what’s left of Flare, slightly re-tailored in appearance and totally bereft of her former identity, now brainwashed into being his… lover would put it too gently. Sex-slave is more apt as she’s totally amnesiac and rewritten to be fawning and loving no matter what degradation is demanded, but there are literal sex slaves in this show so since I’m letting myself have foul language for this one, let’s call her a fuck-toy. He takes the name Keyarga to symbolize his dark rebirth.
Now, there are a few problems with this bit. First of all, the entire “revenge” scene, from revealing himself in Flare’s room until it ends, takes around ten minutes. That may not sound like much, but in episodes of 20 minutes or so I think it means that Flare is being tortured and raped for longer than her screen time up to that point. True, we get enough other scenes of Keyaru suffering due to her machinations that it’s not one hundred percent overbalanced but it’s still… quick. If you want such an extreme payoff, and boy howdy is it extreme, you need a powerful setup. Redo of Healer thinks that if it goes full bore with the intensity of the wrong it will feel good enough that we’ll let it indulge in its twisted fetish material, but I am not so generous. Flare might be a cardboard villain who comes off as enough of a terrible person that Myne from Shield Hero looks like Jessie from Pokemon by comparison, but we didn’t really get a chance to know her. I’m not sure I want to, but for how “lovingly” drawn out the torture and rape are and how freakishly meta-horrific her fate here is, if it was ever going to work (and that’s the if to end all ifs), we would have needed the time to hate her exactly as much as Keyaru does, not just have enough facts to say “well, the scales of cosmic awfulness are probably somewhere vaguely close to in balance”.
Second… dear Haruhi that’s dark. I know this show is dark in general and that revenge stories are dark, but there’s a degree of sadism in this that would be tough to swallow if it was coming from a character who was supposed to be a psychotic eccentric villain. I can imagine Dantes and Medea with looks of horror on their face as they watch just how low blow this guy is willing to go, and how much he… really, really loves and revels in it. Keyaru (or Keyarga, as I should probably get used to calling him) is not technically cast as a villain at a top-tier level of sadistic insanity. Even if he was this would have trouble playing – I think the killer from Se7en showed more humanity and understanding of the gravity of his actions – but he’s very technically and extremely troublingly supposed to be our protagonist. Our hero. The guy we follow and want to see do things in this world. A staple of the well-done entries in the revenge business is that the avenger type… doesn’t typically enjoy their deeds all that much. They may experience satisfaction or peace when it’s done, but they’re typically acting with some sense of justice that compels them to their ruthless behavior. The successful revenge pays off in the completion of a difficult work. Keyaru’s revenge pays off in laughing like a bug-eyed madman and smirking to himself as he teaches the hollow shell of his former enemy to beg him for sex. Whether he’s the product of the abuses done to him or not, Keyarga is a complete monster, that much is clear. And most people don’t like following complete monsters.
Third, this is episode two. Episode bloody two. The grand revenge against Keyarga’s primary tormentor, the one against whom he was the most dearly motivated, the one who seemed to be the instigator of his hell, the source of his woes, the ringleader of the nasties, and the one foe who might have been shrewd enough to play around him, begins about ten minutes into the very second episode and is done and dusted before the curtains rise on #3.
Did no one ever tell the morons behind this that revenge is a dish best served cold? While she didn’t have all that much presence, Flare was very clearly set up as the grandest revenge target. She was the most wicked, the most cunning, the most powerful, and the most directly involved. Conventional storytelling wisdom would insist that Flare be put off for last, and if not strictly last than at least a late point in the story where her downfall would feel like a momentous climax, the completion of the great work, with perhaps a higher peak from the non-revenge subplot the show is trying to push to come after and little else. And sometimes, like now, those rules exist for a reason.
So Keyagra has other targets to pay back, like the other main party heroes he hasn’t even met this go around. So what? The big one’s down, why would I, the viewer, care about the small fry? You can try to build them up on their own, but when the basic setup was so unequal, it’s going to fall flat when you try.
You did the thing that should have ended the show in Episode 2, Redo of Healer! What more do you have to say? Do you seriously think, after this display, I have one iota of interest in whatever the hell was going on with the “demon lord” and her claims of being wronged? Keyagra’s random babble about becoming the strongest healer? (which he should already be as the chosen hero of that type and on his second life with megaman power stealing at that) We don’t. We won’t. We never would. He beat the final boss and committed what should have been the perfect crime at that, complete with a fake corpse, a fake criminal taking the fall, and his own escape free of any further entanglements or complications. You’re done. Pack it up. Go home, you horrible show.
Sadly for me and gladly for anyone who likes my angry material, I’ve got to watch things the whole way through for the purposes of review. Haruhi have mercy.
The next episode introduces the idea of Flare’s previously unmentioned little sister, Norn, who is apparently sharp. Keyagra intends to book it before she gets involved, and I don’t care. We get more pointless cuts to the first timeline, since this show insists that there be a rape every five minutes and it wasn’t getting one otherwise, and extra torture (courtesy of a literally ball-busting Flare, because she’s somehow supposed to be still relevant) is considered a plus. It even goes on and on, with the other “heroes” getting their blows and rapes in. Honestly, I’m just going to stop commenting on these scenes unless they do something worthwhile, but I feel like it’s important to understand their omnipresence, and how they can start nowhere and go nowhere just to fill some kind of edge quotient.
Keyagra comes to a crime-ridden hellhole of a city (what else would exist in this universe?) where people are getting sick because of monster carcasses poisoning the water source (because Shield Hero did it). Keyagra makes an antidote and sells it to profit via merchant (because Shield Hero did it). He uses the profit of his racket to buy a demi-human slave girl (because Shield Hero did it), choosing a sick one that of course he could heal (Because Shield Hero did it), mostly because she seems to be filled with enough murderous hatred for this show. She’s also level-capped, but we’ve already been told enough about this setting to know exactly where that’s going to go.
Once the girl, Setsuna, recovers, Keyagra puts on his best smug face to convince her to both get bedded (because we need an extended and somewhat uncomfortable h scene)and ultimately give up a True Name that will make her a magically bound slave for life. Did I mention that, while her raw design is vaguely adult or at least teen-ish (adult height, something of a figure), her voice work and manner through here seems to be doing everything in its power to give off “child” vibes? And yet somehow this is the closest we’ve yet had to a sane and consenting experience, with only social pressure and manipulation on offer rather than physical violence, drugs, or heavy coercion and mortal threats?
And why the hell is this so focal anyway? It’s like a really bad and fucked up H-doujin (or series thereof) got accidentally sold as the script for a major anime. Anyway, we segue abruptly to her revenge, because nobody cares about transitions, and Keyagra likes revenge and thinks it would be funny for Flare 2.0 to kill soldiers who would have worked for her 1.0 version. He likes the outcome (as he’s almost assured to like present-tense outcomes, it’s that kind of show) because Setsuna is in his estimation potentially even more corrupted by violence than he is – declining to intensify the poison in the town water supply in favor of liking the idea of killing all humans with her bare hands instead. He also comes away from the encounter feeling like the kingdom must be the problem, so burn it all down.
Next up is the swordswoman he healed. She comes after him as he used her unique style in the massacre, and while she actually makes him work a little he wins the duel and takes her in. He uses some trickery and lying by telling the truth (having Flare who doesn’t know she’s Flare pretend to be Flare) to get her to admit that the kingdom might be corrupt. Then, since that’s entirely too fair, goes ahead and drugs the air with aphrodisiacs so he can have his way with her and turn her into another fucktoy pawn for as long as she sticks around. So we can cross off that screed about him limiting his dickery to actual revenge targets since this was someone he claimed to respect and who the audience actually saw as perhaps the only individual in the show with something of a moral compass.
The next attempt to go after him involves using hostages from his village as bait. He learns that the random lady we saw as his mother figure in episode 1 is raped and probably dead (because of course random soldier #4 would gloat about how that happened like it was an awesome piece of entertainment) and the show pretends like Keyarga can go more off the deep end or that he cared. He does his thing to get access to the leader of the effort to catch him, turns the guy into a woman and has him gang raped presumably to death by his own soldiers turned crazy and bestial. Not sure what kills them first since they’re left in a burning building but at least it’s brief. For some reason he can’t save his not-exactly-a-mom despite her being conscious when he first enters the room, because godlike powers are evidently nothing next to the plot saying you got to die.
The hostage thing continues to be used, with a mass execution scheduled in an obvious trap, and Norn said to be behind it. We get another long flashback scene of sexual abuse in which Norn recruited Keyaru as a spy against her sister, but it’s just numb at this point and we know nothing ever came of that.
The episode resolving the trap is mercifully just a bloodbath (though of course at least one sex scene has to get thrown in at the end for no good reason), establishes Flare is alive and brainwashed (not that Flare knows she’s impersonating herself) and sets Norn all the more properly on the case, as it seems she’s gearing up to lead the attack on a city where dwell magical beings in greater numbers.
Maybe it’s just a factor of getting used to Keyarga’s cringe-worthy douchey monologues about how everyone but him is evil and hate is good, but the show gets faintly more tolerable once Norn is in the limelight as the antagonist apparent. She’s a more garden-variety sadistic bitch than her sister (even if she had her moments of the same stuff) and I think the show has largely run out of ways to be creative with its mistreatment of people or unethical intimate encounters by the time she’s making plays. Now, this is more tolerable the way the rack is broadly more “tolerable” than crucifixion, since one is torture and the other is torture and execution, but that’s still something.
The staggering lack of scenes that make me want to chew out my own eyeballs to escape this show continues (though they will return) as Keyarga meets the Demon Lord from his first life. Except at this point, she’s not the Demon Lord but a down-on-her-luck member of a tribe of demonic beings marked for extermination by the current Demon Lord, with massive potential not yet realized. Keyarga convinces this girl, Eve, to accept his help killing the current Demon Lord so she can become the new one and save what’s left of her tribe, remarkably without drugging, coercing, blackmailing, or cajoling her into sex. Not that he doesn’t try, but evidently he’s not going past words and using his harem to shame her for saying no, while flaunting relations in front of her with no shame as an effort to tempt her – which is pretty bad in normal circumstances but practically saintly by Keyarga standards.
The show putters with this for a while. Blah, blah, rumor of a power to plague entire nations Keyarga wants and the show doesn’t have time to give him (not that he’s not already seemed capable of genocide), random sex, cruel and unusual deaths for some fairly random thugs who were after Eve – by this point it’s more boring than heinous. And it’s still pretty heinous. Whether for better or worse (though really, nothing in this show is ever for better) Norn finally shows up with an elite force that Keyarga can’t masturbate about his power over enough to completely write off, and even one of his other targets, the psychopathic lesbian sword hero, Blade, who beat him senseless constantly in his past life because her crush, Flare, used him sexually.
That means it’s time to go after Blade. Keyarga cross-dresses (including a magic (visual) sex change to some degree) to attract her attention, since evidently her pastime is drugging and rape like it is for everyone else in this crapsack setting. He makes contact and gets picked up as planned, but gets into a fight early, finding he can’t take her when she’s got her sword. Luckily identifying a pretty girl as an assassin doesn’t stop Blade from wanting to rape said pretty girl, so she takes Keyarga home and tries to have her way anyway.
Blade is disappointed twice over: once because Keyarga didn’t change his junk (which causes her to freak out and vomit), and the second time because Keyarga has her raped and devoured alive by some thugs he turned into sex-crazed ghouls while he watches, having a nice little dinner with that as the show. Having Blade killed off also allows Keyarga to claim her resonant superweapon, in a new form that suits him – a very evil-looking eyeball-studded claw-gauntlet with his wish for “devastation and immortality”.
Right on cue with that, Norn starts a massacre, Keyarga pretends like he wasn’t going to do his worst already and gives a big douchey speech about how he’s the hero, and we launch into the last episode. Norn’s plan is disrupted when Keyarga once again uses Flare to make a magic hologram PA announcement as Flare without knowing she’s really Flare, which is stupid since Norn already saw that trick and should have accounted for it if she’s supposed to be this terrifying mastermind, but it doesn’t matter much longer. Norn’s last boss guard is dead a couple minutes into the episode and the rest of the run time is like episode 2 all over again: Keyarga being extra creepy by using Flare in an even more brainwashed than usual state (no more than an animal) to put Norn through an unwinnable girl on girl rape “game” with the end result being that he wipes her mind and adds her to the harem.
This isn’t any less overwhelmingly awful the second time. But, at least, the show ends this time around after a little puttering, a hook for the “take down Bullet” sequel that hopefully never happens, and the last note of Keyarga’s psychotic laughter as he declares the whole world is his plaything and the stage for his revenge.
Good gravy, this one was bad.
At the start of the review, I brought up Count of Monte Cristo and Medea as good revenge fantasies, but there’s one that cleaves a little closer to what we’ve got here that I feel I should address Redo of Healer in terms of: Sweeney Todd. Why does Sweeney Todd work, but Redo of Healer doesn’t?
For those who don’t know, Sweeney Todd is the story of a man, a barber by trade, who was years before the story cast into exile on a wrongful accusation, manipulated by a corrupt judge who wanted to steal his wife and the system that supported him. Todd’s wife is presumed dead (he’s lead to believe she is), and his daughter is now the Judge’s ward, who the judge plans to have his way with. He falls in with a twisted pie-seller, Ms. Lovett, and begins his work as a barber in the hopes that he’ll one day soon get unrestricted razor access to the throats of the people who took everything from him. Along the way, Todd is cast into a myopic morass and, fearing that his direct revenge may be beyond him, Lovett convinces him to kill people at semi-random, so that she can dispose of the bodies by making tasty meat pies out of them.
Eventually, Todd gets his chance at the judge, takes it, and then finds out only after she’s killed that the beggar woman who’s been seen throughout the production is, in fact, his ruined wife, causing him to take out Lovett (who knew) and allow himself to be killed.
Like Redo of Healer, Sweeney Todd is a tale of revenge that wants to have fun by going dark places. Its protagonist becomes an outright serial killer, and it certainly goes with a sordid and naughty premise about lust, death, and cannibalism.
Unlike Redo of Healer, Sweeney Todd knows what it takes to make it both compelling and watchable. Todd himself is a tortured soul, and you feel at least some pity for him when he descends from seeking a direct if bloody revenge on some very bad men to general murderous misanthropy. Not because of how much happened to him, but because he was written with some degree of humanity, and loses a big chunk of it about halfway through. He becomes a villain protagonist, but he never really feels like he loves evil or spite or bad things because bad. He doesn’t have a lot of fun; he does awful things because that’s what he’s driven to do, killing the wealthy for their abuses, the poor as a mercy, and the targets of his revenge for their crimes. Lovett does have fun, and even gets Todd to join her in a hell of a gallows humor song about the various flavors of people pies that could be produced… but Lovett is arguably the actual antagonist of the piece, driving Todd’s spiral of insanity and responsible for every step over the line that ultimately comes back to destroy them both.
And, as part of making the Todd character sympathetic, even as a villain, they remember to make him fallible and relatable. Todd doesn’t just suffer brutality heaped upon brutality, he feels and expresses his feelings of impatience, despair and frustration as he tries to grasp a path forward for himself in a screwed up world. The production also offers a b-line with the daughter and a suitor of hers which, while something of a distraction, helps let off a little pressure that would otherwise build with just Todd and Lovett.
I’ll be honest, I’m not totally enamored with Sweeney Todd either. It also played far better to the edgy teen sense of aesthetics than to a more critical eye, but for all its faults and foibles, it looks like a perfect masterpiece when placed next to Redo of Healer.
To put some of my realizations in a concise form at the risk of accuracy… I think revenge plots work better when they’re tragedies.
I hate this show. I absolutely despise it. It’s a simpering pile of edge and taboo that a high schooler would puke up. You know, the one high schooler who everybody is sure is going to end up on five FBI watch lists or worse, because he’s so dang creepy. That’s who wrote this, right?
It makes me sick. Literally. And it’s not the extreme imagery that causes me to feel an unpleasant churning in the back of my throat like I’m going to vomit, though Haruhi knows it doesn’t help. It’s not for the reasons Redo of Healer wants to make me sick. It’s the accumulation of time with its smug and beyond nasty yet of course unbeatable lead. It’s raw sickness at the idea that this garbage is somehow supposed to be wish fulfillment and the terrible knowledge that for some folks out there, it is.
“But reviewer, this show is brave enough to actually tackle dark themes!”. No. It’s juvenile enough to revel in dark themes. Texhnolyze, for all that it hated you, tackled dark themes, facing some absolutely horrid situations head-on. I found plenty of fault with Texhnolyze, but I will admit it had an unwavering dedication to actually executing its vision. That, perhaps with less spite for the viewer, is how you actually go after hard topics. Other dark fantasy and science fiction works, even works that don’t necessarily norm that dark, can have some very extreme scenes. While I have yet to formally review it, the third Garden of Sinners movie, Remaining Sense of Pain, outright opens with a rape scene just about as brutal as any in Redo of Healer (arguably more so for its attention to detail, rather than cutting away or applying porn physics), and then follows a revenge tale predicated upon it. But Garden of Sinners actually knew how to handle its darkness, and gave us a memorable and studied character with several dynamite interactions rather than the ultimate smug invincible villain cast as the hero.
Surprisingly for some, more awful and more extreme doesn’t mean better. It didn’t work for Elfen Lied, it didn’t work for Magical Girl Raising Project or Magical Girl Site, and it doesn’t work here.
I have seldom run across a show I despise this much. Some have been harder to watch in one sense or another, or more technically incompetent, but I wish this one all my worst; it might be the outright most heinous offering that’s been put in front of me. I actually considered pulling this review, just to not give this piece of radioactive horse crap any more attention, but in the end figured that if I had to suffer through it I could at least tell others to never watch or even google it. Fail. Fail, Fail, Fail, Fail, Fail! And no second chances, either.