If you've been around anime a while, you have probably heard of Redo of Healer. It's a rather middling fantasy world revenge story that made a big splash for two major reasons. First, it's borderline hentai in the amount of nudity and actual sex depicted. And secondly, and the reason it's gotten a near universally loathed and nefarious reputation among the reddit-weeb types is that the Main Character enacts revenge on another character in the first episode by viciously raping her. It's revenge for the fact that she imprisoned him for a year and had him raped every day, but what makes it a 'bad' anime is that it shows the MC that we're ostensibly supposed to follow and root for throughout the rest of the show, doing it back to her. Rape=bad of course, so he's seen as permanently irredeemable and it made a lot of people hate the show based on just that. Also, the MC then takes the evil girl he got revenge on via rape, erases all of her memories and personality with magic, and basically imparts a brand new person with a new name and everything into her body, who ends up being a rather likeable and fun typical-waifu character.
Well there's another anime that is just starting to air right now called Haite Kudasai, Takamine-san. It's notable for two reasons. First, it has a near hentai level of nudity in it (no sex, yet). But secondly, in the first episode the female MC falsely accuses the male MC of rape in school, to the point where a bunch of male simp students come in and start beating the shit out of him, the police are called, he's handcuffed and in the process of being dragged away to be prosecuted for a rape he didn't commit. She has a magical power that lets her reverse time to undo things, so she makes him beg her to turn back time and undo the false accusation in exchange for promising to be her slave. We are lead to believe that later on, somehow they're going to fall in love and become an item.
In both instances we have a main character who commits an unspeakable evil act against another character, but then magics away the consequences of that act, and the two people are expected to move on like it never happened and the audience is expected to buy into a blossoming romance between them. The differences between the two actually land in favor of Redo of Healer in that A: the MC has a good reason to do what he did. You might not agree with what he did for revenge, but being imprisoned in a dungeon for a year, addicted to drugs on purpose, and having everyone from guards to animals brought in to regularly beat and sodomize him day after day is at least an understandable motivation to do something similar back to the person who did it. And B: he erases her memories. She has no idea that she was the one who did that to him, or that he raped her as revenge. He knows, but she doesn't. So her falling in love with him is at least buyable.
In Takamine-san, what's the female MCs motivation for falsely accusing the guy of rape so that he'll pledge to be her slave? She uses her time-rewind ability to be perfect at high school. She get's a 98% on a test so she resets time to get 100%. He finds out she's doing this, so she gets him arrested for false-rape in order for him to pledge not to tell on her that she's been cheating at life for years to appear perfect. She does end up rewinding time so that the accusation never happened, but they both keep their memories of it. He still knows all along for the rest of the show this is something she was willing to do to him so she could cheat at high school.
And it's Takamine-san that's given the free pass. I've seen hundreds of comments all saying "it's just a romcom man, the rape thing ends up not being an issue later." and "it's just a niche show about a femdom fetish, it's cool if it's not your thing but that doesn't make it bad". Reddit-weebs falling over themselves to make excuses for Takamine-san and downplay what she does to the guy, all because it's a woman and she shows her tits.
Redo is actual art. All that you mentioned is just the backdrop for the story. What makes them REEEE is that it shows making the world a better place requires being a chad and never simping for women. He ignores the "rights" and opinions of all femoids not just the heroine.
Takamine-san is just a brainless ecchi and coomer bait. No wonder preddiotrs love it.
It is worth noting that the author of the Redo light novels was surprised to find out ton of women buying his books. Targeted male audience only. Goes to show that women, deep down in their subconscious, are not happy with modern feminist society.
Every weeb girl, no exceptions, has fapped to the rape of Flare in episode 2 of the anime.
Its got literally everything girls want in an MC. A psychotic rape chad that abuses and controls women, but also has a sad boi backstory that makes him secretly hurting and needing love. Its comically perfect.
Redo of Healer has far more female purchasers of product than male. The audience base is quite skewed.
A fun fact of the universe was that both Redo and Dress up Darling were getting big around the same time. One was a girly girl show written by a femcel about her self-insert getting a cosplay BF martysue, yet it was primarily consumed by men.
While the "incel revenge fantasy" Redo ended up as the opposite and was everything women wanted.
The vast majority of cutesty but semi-serious romance anime are consumed by men. Dress Up Darling, Horimiya, Angle Next Door, Pseudo Harem, Alya Hides Her Feelings, Makeine, etc. Those shows reveal the real fantasy many men have. Women think that it's being a monster who rapes and dominates, but that is actually their fantasy of a man. When a lot of men really dream about is the kind of girl we see so often in those 'girl' romcoms. Someone who is honest, loyal, caring, genuinely kind and likeable, etc. A normal guy who is truly loved, wanted, appreciated, and respected by an attractive girl who is actually a good person deep down. I think it's because anime is now the only place where men can actually find women like that. They don't really exist in the real world anymore, and it's still the idea men have. It's akin to masturbating for the heart. You know it's not real, it doesn't produce the same level of feeling the real thing would, but it simulates it well enough if your head that it gives you at least an enjoyable approximation of the real thing, at least for a brief time.
I feel personally attacked that I've seen all of these, sans Angel Next Door.
Though I have extreme opinions that most of these start great and then fall into the classic trap of "we need conflict! quick make up some bullshit misunderstanding!!!!"
Which, if we use the "masturbation for the heart" example, is like putting an entire sad drama storyline in the middle of a porn shoot.
Deep down they want to be dominated by a strong man, because they think with their vaginas, contrary to what they would like to believe. Every one of their "romance" novel male leads should be categorized as misogynist, creepy, chauvinist, etc. by their own standards, but because they are a billionaire vampire surgeon pirate with a 10 inch dick and abs, they are given a free pass.
Women don't actually like their modern lives of having to go to an office for 8 hours a day and coming home to some cats and drinking wine. They just do it because they are "supposed" to do it. They actually want a man to be the dominant force in the house and tell them what to do. This is why married women with few partners and children are much more happy than single thots with tattoos and piercings.
I thought it was ok. I didn't mind all the borderline porn stuff, and the actual plot of the time travel and revenge mission was done in an interesting way. His ability to overwrite people's minds and replace them with a different version of themselves was an interesting aspect to the revenge. Sure he killed some of the people who deserved it, and in some pretty satisfying ways, but others he basically just 'killed' the 'them' that was horrible, and replaced them with an objectively better version of themselves. The main pink haired princess in particular actually ends up being a pretty decent and heroic person with that side of her excised and destroyed. My only qualm, and it's more personal preference, was that I would have liked the MC to learn to be a bit less of a bastard overall throughout his revenge story. Keep the fire raging for the revenge targets who deserve it of course, but I would have rated the series slightly higher if he ended up healing himself a bit during the journey. Maybe seeing the changes in the princess that he was originally just using for revenge, and how she ended up actually loving him, and then seeing that someday when the guilty have been punished he's going to need to let go of his hate and actually try to live a decent life like he imagined he would when he was a kid. Maybe the manga does end up doing that later on, but I didn't really see any threads of that in the anime and I think I would have rated it a little higher if I did. I'm a sucker for real heroes every time.
Still, I liked it and would watch a S2 of Redo if it ever got made. I think what I appreciated most was that it was mold-breaking. There are so many animes that are basically the Mexican food of cartoons. The same bundle of overused tropes, plot devices, and character archetypes endlessly reassembled into slightly different variations of the same thing. Redo said fuck that and brought in so much stuff that one would never really expect to actually get made into a mainstream anime. It's a shame it got such a bad reputation because of one of the novel things it did, because it did so many other things that were unique or interesting that blow "I was the losing candidate of the student council election and now I'm reincarnated as the 18th prince of a kingdom on the brink of ruin so I have to use my OP breadmaking skill to save the world" #6592 type animes out of the water.
What the hell are those plots man.
And where do they get these titles? Do they just pipe the original through google translate and call it good? Japanese media has always put me off with their nonsensical English titles.
Actually yes, a lot of them are just bad translations that are close enough. It doesn't help that a lot of animes are based off of webnovels that have long names as a inevitable requirement of the format. A lot of authors start out as amateurs posting chapters for free on web-novel sites. It was recognized that readers often peruse through the lists of available novels and pick what they want to try based on the title alone. So the authors started making the title of their stories into a whole short synopsis of the whole story so that readers would see it and hopefully decided to read theirs. It worked, and that ended up catching on, and when some eventually got picked up to be turned into anime, the long ass tiles stuck. Then for the English translation, sometimes some of the words get dropped or truncated before translation, and then the common slang name is itself a shortening of the anime title, and you end up with shows with really odd names.
Hell, they sometimes do a literal translation and the title becomes totally nonsensical.
Redo of Healer is titled that because he is the "healer hero" of the party and is literally given a redo of his life after they kill the demon lord in the first chapter.
Also, most of the time the titles are either puns or kanji (aka a single character that takes like 3-7 words to spell out) in their original form. So once its translated to any other language it loses all the reasons it was originally made that way.
Supposedly it comes from light novels (which many anime shows are based upon). I guess someone got it in their head that people were confused by ambiguous names, so they started literally just summarizing the plot as the title.
It's a great way to avoid trash most of the time, because actually talented artists still use sane titles.
Close, but not quite. As I said in a parent post, it comes from web novels. There's a handful of Japanese websites where amateur authors post their work chapter by chapter for people to read. The authors learned over time that the readers were skimming through the list of stories and picking what to read based off whether the title caught their eye. Short ambiguous titles just got skipped more often while titles that summed up what the story was about got picked more. Those stories became more popular, and when anime studios started plucking popular stories to animate, it's the ones that had long titles that sum up the story that got chosen, since they were more popular. That trend in turn caused light novel authors to start doing the same thing, even though there was no real reason for them to do so since LN readers tend to make their choices off of cover artwork not titles, but they were following the trend.
I believe you are correct, although I've never seem any discussion on it. It's just "a thing" and didn't start recently, it is used more often now ofc.
"A Turnip Story" is ambiguous, meaningless until you read chapter 1. So like you said, it'll get skipped a lot (unless one looks at the tags, but who does that? Kids these days, eh!)
"I was reincarnated in a fantasy world as a talking turnip & joined the court of the royal palace!" Now THERE'S a title that gets your attention 😋 I'd better copywrite it before it get stolen...
Lol I ain't a nip, I didn't write them.
Have you never watched something from Japan?
Takamine-san is just femdom fetish material, its not a romcom, almost no humor in it whatsoever, just a humiliation ritual for the MC while the girl that "likes" him wrecks him emotionally, mentally, physically, etc.
The art is pretty sick though and I honestly would have fallen for the same shit for someone that looked like her as a high school age male so I don't really blame the kid in the context of the story.
Never read Redo, don't really watch anime and just tend to read, may give it a shot some time now that so many chapters are out.
edit - Read the first 10 or so chapters of Redo, its pretty garbage just in terms of isekai stories(which is already a pretty mediocre genre), art is okay but even the fanservice/eyecandy girls are not anything too special, if you want revenge stories there are just so many better ones, but if you hate women you might enjoy it a bit more
Mato Seihei No Slave / Chained Soldier hit the same fanservice notes. And made it funny. And framed the whole thing in a way where it wasn't abusive. Takamine-san just sucks.
I would call Mato Seihei no Slave much closer to a romcom - I've laughed at several chapters at least - as well as having similarly good art to Takamine-san, definitely handled it better overall.
Funny, I do hate women but I'd only give it about a 6.5/7 out of 10. A 24ep season where the MC eventually starts to heal and become a better person while still enacting justice would have bumped it up to an 8 or 9 to me.
I'd rate it like a 4-4.5/10 so that tracks imo, but it is just because of how completely braindead every single character including the MC is. I just figure if you dislike women it gets bonus points because you get to see strawman women villains and see them properly punished for their crimes.
Skimming replies and not seeing any mention of Shield Hero at all. That one ruffled a lot of a certain group's feathers, with the protagonist being falsely accused of sexual assault and the usual suspects showing up to deny that false accusations ever happen because 1 in 3 is still somehow a sacred cow
Its because Shield Hero got so bad after Season 1 that everybody collectively wants to forget it exists outside the handful of Racoongirl simps still out there.
I think they shut up on that one more quickly because the first season at least got so popular, so they chose to hold off a bit until a more unsympathetic target came along. Also, the one who accused the MC of sexual assault in Shield Hero is a villain and is never really implied to be anything else. The female MC in Takemine who accuses the guy of rape is one of the central protags the audience is supposed to like and cheer for.
Retarded white-knight simps will do anything and everything for even a crumb of pussy.
And there are alot of retarded white-knight simps on reddit.
The Redo of Healer subreddit had some of the funniest memes I've seen in years back when I checked them out... I think it was last year, or maybe 2 years ago now.
I'm not surprised that redditors are disingenuous, whiny faggots though. I don't really care either way because its fiction, but damn you'd think people would learn to stop being such bitches by now.
I guess it's because they've never done anything morally right in their real lives so they have to condemn fictional acts like they're some great evil, its pathetic.
It was far longer than "a year" it was his entire adult life (in the first timeline). Also tortured every day as well. They hooked him on drugs and forced him to heal others even though he felt the full pain of every wound he healed. BUT that's all OK in a leftist mind because he's a (White) male. He lays one finger on a "girl" and he's the evil one in their twisted world view.
Haite Kudasai, Takamine-san looks like a steaming pile of shit, to be honest. The "price" she pays is... taking off underwear? So what if she strips nude first? She jus goes back in time and no one remembers it. Except some rando? Dumb.
Strangely? Both have an identical 6.33 rate on MAL as I write this 😮
But it's not a tale of two animes, it's a tale of THREE animes...
Because the third is Apothecary Diaries, which has culturally accepted prostitution, monarchical polygamy, "I can't believe it's not slavery", and is toping every chart in rankings and sales.
Not a fan of redo, I know the story as far as you have mentioned from general knowledge, not the biggest on rape in story especially happening to men. Takamine-san I never put that together, touché.
It IS really fucked up but it seems people do not like the show that much at least from where I checked. I doubt there's really much of an agenda behind it from the Japanese side of things but westerners obviously lapping it all up and ignoring what actual bad thing has happened there is not even a surprise anymore. They hate heterosexual men and want us gone.
You know you've gotta get used to it by now, the mind of westoids, they will excuse bad behaviours of women because they are women. At first I was shocked and depressed at how lopsided the western culture was but now I got used to it.