YMMV / Redo of Healer

aka: Kaifuku Jutsushi No Yarinaoshi

• Angst? What Angst?: Some fans are rather impressed with Keyaru's lack of squeamishness with using rape as a tactic of war for his benefit, considering he spent at least 4 years of his life on each timeline on the receiving end. Not only has it not rendered him into a broken husk of a man, the rage wrought from the torment has him become something more akin to a conqueror.
• Awesome Music:
  • Despite the polarizing nature of the show itself, many agree that the opening song, "Zankoku na Yume to Nemure" by Minami Kuribayashi, is amazing.
  • There are some standouts in the soundtrack such as "On This Cruel Earth", which plays when Keyaru gets his comeuppance on Flare and "Brave Clash", which plays during the duel between Keyaruga and Kureha.
• Bile Fascination: Oh so much. The series gained a lot of attention for its dark and violent content, which goes so far in terms of darkness and depravity that many find it utterly absurd, but those were the parts that got people into the series in the first place, as they want to see how far it would go.
• Catharsis Factor: As a "revenge fantasy", this series is all about horrible people getting an equally horrible comeuppance at the hands of a former victim.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Well... uh... Where do we start on this? There are all sorts of villains running around that are so ball-bustingly unhinged and sadistic that the wind up coming across as being entertaining to watch just because of how evil they are. It also doesn't help that our Healer Hero Keyaru literally does the exact same things that the Kingdom of Jioral does and is effectively a conqueror who rapes, murders and tortures his way to taking the monstrous kingdom over.
  • Threatening a former abuser with some abuse of his own? Harsh. Offering her to use a red-hot poker as foreplay? Especially disturbing. Actually going through with it in the novel as an afterthought? Darkly hysterical.
  • The memetically (in)famous dick-slapping scene. It has gotten a lot of mileage from how ridiculous it is in an otherwise disturbing scene.
• Designated Hero: The audience is meant to sympathize with Keyaru because he was enslaved by people seen as heroes, then raped and tortured for years while used as little more than an object. When he frees himself, he proceeds to... enslave everyone he wants to, raping and torturing his enemies, and overall doing the exact same things that were done to him, if not worse. While most of his victims are his original tormentors, he expands the scope way further to the point that he's essentially starting a literal war over a few abusers, and even when he's not explicitly raping and torturing he's engaging in a lot of Questionable Consent tricks and use of drugs to influence people.
• Estrogen Brigade: According to the creator, the anime adaptation has more female viewers than average, despite the fact that the anime (and the original light novel) only show Keyaru raping and torturing his sex slaves and his enemies, both of which are all female, while the latter are brainwashed by him.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • With Re:Zero, of all things. Redo of Healer started beating Re:Zero in online popularity polls, which enraged and confused the Re:Zero fans. And Redo of Healer fans, for that matter.
  • A minor one with The Rising of the Shield Hero, who's fans often accuse this series of being a bad copy and Keyaru of being an irredeemable and unlikeable Naofumi. Comparison between the two shows are common, though there are fans of both series.
• Friendly Fandoms: With The Saint's Magic Power Is Omnipotent, weirdly enough, despite how very different both shows are with the only one thing in common being Healers as the Chosen One.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The Redo of Healer fanbase shows to have many fans in Latin America, mostly in Brazil, with fansubs for the anime and fanmade translations of the manga that have been read by thousands of people.
• Iron Woobie:
  • The things inflicted on Keyaru get genuinely uncomfortable to watch, but instead of breaking his spirit, they only hardened him and fueled his thirst for vengeance, resulting in a Determinator who will absolutely not stop until he's thoroughly humiliated the people who tormented him. He also qualifies as Jerkass Woobie due to the rather unsavory things he does to get his revenge.
  • Setsuna and Eve Reese are both examples as well, something Keyaru plays on to recruit them to his cause.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Most of the elites of Jioral crossed it a long time ago with their sadistic rape and murder streaks. Flare and Bullet have their repeated sexual and physical abuse against Keyaru, Renard (and by extension, Norn) has the ransacking of Keyaru's village and the rape and murder of Anna, and Norn likely crossed it a while ago with her sadistic plan to exterminate demonkind.
  • King Proum has his own capture and brainwashing of Kureha. Just like Renard's ransacking of Keyaru's hometown, this is played as seriously as possible without even a single tint of being Laughably Evil or crossing the line twice.
  • The web novel makes it explicitly clear that Keyaru actively looks for reasons to be offended by people, so that he can feel justified in taking Disproportionate Retribution on them.
• Narm:
  • Pick any trope related to facial expressions – like a Slasher Smile or an Evil Laugh – and imagine it in the most over-the-top way you can. This series will find a way to top that. The faces of the characters get so deranged it stops being scary and gets funny. Naturally, a bigger issue for the adaptations in visual media – the manga and the anime – than for the original novels. Even some people compare it to Light Yagami's memetic face.
  • Just how literally everyone is so unbelievably deranged and evil that it stops being repulsive and disgusting and becomes funny instead. There are all sorts of depraved rapists, genocidal world conquerors and sexual deviants running around that are somehow still being worshiped by the public at-large, all of them carrying comically deranged expressions as they Rape, Pillage, and Burn like a parody of an Atrocity Montage. Unlike most revenge fantasies where the protagonists are willing to hold a moral high ground while their targets are legitimately way worse, Healer Hero Keyaru also somehow ends up causing way more harm than King Proum and Bullet on his quest of revenge and is essentially no different from the depraved maniacs he's going up against, making the whole thing even more ridiculous than it already is.
  • The scene where Keyaru tortures Flare with a hot poker becomes darkly humorous due to one shot being identical to the scene of Anakin killing the Younglings.
  • Also from the "dick-slapping" scene, Keyaru using his healing to give himself an erection for the express purpose of slapping Flare across the face with it. It's so out of left field in an otherwise disturbing scene that it's hard (no pun intended) to take seriously.
• Narm Charm: The scene where Keyaru administers so much aphrodisiac to the Knight Captain's elite guards that they turn into what can be accurately described as "rape zombies". The sight of a bunch of burly men with absolutely raging erections growling "WOMAN... RAPE..." is simultaneously unsettling but also weirdly funny in a surreal way.
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity:
  • Despite the controversial content of the story and the fact several countries refuse to legally stream the anime, none of that has done anything to stop it from being one of the highest viewed anime of its season, and it was popular enough that a fully-uncensored Blu-ray and DVD release in Japan was revealed just weeks after the anime started airing (disc releases usually take a few months to confirm).
  • An interview with author Rui Tsukiyo reveals that the series was made with this trope in mind:
    Tsukiyo: Imagine an audience of 100 people. Even if that entire audience somewhat enjoys my show, they aren't going to throw money at it. But if I made a show 50 people love, while the other 50 people tell me to go get myself killed, then the other 50 people who loved it would be willing to pay for it. Having both fans and haters is fine. What matters is how many people are passionate about the show. I was prepared to face controversy from the beginning.
• Periphery Demographic: Rui Tsukiyo tweeted late in the anime's airing that the show's online viewing statistics showed that it had a higher percentage of female viewers as compared to other typical anime. A common element found on Japanese Twitter is that the most appealing part of the story to the female audience is that Keyaru is a rough and commanding man who simultaneously has a traumatic past full of suffering.
• Signature Scene:
  • The scene where Keyaru tortures, rapes, and enslaves Flare is basically the Establishing Series Moment.
  • In the anime, the scene of Keyaru slapping Flare with his erection has gained a lot of traction online.
  • The duel between Keyaruga and Kureha caught many viewers by surprise as being surprisingly impressive for a series that many considered cheap revenge erotica.
• So Bad, It's Good: Many people think that the "revenge fantasy" angle doesn't work, but not all of them hate the series for it. Instead, some of them find it to be a decidedly outrageous Black Comedy.
• Tear Jerker: Just the fact that Keyaru Used to Be a Sweet Kid until becoming the Healing Hero ruined his life and all the abuse he was forced to endure twisted him into being almost as bad as the villains.
  • Anna's horrific fate. One of the few times the viewer can sympathize with post-loop Keyaru when he mourns her death.
  • The death of Caruman (or the Sweet Baker in the manga adaptation) who Keyaru had befriended in Branicca. They were among the few genuinely nice people who brought out a better side in Keyaru, if only for a while.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: While quite a bit of the audience likes Freia, many wish the story would have continued with Flare instead, as her domineering, bitchy personality and overall better character design. Made Flare a more attractive and interesting character; in comparison to Freia's submissive and blander personality in a number of the fan’s eyes.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The main character is a Serial Rapist, a very creative torturer with a harem of slaves made out of women he brought or outright captured and made from his enemies, wages a literal war against the Demon King and the Kingdom of Jioral and comes out winning... but his enemies are even worse because they don't even have the redeeming qualities he has. It's very easy to end up not caring about what happens to anyone, unless you're into rape, sex and Black Comedy scenes.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • While many do sympathize with Keyaru, there are some who lose sympathy for the fact that he ends up becoming just as sadistic as his tormentors while only marginally being A Lighter Shade of Black. The main thing that he has in his favor is that the people he tortures tend to be worse than him and taking them out makes the world a better place. However, that isn't enough for some people to root for him. And many don't find him all that likable even taking his ordeal into consideration. At the end of the day, Keyaru is a traveling mercenary, slave-owner, serial rapist and war-mongerer who, in the Light Novel, eventually begins to target women who were simply nasty to him instead of people who actively tortured him for years at a time, ultimately making him just as bad for the world as the tyrants he opposes.
  • Kureha. The fact that she came at the guy who healed her and gave her back her sword arm, fainting in agony doing so, abjectly refusing to hear his side of the story, repeatedly trying to kill him when he gave her every possible chance to walk away and perform an independent investigation, and then attacking Setsuna's character, and rendering Freia unconscious with a punch to the gut, for the "crime" of testifying on his behalf, even treating the very real memories of the royal soldiers who went on slave hunts as mere illusions, has made her loathed by a significant portion of the fanbase who thinks she got off way, way too easy. The fact that she continues to see Norn as a Princess Classic, even after seeing the Kingdom's corruption firsthand, doesn't help.

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