I just want to say before I jump into these last few points that I’ve wanted to tear this story apart and talk about it like this ever since I finished it, so even if we’re disagreeing on some points I don’t mean to be argumentative or anything, this is just stuff that’s been burning a hole in my mind because I couldn’t stop analyzing and criticizing the series both while and after reading it. Overall I agree with everything else you’ve posted in this thread although I really regret unspoilering the Made in Abyss thing about Bondrewd because I’d managed to block out the specific details in the two years since my Made in Abyss is the worst thing ever made post and just remembered it as being very bad.

Also I just woke up and took my ADHD meds, so I kind of got carried away breaking the story apart and examining it here, sorry about that.

Oh yeah, the Slyphie stuff is fucked up, I just thought it wasn’t as clear-cut in terms of the text handling it poorly in the view of someone who is being extraordinarily generous.

Sorry, I should have phrased it better. Tonally I meant something like “I know this didn’t make the cut of points to raise, but I bet you saw this too right?” To elaborate slightly on the differences between the anime and the novel: the text doesn’t whitewash Rudy’s (or really ________'s, because “Rudy” doesn’t really exist as a distinct person yet) relationship with/intentions for Sylphie the way the anime does, which I think is handling it better than the anime because it makes it completely unambiguously clear that what Rudy thinks and wants is repulsive and toxic which is why Paul conspires to separate them.

I think your claims about Roxie

Roxie’s the middle aged teacher who’s older than both of Rudy’s lives put together. Her relationship with him is problematic in exactly the opposite direction: her own insecurities aside she’s an experienced power figure who was both his teacher and therapist, she takes advantage of him when he’s isolated and melting down with survivor’s guilt over what a complete failure he’s been, and he’s extremely/completely codependent on her to the point that if, say, there were a hypothetical alternate timeline where she died because some jerk who’s Rudy’s narrative and thematic foil conspired to see her dead, he’d be left nonfunctional and never recover beyond being a bitter, violent husk who’s so reprehensible that his perspective and actions would disgust even real timeline Rudy.

rely on really concerning reasoning because the dude is still an adult who, on some intellectual and even emotional levels, is way beyond the kids who are his “peers” and I just don’t think him being stunted is a good excuse for him “romancing” a minor for years in order to fuck her when she’s 18.

Eris’s relationship with Rudy is unhealthy and problematic for a lot of reasons (in fact it’s a pretty close parallel to why Rudy’s relationship with Roxie is problematic, just with the places inverted), but I don’t think it’s as clear cut as just taking ___________'s age and adding it to Rudy’s. Maybe if this sort of memory/ego-intact reincarnation were real that would be a good rule of thumb for determining what’s appropriate for a reincarnated person (although that raises issues in the opposite direction as well).

Rudy has more wherewithal than a literal child, but when he starts working as her tutor he’s stuck in a very weird place of being physically a child, emotionally and socially a young teenager (so still ahead of her in that regard, although he stays there as she does not which I’ll come back to in a second), and intellectually a severely depressed and brainrotted adult who can kind of scrape together lesson plans and interact with the other teachers^[1] maturely. Over the next five years the last bit increasingly breaks down and melts into who he is becoming and the things he is learning as he actually has to grow up and see the world as a real, living world instead of thinking of it as an anime he’s watching or a game he’s playing. Especially when he’s trailing after Rudjerd he’s not exactly regressing but replacing whatever malformed adult ego and experiences he had left over from this world with the sort of socialization and maturation that’s typical of someone growing up in that world. In some regards he’s actively stunted and behind the curve there, because his old ego got in the way of him learning and internalizing all the things that people like Sylphie and Eris were seeing and learning as they grew up, leaving them ahead of him in the context of their world.

Eris is, well, an extremely violent aristocratic faildaughter who’s heavily internalized the lessons her family taught her about society and the world (which are bad) as well as the ones Ghislaine taught her (which are less bad, but still not good). She’s also actively being groomed by her parents towards a unilaterally-arranged marriage with Rudy that her father wants to force to happen. I don’t think the anime actually revealed the extent of that, instead just implying that she’d been coerced (she was) into going to Rudy’s bedroom on his birthday and not really exploring what was going on in her head (she very much did not want to be there) or why she came back (she felt obligated to fulfill the social role that was imposed on her). By the point of the displacement incident she’s more emotionally mature than Rudy and has an ego that it terms of matching the world they live in and its societies is more developed than Rudy’s, but she also has a heavily idealized image of Rudy as someone who is smarter than her (which is admittedly true, Rudy’s an absolute nerd who’s tried to learn everything he can just because he enjoys learning new things^[2], and Eris is a martial arts prodigy who struggles with more abstract things), more mature than her (he’s not, he genuinely does not have the same context for how fucked things are because he thinks he’s the protagonist in a shonen story and things will just work out), and who’s reliable (he’s not, but he is trying very hard to not completely fuck up and let everyone down).

So her fixation on him is not good, it is absolutely toxic and problematic, but it’s also very one-sided and the power dynamics when they do hook up are really messy and bad in both directions. She has a completely unrealistic idea of him on which she is emotionally dependent, but from the other side he’s been keeping her at arms length and just trying to see her back to her family whom he doesn’t want to be involved with further. She took the trauma of the displacement incident in stride and was emotionally prepared for the worst, while he had genuinely thought everything would just work out and is traumatized by seeing the extent of the calamity and realizing almost everyone he ever knew is actually gone forever. She has institutional authority and social status over him even with the deaths of her immediate family, while he is effectively an orphan (despite his parents still being alive, they’re both entirely absent) with no social structure left other than her. She is socially and legally an adult whereas he is very much not, regardless of what his internal identity may or may not be at that point.

The whole scene is very much not good for a lot of reasons, and I’m not going to claim the text (let alone the anime) did a good job of really articulating all the ways it was bad and problematic for both of them. Should Rudy have kept turning her down in line with the conscience he actually managed to develop along the way, even when she pressured him? Sure, but it’s still understandable why he’s not mature enough to do that. Is literally every single aspect of their relationship unhealthy and completely fucked for both of them? Also yes. I just don’t agree that it fits into the model of grooming because that’s predicated on like institutional, social, and legal inequality and a difference in life experience and capability for personal agency that just isn’t there in the story.

Now subsequently, did the author make a good call by taking away Rudy’s dick and making Eris run away to play samurai with a buff catgirl for the next 8 years? Definitely. Confiscating Rudy’s dick privileges until further notice is one of the best things the first half of the series did and I will only begrudgingly admit that he did ultimately earn the right to have them back.

Lastly in terms of what I mentioned, I don’t know what to make of what happens with the mom in the LNs, but in the anime the dynamic of preserving her as someone more gooners would like on promotional material is clear.

You’re gonna hate this, but the anime actually aged her up visually. She’s like 18/19 (and Paul’s 21/22 IIRC) at the start of the story. _________ thinks of Rudy’s parents as still being kids early on in the first novel. Zenith and Lilia (who’s IIRC two years older than her) both just get rendered as a vague late 20s-early 30s or so in the art and stay that way for the next 16+ years. The stasis bit means Zenith is ~28 instead of ~34, but she’s rendered as looking the same as Lilia who’s ~36 by that point. The art in the LNs also shows Zenith as more like late 30s after the whole incident.

[I hit the text limit, I’ll continue later. I don’t disagree with the rest of your post but I do want to respond to it too.]

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1. Tangential to that, can I say I loved the series’s treatment of language and language learning? Rudy’s earnest interest in learning more languages that started at that point in the story was so narratively unnecessary but such a great bit of worldbuilding and characterization and as a language nerd I really appreciated it. ↩︎

2. side note: I mentioned ADHD before, but he absolutely reads as someone with ADHD with the way he goes between enthusiastic obsession with anything new and unfamiliar and bouts of stagnation where he doesn’t want to follow up on it. ↩︎