[continuing from where I left off; I got dragged off right after starting this]

Ultimately it’s a matter of 5-6 years difference for a character who’s already close to 30. There’s so little material difference there, especially with how the art kind of flattens age ranges weirdly and handles characters inconsistently anyways. IIRC the art of Rudy in his 20s has him still looking younger than Paul did in the very beginning. I don’t know how the anime is going to handle Zenith going forwards, but in the books after that point she’s always just this sort of quasi-senile grandmother who’s non-verbal but still capable of doing day to day tasks with some supervision, and people are worried about her but don’t know what to do, and that’s the sum total of her presence in the story until like book 20 or so.

I know you assume the worst of it there, but I do genuinely think there isn’t anything deeper than a simple plot device to avoid having to justify the whole rescue story further^[1], except maybe the author seeing a good opportunity to further explore the whole concept of “blessed/cursed children” which end up being a major plot point with regards to what is even going on with the story.

I would also like to say that there’s a problem in your reasoning as you present it, which is that you’re using information that was cut out in the process of making the anime adaptation to interpret the anime, when none of that stuff, none of that extra criticism and recharacterization, actually exists or will ever exist within the anime (obviously the stuff later in the plot might, but that’s not really adequate). imo it makes much more sense to conclude that the LNs are duly critical but the adaptation transforms the work into frequently-uncritical gooner shit, like a parody that is adapted into being played straight.

That’s a fair point. Losing the revulsion and self-crit from Rudy’s inner monologue really does make the anime come across as way more ambiguous, for all that it keeps following along and reaching the same plot points and conclusions as the novels. Even in the text it is not always clear what is being presented uncritically vs being something that is clearly wrong: a lot of the driving drama comes from Rudy being wrong about stuff and the PoV is stuck firmly in his head most of the time so there’s no real refutation of it until the plot demonstrates it as wrong and he has to reflect on it and criticize himself. There are also issues where his inner monologue does clearly identify something as wrong and harmful, and then he just doesn’t act on it: Lilia grooming and verbally abusing Aisha to try to impose a specific subservient social role on her gets called out multiple times but apart from not engaging it with it and instead encouraging Aisha to just make her own decisions, he never actually confronts Lilia about it and eventually she just sort of stops on her own and Aisha ends up being her own person with agency and goals unrelated to Rudy and which he’s generally unaware of anyways.

So yeah, I will agree to an extent that the anime did not go far enough in differentiating “Rudy does an anime sex pest cliche, which is bad actually because this is supposed to be a real living world and not a cliche anime world so it’s a crime instead of a funny little thing, you should hate him as if he’d done it in real life because even he hates himself for this shit” from “this is an anime and Rudy does anime sex pest cliches on screen for your entertainment, like every other anime does”, and even the novels didn’t always go far enough and didn’t always differentiate between Rudy’s brainworms wriggling and being awful and an actual authorial endorsement of an idea very well. I just don’t agree that’s enough to condemn it outright, though: it is still the same story, missteps, omissions, and small changes aside, and it’s ultimately going towards the same state of Rudy having self-critted and healthy-socializationed his way into being a somewhat decent person who respects others but has big blindspots and isn’t particularly proactive in addressing problems systemic or otherwise, and also towards all the really wild plot nonsense that should kick off with the next season.

Like I love the story’s worldbuilding, all the effort that went into trying to make it feel diegetically real and vibrant and internally consistent, I like the overarching themes of redemption and personal growth that come to explicitly pro-social conclusions, I like that despite having a harem slop core it makes a point of respecting its female characters as characters who exist in their own right and have their own personal agency even if it could have still done more of that, this might be double dipping on the redemption point but I really cannot stress enough how much I like the transformation of Rudy from the literal worst guy ever into an empathetic and respectful person who centers the needs of others for all that he’s still brainrotted and gross at times, I love how weird the overall plot ends up being and how it explicitly ties back into the themes of empathy and respect for and reliance on others, and I am relieved that it never just randomly threw in homophobic or transphobic caricatures which is an absurdly low bar to clear that still filters out so many series. I do feel like these things do (in the books) or will (in the anime) outweigh the bad stuff and the borderline stuff even in the anime, for all that I really don’t know if the anime can legitimately stand on its own right now.

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1. Funny aside, for as much as the author really likes exploring the worldbuilding of dungeons as like a sort of quasi-living monster of their own and likes talking about them and how they work, they only get used in full for that one specific plotline. They show up a few more times and characters talk about them semi-regularly, but there isn’t another earnest dungeon crawl like that one ever again. ↩︎