My most uncomfortable part of Episode 13?

Just finished watching the latest episode and holy fuck it was hard to get through. It was a ton of misery porn but there were some bits I just wanted to ramble about because they fucked me up bad.

Spoilers for episode 13:

!Honestly him torturing Eris was the part that got me the most. The rest of it is bad decisions all the way down, but something about torturing a girl who clearly loves you (in a frankly unhealthily codependent way) while she just doesn’t even try to stop him with tears in her eyes was just…deeply disturbing to me. It felt like he was torturing a loyal puppy, it just churned my stomach a bit, even if they at best only!< >!implied!< >!torture and a beating.!<

!Close second is throwing a bottle at both of his moms. Yes,!< >!both!< >!of his moms, he hit Zenith but he!< >!intended!< >!to hit Lilia and that woman did more to raise his ungrateful ass than Paul did. I was genuinely worried for a second that the bottle was going to kill Zenith, and audibly breathed a sigh of relief when the bleeding stopped and they left his dumb ass alone in that house. It didn’t hit quite the same level of disgust the torture scene did, but the depiction of domestic violence made me so uncomfortable.!<

Which, I understand that those reactions are the point, it’s meant to be a bad timeline, but goddamn. I’m a comic books nerd, so I’m used to the “elseworlds story where everything goes terribly and the MC goes bad” but this one…this one just feels like it’s meant to make Rudeus seem like a straight up villain.

My first and main takeaway was just that Oldeus made basically every wrong choice imaginable, to a degree that actively makes Paul look like a fucking paragon of virtue and restraint. >!Going from actual honest-to-god mistakes, to impulsive bad decisions, to full throated torturing someone who worships the ground you walk on is just…full on villain behavior and it’s really really hard to watch.!<

Honestly MT kind of impresses me with how much it manages to unsettle me. I bounced between “this is genuinely really compelling writing” and “holy shit I despise Rudeus fucking Greyrat” every five minutes when binging the first two seasons, and genuinely thought I was hardened enough to not be phased by the new season.

But no, 13 episodes in and I’m still getting my shit rocked by anime’s most controversial main character and writing entire essays trying to untangle my own feelings about it. (I still haven’t managed to decide if the moral ambiguity is intentional or if the author is just really REALLY bad at understanding the horror level of crimes he has his characters commit)

Anyway, here’s fucking hoping for a nicer episode in the future! (LN readers if that’s not coming please just lie to me and say nice episodes are coming anyway, I think us Anime-only’s need a fluff episode atp)