In the LNs the monologue at the end of season two is the turning point where Rudy starts being sort of a fundamentally decent and healthy if vapid and very flawed person. He never really comes to believe in anything more than wanting to hang out and make cool stuff with his friends and family and is entirely dragged along by crises and necessity getting in the way of his dreams of just chilling and never doing anything dangerous ever again, but is also just a sort of respectful and empathic person towards people who aren't actively out to hurt him or the people around him.

The failure to ever reckon with the thriving slave trade in the place he chose to make his home, or to follow through on any of the identified social ills he kind of notices and goes "damn that sucks huh" and then immediately forgets about, is the big glaring flaw with the otherwise very good latter half of the novels.

Oh, and the whole apparent gay panic thing he does in the anime is contextualized differently in the LN, with him being way more "wait, I'm in love with another man? Guess I'm gay or bi or something and just have to accept that, because I am very much in love with him," and even all the obsessive trying to "make sure" is couched in passages of him telling himself that the most important thing was respecting what "Fitz" wanted to identify as regardless of what he found. There's just the dichotomy between his inner principles and him being an obsessive weirdo who can't help but pry.

That's why my take on the author is that he seems like kind of a vapid lib rather than a chud. Rudy's meant to be flawed and kind of unmotivated to actually change the world around himself after changing himself, but the themes of the novels are resoundingly cynical about violence and emphasize over and over this focus on respecting others and not treating them as playthings or trying to control them. That's why even if Rudy isn't the sort who'd stick his neck out to stop the slave trade (because he's a flawed grillman ), the text should have still found a way to cast that as a clear failing of his, that he's wrong for taking this stance, and that it instead just kind of went along with his bullshit rationalizations and that the author seems to agree with those rationalizations is a huge problem with what is otherwise the best stretch of the series.

[–] Awoo@hexbear.net 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That's why my take on the author is that he seems like kind of a vapid lib rather than a chud.

This was what I assumed. Shield Hero has the ideology of a chud. Mushoku has the ideology of a lib with almost no political education beyond passive absorption so they're very muddled and brainwormed.

Anyway with all that said I still condemn the fuck out of reborn adults who go on to date teenagers. It's an incredibly shitty narrative tool where the "adult" part is just forgotten because it only exists as a marketing gimmick in the first place to tick 3 or 4 different marketing groups.

[–] KobaCumTribute@hexbear.net 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah literally none of Rudy's relationships are healthy or ok. The anime did kind of do Sylphie dirty compared to the ice cold veteran who had to grow up way too fast she is in the books (in the anime she's way too fluttery and flustered all the time, vs the books where she's explicitly supposed to be the shoujo Prince archetype), but her relationship with Rudy really is not healthy; the early books even had a sequence of what was basically Paul turning to the camera and explaining over a page or two exactly why grooming and codependency are bad and unhealthy and how it would be extremely toxic and harmful if Sylphie were codependent on Rudy, leading to the plan to split them apart so they could each grow and be their own person. Then there's the inverse with Roxie whom he unironically worships as a literal god and who took advantage of him when he was a complete wreck of guilt, goaded along by Sylphie's shitbag grandmother. Nothing about either direction of his relationship with Eris is healthy or ok either, neither the bit that the anime covered nor what will happen presumably at the end of the next season or in the one after that.

[–] Awoo@hexbear.net 4 points 2 days ago

All of these relationships are probably personal experiences from different parts of the author's life.