Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation

[KrayZ33]

out of your list there, the only relevant point from all that is: "why wasn't police involved?"

Because all the other points you mentioned either enable bullying in the first place or are your personal thoughts on this even though the show doesn't mention nor show any of that, or aren't even true.
His parents actually did something too.


Good question though, not sure if you involve police here or if you straight up sue the bullies' parents.

The point isn't to raise awareness btw, that's like saying when a character has cancer it is supposed to remind us of how bad cancer is.

[MFauli]

The point isn't to raise awareness btw, that's like saying when a character has cancer it is supposed to remind us of how bad cancer is.

Yes, but then do it better still. The way it's done in Mushoku is like "btw Rudy had cancer LULZ".

You could take my criticism to other anime, too btw, if that's confusing you. I have disliked the whole "delinquents at school bully others without consequences" for some time now. I even dropped a basketball anime that aired, I dunno, 1-3 years ago, because the delinquents gave off such rapey vibes that I couldn't stand any scenes with them and the girls, always made me think "at some point, they're gonna threaten to rape or actually rape one of the girls". And that's just from the shitty "no consequences" presentation - that anime didn't actually have any rape or such (probably).

As you know, I'm absolutely against censorship and I don't think fiction leads to reality. However, when something is THAT normalized in popular fiction, then it might create a bad mindspace in the people watching it. I mean, fuck, anime taught me that civil courage doesn't exist in Japan, so better don't expect nor offer it myself, right? WRONG. Even if it's true, unless your story is about social criticism, why not show it OUGHT to be?!

In Rudy's case, I would have liked to see either a smoother progression of the bullying that shows how it could realistically get to that point OR show that his teachers, classmates, parents and directors actually react properly aka the bullies are thrown out of school, punished by law, the school mates are all "poor Rudy, hope he gets better soon" and the parents are "this is so terrible what happened to our poor son *sobs*" and the director is like "we cannot let something like that happen ever again! This poor boy shows us our own mistakes!". And so on. Of course, not 100% of these people would be that empathic with Rudy. And you could still have Rudy be miserable, because just because people are empathic with you doesn't necessarily heal your wounds. So the "evolution" into the gross Rudy we were introduced to in the beginning could still be happening.

Instead the anime throws this non-sensical hyper-extreme bullying at the audience and expects it to work. That's just too shallow, especially for this anime that prides itself on going into details usually. It went the trope route here, and while most won't complain about this, as evident in this thread, I do, because I demand better.