I appreciate the fact that the MC still obviously has a moral code of some sort, and doesn't want to compromise it. I called that he would go easier on the children, because even if they were rotten little shits, and wannabe murderers, they still hadn't actually murdered anyone, and were thus "more innocent." And he did. Conscripting them all into the military is probably the best thing that could have happened to them. A few of them might even end up turning out all right.
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@Alrange , I keep comparing this to the Healer Hero in my head, because while there are lots of super edgy hero revenge stories out there, Healer Hero is probably the most well known one. And this really is just better in every way. Healer has no redeeming qualities as a person whatsoever, and is just as bad as the people he's hunting down and taking revenge on. He proves that constantly. And the manga desperately tries to make up for that by making the villains even more over-the-top, but it never really manages to pull it off, because every single character has already totally jumped the shark, morally speaking. Why is the MC being raped so heinous when he turns around and rapes people himself? Why should I take him seriously about how much he hated being tortured, drugged, and abused, when he tortures, drugs, and abuses people on the regular? Healer Hero is the story of a self-righteous devil amongst other devils. It tries to make us sympathize with one in particular, and fails almost immediately. It would be a more interesting story if no effort was made to try and make the Healer sympathetic, if it simply embraced him as being Yet Another Asshole, who just so happens to have the power to screw over all the other assholes. But it never embraces that, it still won't give up on trying to make him seem sympathetic. And as a result, it just becomes cringey, awkward, and almost a parody of itself.
By contrast, the MC in this story IS a head and shoulders above everyone he is taking revenge on. He was clearly working for villains disguised as noble heroes, but even though his revenges are creative and sadistic, he never stoops to their level. He doesn't involve innocents (Healer Hero frequently involves innocents and doesn't give two shits about it), he avoids unnecessary killing (Healer Hero functionally slaughters everyone who gets in his way), and he always goes the extra mile to make sure their punishment fits their crime (Healer Hero doesn't care about the justice aspect of what he does, he just wants visceral emotional satisfaction).
Healer feels like a sadistic sociopath amongst other sadistic sociopaths lamenting how unfair it is that anyone would behave sadistically towards him specifically. He comes across as a delusional narcissist and total hypocrite. This hero, though, in spite of having clearly become unhinged by what he experienced, still has a degree of morality and purity about him. He feels almost like the classical Revenant from fantasy and mythology, a dead man who has risen temporarily from the grave solely to pursue a wrong and right it.
Every noire detective or byronic hero is interesting because they have some moral code, something that holds their head above the dirty water that the rest of the world as sunken into. That is what makes them such compelling characters. The bitter detective may be a sarcastic and selfish asshole, but he believes in justice and won't hurt women or children, even if it comes back to bite him in the ass, and his pursuit of justice and refusal to cross lines in a world comprised entirely of lines that have been crossed is what makes him a character we can not only like, but sympathize with.
This MC is a proper byronic hero. Healer is just a morality-free manchild throwing a temper tantrum and using his cheat powers to enable it. We are told to empathize with Healer, and we really don't, because he's not behaving in a way most of us would even if we were in his shoes. But we naturally do empathize with hero, because not only does he have a sense of justice, but he actually is doing the things most of us wish we COULD do if we were in his shoes. We actually feel like Hero has accomplished something when one of his revenges gets taken care of, like the world has been made a somewhat better place because of his actions, even if he does cast himself in the role of a villain. Healer, by contrast, just seems like the sort of person Hero would devote an arc to trapping and killing. I see no real difference between Healer and the antagonists of this story. Like them, he has an over the top sob story background, unintentionally like them, it doesn't really justify anything he does, and we would all cheer if this hero were to drag what Healer has done out into the open, corner him, and then karmically deal with him.
Fundamentally, Healer is a villain LARPing as a hero. This hero is the exact opposite, a hero who has cast himself into the role of the dark-caped villain and yet still feels unmistakably heroic. This manga is what the Healer Hero mangaka tried to write, but he's too much of a fucking edgelord to manage it, and doesn't actually understand the point of a byronic protagonist keeping their head above water with their one rule that they won't break, or their one sense of morality and justice that they won't let go of.