I skim the raws for this arc similarly to Tatsuya-Kai. Anything with "mind control" or "selective amnesia" is a contrived plot device by a bad author.
The one and ONLY time I've seen it pulled off well, it was a video game. And only ONE of the games in that series: (not a spoiler since it's in the name) "Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs".
Not the first one?
Not that I know much about either, been years since I played Dark Descent, and was stuck without oil and not knowing where to go after going down the elevator, and did not play Machine for Pigs because in my mind it screamed "sequel".
It's almost like he lost all of his memories and thus isn't the same useful and not naive person he was before he got mind wiped!
So... he is not the character we have been following before this arc, and thus any of our connections with said character are turned into annoyance until he starts
at least acting as the original one?
As TNT261 mentions, this type of amnesia has to have a
goal that improves the character. We either see them acting how they would without a memoy or trauma that would usually change their behavior. An evil person without the baggage that turned them evil, a good person without the situation that made them become good, someone that learned to think things through acting as before they learned that lesson.
Something that gives us character development through removing the development we did not get to see, so we have the before-after contrast.
Which... we do not have here.
That said, I believe people are being a bit unfair with amnesia and brainwashing. These
can work if used well...
For example,
this arc could have been saved if the scenes of the main character until this chapter had been kept to the minimum, giving the focus to the other characters and skipping
him for all but the major scenes.
In-between, show that Elma had been seduced to betray him, show him helping the people at the docks but being driven away before the others see him, then show Elma trying to confess to him. Somewhere in the middle, put a scene of him rejecting the saintess, showing that the brainwashing is not enough.
Everything else of the MC between then and now is better skipped.
Every other scene should focus on the others' reactions.
That should cut this to 4 scenes of the boat group, about 4 scenes of the rest of the main cast. This could probably be compressed to two chapters instead of 8, easily.
Then we reach
this chapter.
I will say the point is generally just to give people who have issues (potentially severe triggers from traumatic incidents) with certain stuff a heads up. And I mean thinking about it from that perspective I don't think it would matter if there was actual touching. I guess this could be solved with a "sexual violence hinted at" tag.
I personally think that these warnings should be kept at a minimum to not ruin the story. "Sexual violence" should only be tagged if there is an explicit scene about it, even if the act itself is stopped. Which is not this case.
But again, I had a story I was reading online ruined by those.
Picture yourself: at the start of the chapter there is a "trigger warning: abortion". You expect that at some point of the chapter there will be a mention of it, or that there will be a scene with it being caused, so you prepare yourself.
Instead...
At the end, on one of the last lines of the chapter, the woman they were rescuing says "I lost the baby".
That was it. The whole, long chapter, and the trigger warning is for something at the end of it, something that was clearly meant to be a big deal or surprise but that was ruined because... get this, it was given a
very explicit trigger warning at the start of it.
That's like if there was a story about a "will they won't they" couple, then at the start of a chapter there a warning at the start of "they kiss" but the whole chapter until the end was just like a normal chapter.
People don't know how to Trigger Warn.
