Max and the magical pen Once upon a time, in a small village, lived a curious and imaginative boy named Max. Max was not like the other children; he had a special gift. He possessed a magical pen that could bring anything he drew to life. Max loved to spend his days doodling and creating whimsical creatures and amazing new worlds. With a single stroke of his pen, his drawings would magically come alive right before his eyes. This remarkable ability made Max feel like a true wizard.
This remarkable ability made Max feel like a true wizard. One day, while Max was wandering through the forest, he stumbled upon an ancient and mysterious-looking notebook. As he opened it, he found a note that said, "To the one with the magical pen, use it wisely and with the utmost care.
Understanding Trope Subversion: Redo of Healer vs The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic
To say most anime rely on a consistent set of tropes is a massive understatement. A lot of the time anime can feel like nothing but a series of copy and pastes, similar if not identical settings between 10 new shows in the same genre that look the same as 10 shows from the year before in the same genre. The same character archetypes endlessly rehashed in the same genre and possibly even entire medium, even certain poses which appear so often as to be ubiquitous. Perhaps this is why when something that feels new and fresh steps up to the plate, a lot of people are understandably excited. It heralds an opportunity to see the medium grow in new and possibly interesting ways, for tropes to change, new tropes to arise and even for some tropes to vanish forever. Pop culture and its many critics have come to love the word subversion – generally meaning an unexpected twist on something familiar. I however find this love of subversion somewhat misguided. Don’t get me wrong I’m as happy for something new as anyone else but sadly there comes a time in your life when you become a jaded motherfucker and realize that subversion itself can become trendy and a lot of shitty shows based around subverting the tried and true formulas will arise to make a quick a buck. There will be minor spoilers for IPs mentioned in the title, you’ve been warned.
One of the best examples of this going wrong is magical girls. Madoka Magica came out and shocked the anime world. This bright, cutesy magical girl show took a sudden dark turn and everyone ate that shit up. And fair enough, I loved it too, I think it was very well made in all aspects – visually unique and impressive, the story and emotional through-lines well delivered, etc. But shortly thereafter a bunch of “dark” and “edgy” magical girl shows started coming out. Suddenly there were magical girl death games, abused girls becoming magical girls, magical girl wars, and so on and so forth. And most of those are not so fondly remembered, if they’re remembered at all. That’s not to say all of them were shit, some of them might have been good, I can’t really say I’ve never been much into the magical girl scene. But I can confidently say that a lot of garbage shows based around a dark subversion of the magical girl genre popped up as a fad, and thankfully it’s mostly dead now – or at least fewer obviously bad shows in that vein are being pumped out.
I would say isekai, a genre that is bloated with a seemingly endless number of shows with no sign of slowing down, is going through a similar phase now. It’s not quite a pronounced as magical girl one is but the ultra dark, edgy and brutal isekais are coming out of the woodwork. Goblin Slayer is the first one I would point to in this particular trend, though depending on how you want to define the subversion Re:Zero’s first season would be another good starting point, and the big one now is of course Redo of Healer. And it sucks. Were this blog at all popular I might get some ire for saying that. Shit I still might, considering how long my mini-feud with the Overlord fandom (another possible starting point in the trend now that I think about it) has gone on for. Regardless I don’t think my argument here is at all a big sell. Redo of Healer is ultra edgy revenge porn. It’s full of rape, brainwashing, murder and a bunch of other horrible things in a world full of humans so comically evil that you almost have to laugh at how upfront the story is. The story attempts to justify the main character in his edgequest by brutalizing him in the prologue about as hard as you can expect anyone to take but still survive. It’s hot garbage but it can be darkly entertaining or cathartic garbage. I’m up to date on the manga btw, so I’m not just dunking on something I know very little about. In fact I don’t even hate Redo of Healer, I’m not above indulging in some entertaining garbage from time to time, in fact garbage shows can be the most fun sometimes. The anime is somehow even worse than the manga though because it takes this hot garbage story and brings it to life with some of the most terrible production values I’d ever seen, at least until Ex-Arm lowered the bar on terrible looking anime forever. I dropped the anime a couple minutes in. Hated the VA for the MC, thought his voice didn’t match the kind of character the MC would become and it was hard to look at the show before the rape train started.
Sexual content and general attitude of Redo of Healer aside, one of the big things it hinges on is a massive subversion of the Healer character trope. Everyone born since D&D was created knows that healers are generally passive support types with pretty limited abilities. They tend to be extremely important but they have a narrowly defined role and that’s that. Redo of Healer attempts to break this mold by basically redefining what Healer and healing magic means in the context of this specific fantasy world. Now it’s not uncommon for healers to have some offensive abilities roughly in line with their healing abilities – they could be able to cast inflict wounds and heal wounds for example – but Redo of Healer basically overhauls the entire concept of healing magic while leaving the base idea intact. And it sucks. Not so much because it’s trying to ascribe new powers to healing per se, but because the changes are basically a matter of narrative convenience. The author clearly had a type of story in mind and went about creating a world and powerset with that story in mind – and with the subtlety of a fucking brick to the face. Everything from the blatant cruelty world to bizarre aspects of “healing” which really stretch and strain at our common conception of healing (like turning back time or learning the skills of the people you’ve healed) are all there to make the author’s story possible. It doesn’t feel like a story that arises naturally out of a setting, it’s a setting that has been twisted and broken to fit the story. It’s just really shitty writing. Which is why the Healer subversion they should have made an anime out of was The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic, henceforth Wrong Way.
Part of makes Wrong Way so great is that it doesn’t really change the core mechanics of healing at all. If anything it’s almost entirely limited to traditional healing, no inflict wounds even, at least not in the manga. Instead Wrong Way takes the common conception of healing magic and changes how it’s used tactically to create a Healer who is almost the total opposite of the healer stereotype. The big hook if you will of Wrong Way is that the MC, and his mentor who comes up with the idea, basically use healing magic to abuse their bodies to shit and get swol in the process. They both undergo grueling training that would break the human body, and continuously use healing on themselves while doing so not just survive the training intact but keep it going far beyond what a non-healer could ever do, thus building muscles and endurance with abnormal speed and to inhuman limits. And it’s hilarious. The MC and his mentor both have monstrous strength, speed and stamina that makes them a terror on the battlefield. And they can still heal people as needed. There are way too many differences between Wrong Way and Redo of Healer to get into without a lot of spoilers but to put it simply what makes Wrong Way interesting it that used a common trope in a clever way to tell a new type of story that stills seems well within the common bounds of the isekai genre. And Redo of Healer rewrote the trope entirely to tell a story for what feels like a very different genre.
This is not to say attempting to edit a trope, to stretch it beyond it’s usual bounds is bad in and of itself of course. The time reversal example I cited before actually shows up in reverse in Accel World where a girl is thought to be a healer when she’s actually turning back time, and uses the mistaken perception of her power to turn the tables on the series villain. So it’s not totally beyond the bounds of convention. That being said the main problem with Redo of Healer in this regard is that it’s too extreme and not just with all the rape and whatnot. It’s making such a laundry list of changes to Healing and Healers that it is very hard to take seriously as an interesting or even genuine subversion of the trope. I can scarcely imagine anyone thinks it’s clever or eye-opening the way Madoka Magica was to magical girl shows. A large part of that has to do with surrounding story and hideous anime, but a key component here is that Redo of Healer is just a terrible subversion of the tropes it builds itself around. It’s not an innovative or interesting take a well-trodden path, it’s just crass writing, crudely smashed together to tell the garbage story it wants to tell. And for the people who love it that’s good enough I suppose, I must admit I’ve been losing interest in Redo of Healer for some time now, but we should celebrate when someone does it better. Hence why I wanted to talked about Wrong Way even if just a little. Because Wrong Way subverts the tropes well, not by re-writing the rules of trope, but changing how it is used to tell a different kind of story. And the results speak for themselves, I’m always looking forward to the next chapter of Wrong Way, I’m more or less at the point I want to drop Redo of Healer. Sure that’s just my personal take, but I do believe I’m onto something here. See y’all in the next one.
This is not to say attempting to edit a trope, to stretch it beyond it’s usual bounds is bad in and of itself of course. The time reversal example I cited before actually shows up in reverse in Accel World where a girl is thought to be a healer when she’s actually turning back time, and uses the mistaken perception of her power to turn the tables on the series villain. So it’s not totally beyond the bounds of convention. That being said the main problem with Redo of Healer in this regard is that it’s too extreme and not just with all the rape and whatnot. It’s making such a laundry list of changes to Healing and Healers that it is very hard to take seriously as an interesting or even genuine subversion of the trope. I can scarcely imagine anyone thinks it’s clever or eye-opening the way Madoka Magica was to magical girl shows. A large part of that has to do with surrounding story and hideous anime, but a key component here is that Redo of Healer is just a terrible subversion of the tropes it builds itself around. It’s not an innovative or interesting take a well-trodden path, it’s just crass writing, crudely smashed together to tell the garbage story it wants to tell. And for the people who love it that’s good enough I suppose, I must admit I’ve been losing interest in Redo of Healer for some time now, but we should celebrate when someone does it better. Hence why I wanted to talked about Wrong Way even if just a little. Because Wrong Way subverts the tropes well, not by re-writing the rules of trope, but changing how it is used to tell a different kind of story. And the results speak for themselves, I’m always looking forward to the next chapter of Wrong Way, I’m more or less at the point I want to drop Redo of Healer. Sure that’s just my personal take, but I do believe I’m onto something here. See y’all in the next one.
" Intrigued, Max took the notebook home with him and began to experiment with his pen's power. Max's imagination ran wild as he drew beautiful landscapes, fire-breathing dragons, and fantastical creatures. Each creation was more incredible than the last, and Max's joy knew no limits. But he soon realized that his magical pen was not just a toy. It had the power to change the world around him, for better or for worse. Max became overwhelmed with the responsibility that came with his gift. He realized that he had the ability to make a positive impact on the lives of others. So, he decided to use his magical pen to help those in need. He drew magical healing potions for the sick, bridges for the villagers to cross dangerous rivers, and even food for the hungry. Word of Max's incredible power and selflessness quickly spread throughout the village. People would line up outside Max's house, hoping to have their problems solved with a stroke of his pen. Max became a local hero, using his magical pen to bring happiness and joy to everyone around him. But as Max continued to use his pen for good, he discovered that there were limits to its magic. He could not solve all the problems in the world, no matter how hard he tried. He started to feel overwhelmed by the constant demands and expectations placed upon him. One day, Max decided to take a break from using his magical pen. He realized that he needed time to focus on himself and his own dreams. With the support of his friends and family, Max pursued his passion for art and became a renowned painter. He found joy in creating beautiful works of art without relying on the magical pen. Max's story teaches us the importance of using our talents and gifts wisely. It is easy to get overwhelmed by the expectations of others, but true happiness lies in pursuing our passions and using our abilities to make a positive impact in our own unique way. Max may have had a magical pen, but it was his kindness and selflessness that truly made him extraordinary..
Reviews for "The Legend of Max and the Magical Pen"
1. John - 2/5 - I was really disappointed by "Max and the magical pen". The story felt disjointed and the characters were underdeveloped. The magic element was introduced in a way that felt forced and didn't add any depth to the plot. The writing style was also lackluster and failed to engage me as a reader. Overall, I couldn't connect with the story and found it to be a forgettable read.
2. Sarah - 1/5 - I found "Max and the magical pen" to be incredibly boring. The pacing was slow and there were long stretches of exposition that added nothing to the plot. The main character, Max, was unlikable and lacked any depth or growth throughout the book. The magical pen aspect was also poorly executed and didn't make sense within the context of the story. I struggled to finish this book and wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
3. Mark - 2/5 - "Max and the magical pen" had so much potential, but it failed to deliver. The plot was predictable and lacked originality. The dialogue was stilted and unrealistic, making it difficult to connect with the characters. Additionally, the world-building was weak and left many unanswered questions. Overall, I was left feeling unsatisfied with this book and wouldn't recommend it to others.
4. Emily - 3/5 - While I didn't hate "Max and the magical pen", I found it to be average at best. The story was predictable and lacked any real surprises. The characters were one-dimensional and lacked depth. The writing style was also quite simplistic, making the book feel more like a children's story rather than a young adult or adult novel. It just didn't hold my interest and I wouldn't read it again.