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Just saw the ep, and I'm honestly surprised it started such a debate. I thought it was going down to more "meh" - personnally, I found it painfully melodramatic.
I think the core problem is that the serie is firmly rooted in "anime world" on one side (the hilarious slapstick, the way the weirdness of people, despite being the main subject of the show, are still MUCH more tolerated than they would be in real life, etc.), but also attempt to grab a "realist" one on the other side.
As such, there is a conflict on the actual degree of gravity we are supposed to perceive the chuunbyou problem :
Are we supposed to evaluate the seriousness with the criteria of anime-land (where it's rather funny, full of anthics and the like), in which case some might see the attempts to push Rikka out of her delusions as cruel and oppressively formatting ?
Or are we supposed to evaluate the seriousness with the criteria of actual real life (where someone who has spent years in complete delusion is NO JOKE AT ALL and is in fact the case of a VERY SERIOUS mental problem), in which case dragging Rikka out of her fantasy is the only responsible thing to do, even though it will very obviously be very painful for her at first.
The anime gives constantly conflicting messages about it. It's using both anime-land and reality criteria in several instances.
And anyway, despite this, it seems very obvious that Rikka situation, even in anime-land, is very serious. If she's so lifeless now, it's rather a proof that her delusions have eaten her real personality, and kicking her out of them is more exposing the damage already done than really breaking her. It was hard to feel bad because I felt like the episode tried to make me think "see, she's unhappy, she really need to have her delirium back, it was a mistake to remove it from her", while what I felt was more "look at how broken she is now after years of being eaten by her delirium".
It's a bit like if the episode shown someone being pushed to quit on smoking, being cranky and irritable, and attempting to make me feel "look at how much nicer he was when he was smoking, it's cruel to deprive him of his cigarette, hopefully he'll start again for the final".
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