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This Week in Anime - When Your Fav Anime Protagonist is Problematic

Which, you know, so long as the viewer makes a really clear distinction between fiction and reality, there's no reason that kind of portrayal for enjoyment should be illegal or anything, but it is also clearly playing to base vices, and not really saying anything deep or nuanced.

EDIT: I think it's also possible to have very 'sex-positive' and sexually charged protagonists who handle it in a healthy way and have plenty of in-world sex/sexually charged interactions. I honestly can't think of a single one of those off the top of my head, though; authors seem to do negative much better than positive here, in my experience, which is kind've curious.

Man, I love Ranma 1/2, but you can't pretend that Happosai stealing underwear and spying on girls was ever clever or tasteful. It's the same level of humor and it's the least funny part of both series.
A better comparison to Mushoku Tensei Man would probably be Inuyasha's Miroku, though. He constantly groped women as a gag (also not a very good one, although Inuyasha's doesn't have Ranma's comedy highs for contrast) but was also meant to be cool, sympathetic, and a good person, and he eventually ended up with one of the women he kept groping. The obvious counterpoint on the macro level is that it's easy to list lines one crossed and the other didn't. But if you're going to highlight "vulgarity" as the dividing line, then that's a question of comedic taste, not morals.

For the bolded part, so what? I'm no auteur, so I don't expect or even want everything I watch to be deep and/or nuanced. I do enjoys those kind of shows (86 is now one of my all-time-favorites, for instance), but I typically follow a handful of shows each season that are mindless distractions, too, because I find them to be good stress breaks.

Interspecies Reviewers, which is literally about its main cast members going around visiting brothels of different races, is commonly-lauded as a very sex-positive show.

The problem is how much the story endorses their actions and rewards them for said flaws. It is being made very clear when Subaru is in the wrong in Re Zero. Konosuba's Kazuma barely counts because it's an absurd and over the top comedy that doesn' take itself seriously in anything really. (Although it would have been much preferable spoiler[to not pick the literal child of the group for a girlfriend].) But Mushoku Tensei is sold as a very straight laced story with plenty of dramatic turns and heavy topics. Of course it feels displeasing to see it reward its MC's worst flaws..

How would you make a pervert character do that stuff without 'celebrating' it in some form like fanservice or humor for the audience.

For the bolded part, so what? I'm no auteur, so I don't expect or even want everything I watch to be deep and/or nuanced. I do enjoys those kind of shows (86 is now one of my all-time-favorites, for instance), but I typically follow a handful of shows each season that are mindless distractions, too, because I find them to be good stress breaks.

Man, Hanebado was so good.

You definitely don't see female characters with the same flaws common to male ones nearly as often. If you want a parallel to Thorfinn, there are manga like Shut Hel out there, and I could name some LNs with casts of fantastically messed-up women (how I wish Executioner and Her Way of Life's adaptation went to at least the end of book 6), but it's hard not to see the difference in baseline expectations.

Kazuma from Konosuba is a much worse person than Rudy. It's too bad he's not brought up here.

I'd never claim that everyone should only be watching complex philosophical shows all of the time, but even simple stories can feature good writing and effective characterization. No one's ever going to mistake Monkey D. Luffy for someone out of a Dostoevsky novel, but so many of us tune in every week because we want to see him live out his strong personal convictions, much like any good shonen protagonist

Luffy is pretty problematic himself though, to be fair. He's Goku levels of disinterest in women to the point he causes problems for Nami and Hancock. Although Hancock doesn't seem to mind being seen naked by him so... but he's also really dumb and makes things worse for people. I saw people cited him punching the Celestial Dragon in the slave auction house as a counter to how slavery in handled in isekai, but the irony there is him doing that was was led to his crew being attacked and split up by the World Government. The only reason any of them are still alive today is thanks to Kuma. It was objectively a terrible decision on his part to get involved and do that. Ironically probably what the Mushoku Tensei author was getting at with complexities of the world and not wanting to get involved. In general, if Luffy does something it's probably a bad idea and only makes things worse, but it usually works out thanks to plot and other people bailing him out. But yes, he is fun to watch get into trouble.

It's also funny to see somebody saying Luffy is "problematic" for that punch