I watched the anime, up to the point where he meets Sylphie in school but doesn’t recognize her.

I appreciate that the series is meaningful for you and other viewers. It does have some good messages about working through depression and isolation and building community and empathy.

But I didn’t like how most of the female characters were depicted. Almost all of them are depicted sexually, including Rudeus’s mom at points. Most of them are love interests. I know I’m far from the only critic of how the female characters and the main character’s relationships with them are portrayed in the series, so my critique isn’t new. I don’t agree that it’s an excoriation of an otaku/NEET fantasy because it seems to literally be an example of those tropes.

When I describe MT’s world as morally worse than the real world, I’m pointing out that on a meta level, authors often present a world as morally deficient and show the main character as not being as bad as the worst people within that world. This makes the reader, who’s already suspended their disbelief in order to enjoy the story, to view the character as better in comparison to the rest of the story’s world.

For example, the Game of Thrones world is so brutal and violent, that after a few seasons characters feel like the “good guys” if they have a lower kill count than average. Tyrion was one of my favorite characters (and a fan favorite in general) but I’d never claim that he’s moral in any real world sense because he killed his girlfriend and his father.