>>279815728 (OP)>The ideal male fantasy consists of growing up to become a man worthy of having loved ones to protect and provide for, eventually growing old and dying after your children become accomplished adults.No it's not. What you describe is the "male fantasy" from the point of view of a collective, the greater good, not from the point of view of an individual. The collective wants individuals to reach high but realistic and stable targets to show its overall societal progress and growth that is under its control.
But an individual always wants to specifically go beyond these stable targets, beyond these "averages hoped for by society".
An individual has ambitions and your description lacks that. And that's also the one big flaw I see in MT.
In the late parts of the story the ambitions fade away.
It starts with a loser, who manages to rise up all the way to the ceiling of normalfags but fails to go beyond, not because he can't, but because he does not intend to go beyond that in the first place. Deep down Rudeus always wanted to be a king among normalfags and that fits him. So the problem does not lie at the end of MT, but at a much earlier point, somewhere in the middle of the story, where Rudeus was portrayed as more ambitious than he should have been.
I suppose it's because Rudeus was not meant to be the "true protagonist" but Rifujin seems to have let MT's unexpected huge success during its WN era rise to his head too much that he himself as an author started pouring his ambitions into his own work, only for him to ultimately double down on his initial plan of putting up a ceiling in the end for better or for worse, but the damage was already done at that point.
The WN-era was when people were sick of moralfag preaching so power fantasy aspects just existing without nuance was fine back then. If Rifujin had just rewritten the LN to follow his originally intended script instead, it would have all worked out. But he didn't, so LN/manga kinda flopped.
