Making abuse victims Unreliable Narrators is such a copout

So, there's this character who was horribly abusive to the protagonist, and they were clearly having the time of their lives torturing them. But then the abuser gets confronted, or the situation gets shown from their POV, and it turns out that their malice was just simply how the victim remembered it. That just feels like a cheap way to make the abuser more sympathetic. Instead of having the character own up to their mistakes, the writer wants to downplay the severity of what they did and make it seem like the victim was just making a well-intentioned parent/lover out to be a monster. This is just a fucking insult to the actual victims.

A good example of this is Your Lie In April (alright, free pizza, here I come!). So, Kousei's mom was a stage parent that would make Joe Jackson look like Mr. Rogers. She isolated him from his friends, made him practice for hours, and would hit him for making the slightest mistakes. Kousei put up with it because she was sick and unconsciously using her illness to guilt trip him. One day, after a big recital, he screwed up and started beating him with a cane, breaking his glasses and making him bleed. That's when he finally tells her to fuck off, and because that series loves contrived drama, she dies later that day. But then we get to the episode from her perspective, and it turned out she had the upmost pure intentions and she just got carried away. So, you see, she injured him out of love. Oh my fucking god, this series can fucking blow me!

Another example of this is Don't Mess With Me, Ms. Nagatoro. So, in the first few episodes, Nagatoro was a menstruating c*nt of a human being. It got to the point where Naoto broke down crying on a few occasions, and she was laughing like the Joker during a Saw binge after inhaling Nitrous Oxide every time. Then, all of a sudden, she undergoes offscreen character development and is suddenly less of a sadist. This was answered in a bonus chapter where we see her making Naoto cry from her POV. See, it turned out she wasn't grinning like a serial killer. That was just how Naoto was remembering it. And then she started to question if she went too far. Yeah, let's just ignore how that moment wasn't even the last time she made him cry. She totally felt bad about it. There's retconning, and then there's gaslighting the audience.

Now, this next example isn't exactly a case of Unreliable Narrator, but still a cheap retcon of the abuser's intentions. So, in Final Fantasy VII Machinabridged, Tifa was just the absolute worst to Cloud. She insulted him at every given moment, got him mixed up with a terrorist organization, kicks him when he's emotionally down, threatens to sodomize him if he doesn't obey her, and most infamously, used a graphic prison rape ultimatum to get him to stay with AVALANCHE. So, this makes the moment at the end of season 1 where Cloud finally chews her out for how he treated him satisfying. But then comes the episode where Tifa tries to restore Cloud's memories, and we learn that her abuse towards Cloud was just an act because she thought acting like how she did when they were kids wouldn't screw with his already faulty memories. So, was the joy she was clearly taking in tormenting and humiliating him also just an act too? Does that mean she knew full-well she was crossing the line when she told him he was going to get raped and threatened to go shoulder deep herself? Did TFS realize that taking a character who was meant to be the team mom and turned her into an abusive taint maybe was actually a bad idea?

Speaking of Final Fantasy, I want to talk about an instance where this was actually done right. This came from Final Fantasy X. So, Tidus's complicated relationship with Jecht was a huge point of his character. Back when he was a kid, Jecht was a drunk who regularly taunted his seven-year-old son for being a crybaby, something that gives Tidus nightmares a decade later. It gets even worse when he sees the people of Spira revering Jecht as a hero. However, we see in flashbacks and Sphere recordings that, yeah, Jecht was still a piece of shit, but one who was forced to grow up when he ended up on Spira. His alcoholism got so out of control that he attacked a transport animal and Braska was forced to give all of his money to pay it off, so the riot act came in hard cover volumes for him. He also eventually admits he was a lousy father to Tidus and wishes he could apologize to him. When he dies, he still taunts Tidus for crying, but you can argue that he did it so he wouldn't feel bad about killing him.