Finished Blue ch 3, here are my thoughts. Spoilers ahead.
tl;dr it was bad but I didn't think it was as bad as people were making it out to be.
Let's get this out of the way at the start. The whole murder plot of Ikeda killing Yaitabashi was unforgivably ridiculous. I find it really hard to believe that Ikeda would be able to do all that stuff and perfectly imitate Yaitabashi and all, especially with a broken arm, starving, dehydrated, and sleep deprived. And his supervillain speech was a little um. unserious
There was gratuitous violence and angst in ch 3 but Pink was already hella graphic and angsty, like, Tetro has been The Gratuitous Violence & Angst Fangan from the start.
That said, I don't think the removal of back skin and fingertips after death is terribly graphic, at least it's not far outside the realm of typical stuff people do to corpses to erase evidence in crime dramas, so I'm not sure why people are so upset about it this time. Ikeda specifies that Yaitabashi was already dead when he did those things.
And I'm seeing a lot of comments that "Ikeda wore Yaitabashi's skin!!!" no? he wore a disguise as him? That's not even remotely close to being the same thing?? Come on, there's enough here to criticise without making stuff up.
There was good writing and there was bad writing. It seems like a lot of what people are touting as 'bad writing' is just... not that bad if you think about it for a sec. 'OMG why is Yaita volunteering himself so much, he's so out of character, this is bad writing' or, the electroshock torture got to him and he's convinced he's useless and he's desperately trying to be useful. 'Ruka would never try to kill Ninomiya, this is bad writing' or, Ruka is a flawed person who saw an easy way out.
That said - I do not like Ikeda's, Kumada's or Yaitabashi's 'arcs', all of these characters had so much potential but were cut short in a way that leaves me asking what was even the point of their existence. And Shishikura killing Kumada seemed kind of out of left field. Need to watch it again and see if there were any signs that he was going to do that.
