I tried reading the parallel manga chapter to when Emilia confronts Subaru and I prefer the anime version. The manga doesn't have the lighting, voice acting, and of course, animation of the latter. (I don't really care about the comment about the loot house, I already knew that anyway from memory.)
The other thing is that the manga just straight up feels like it gave me a different message. Like Subaru would say something like that from just being mildly frustrated. That's not what the anime tells me and I feel like the anime does a better job at showing just what sort of emotional conditions and motives you would be have to actually say something like how Emilia doesn't even understand how much she owes him. He isn't really considerate of her. He outright holds contempt for her, for not living up to being a convenience, and that's emphasized through his demanding tone and sneer. I don't think it's better to portray him the way he was in the manga, people look ugly when they have ugly feelings and can't hide it anymore. This is what the flawed in the form humans want their characters to be flawed look like without the glory of "good writing" to dress them up and whitewash the truth of how repugnant that kind of person would actually be. And the "can't tell about return via death" thing doesn't really concern me nevertheless, because even he could tell Emilia about that, it doesn't excuse him from everything even if she were to actually believe the outlandish claim. It's clear that whether his intentions have a meaningful motive behind them or not, that doesn't invalidate him being a dick.
The premise and artstyle of My Hero Academia don't interest me in the slightest so I never bothered with that.
What you're saying actually makes a lot of sense, but sadly it doesn't change how I feel. For the sake of this discussion I'll ignore all the other problems with the show and just focus on this one scene and what it generally entails.
In the first place, I have a hard time believing the show is trying to show anything as deep as you make it out to be, but that aside, let's go with what you said and give the author the benefit of the doubt, all that does in my mind is cement that Subaru's annoying and an idiot and unlikable. While I have almost no faith in people, you seem to have even less faith than me, because I can't get behind a character with such repugnant behavior. There's no appeal in seeing someone break down that much, nor do I think it's cool that it went an extra step past what most shows are willing to go. Because to me the manga got the point of what Subaru is thinking and how terrible and selfish and naive it is across very well while still barely, barely keeping Subaru at a point that it feels like he could eventually redeem himself because he's a good person at heart or something. The way you portray him as being in the anime makes it seem to me like he's literally just scum that's been unmasked, and that comes off as a rather negative and twisted way of thinking to me, even if it's true.
Maybe it is "whitewashing" the truth a bit, I haven't read the source material so I don't know how Subaru is intended to be portrayed, but what's wrong with that? People want to believe in the good of other people, that people are flawed and selfish and more but that they can still be redeemed. It's common in writing for a reason, and as you mentioned even you expect him to eventually be redeemed, which is ironic because in my mind he shouldn't at this point, which is why I felt like a reset by death is both the only way out and a cop-out (and thus why I don't feel like this show can go in any direction that I'd feel good about).
Of course, there's something to be said about the difference between living on the line and crossing the line, maybe it's a bit more dark and more impactful or whatever for Subaru to seem like total trash, but like I said, after that point there's no longer any appeal in it. If that's Subaru's true face, if his "contempt" for Emilia and his mean words are not just his naivety and stupidity fusing with his emotions and being released in a very IMO human-like manner but it's him showing off just how much of a terrible person he is, then that's fine, but the author lost me here, I'm not interested in that. There's no beauty for me in seeing the raw ugliness of something... not in this sense, where he's the main character and I have to watch him constantly. I already know what that's like, I wouldn't come to fictional works for that, there's no merit in portraying it. It's definitely something different, I'd look at him differently, it'd almost feel like looking at a villain as an mc, feeling contempt for the character yet having to watch them so closely, and so I can see why there'd be merit in that for someone else, but just like how I don't play games with excessive gore and I don't watch war films or anime where it's a constant mess of depressing but realistic tragedy, I'm not interested in this. Doubly so if it's going to turn its back on what it did and ultimately try to redeem Subaru anyway.
So I'll cede that maybe for you there's some value in portraying his true nature or whatever but for me it's just annoying and unlikable and an ironically fitting way to end a couple of IMO terrible episodes. And my thoughts are kind of vague because it's been a few days and my memory isn't great so I don't remember all the details, so I apologize if I said something wrong or inconsistent.
