Gonna ramble for a bit.
Ryuko as envisioned by her creators is that of a girl overwhelmed by her fate, someone who can't deal with the responsibilities thrust upon her, and who is not dealing well with this revelation that the mother she'd sought all along is a monster. A sympathetic figure, really, at least in concept. And as has been pointed out before, a teen. None of these things are bad, and could have made for a good, compelling character.
But it didn't work out that way because she as a character basically doesn't exist. Like, at this point there's no sense that she has any real motive of her own. Endless manipulation from every source around her has turned her into a puppet, and this manipulation in turn was never used as a motivation to give her purpose. We see it in action this episode when she tells everyone to fuck off, or more revealingly, she tells Aikuro that he misled her from the start, too. But all of this didn't happen because she realized it; it's just backlash after Ragyo provokes her. That it all ends up being another bout of puppeteering from the villain just drives home how pointless Ryuko is as a character. We joke about how she keeps losing her way, but really, she never found a way in the first place.
I dunno, I'm kinda bummed out because that brainwashing/forced robing montage could actually have meant something at one point. It's a sequence that shows the things she craves, and their lack is piercing stuff. It's about as invasive and tragic as anything that's happened in the show, and yet it's failed to invoke any real sort of sympathy, because we - at least in this subset of viewers who don't give a fuck about her character - just can't bring ourselves to care. Instead we cheer for the wannabe fascist dictator girl who burned down an entire city. Fucking KLK.
