There's a story that the reason why you have a lot of anime that goes in very weird sexual directions is that Japan is an incredibly sexually repressive society, so the Japanese channel their compressed libido towards art.

I don't really believe this story, but I think the pattern it exemplifies is at play here.

Rats have very ambitious goals of fixing the world. They see that the world is in a pretty bad shape and demands fixing. But they can't fix it. No one else can fix it either (nihil supernum, deep atheism), and even if they could, it would likely be bad, because their values are not yours (even deeper atheism). So you yearn for a world in which you smash those limitations. "Power" (or a specific kind of it) is the thing you need, and its value is not bounded, so the threshold of a superstimulus is largely your imagination, perhaps constrained by some ontological assumptions. That's why this theme recurs through ratfic so much.

This seems somewhat obvious to me^[1] and so I am somewhat surprised that people in the comments mostly seem to explain it in terms of game-theoretic (or other) realism or people having consequentialist-ish views, etc.

1. ^{^}

   partly through introspection + the Copernican principle, FWIW