Reading this just makes me sad ngl. The MC has zero clue about life cause his father just straight up doesn't care about him and his new mother is grooming him essentially towards fucking her with him having basically zero clue about if it's being normal.
Don’t get me wrong, he’s clearly being groomed, but Jun also has agency of his own since he’s pretty self aware that he’s sexually attracted to Saki and has been consciously suppressing that feeling for the sake of the familial relationship between them he’s grown to appreciate (even if he’s grown dissatisfied with that relationship).
Oh also the childhood friend only coming back into his life cause the new mother arrives is also kinda sad.
Like yeah, I don't care about you at all but now that you have a woman in your life I'll start going out with you.
That’s a total misread of Riko’s character, the reason she even found out about Saki in the first place was because she was stopping by Jun’s house to ask him to walk to school with her on their first day of high school. And her whole thing is that she’s always cared about him, even at times where she self admittedly failed to be there for him.
It'd be a lot nicer if it wasn't forced into this whole marries into family and slowly grooms the kid and instead something like he meets an older girl (like a year or two gap) than him w/ motherly type qualities where he becomes more confident and less sheltered through knowing that person and eventually going out but yeah.
Well yeah I suppose it would be “nicer” that way, but then you really wouldn’t have the kind of story the author was going for, a fairly grounded taboo romantic drama with a darker tone and themes of neglect and abuse.
This weird grooming stuff is just off putting, with the only reason most people reading this being okay with it is because she's got a hot body. (Hey it's like real life!)
Well I take it that Saki’s actions are intentionally written to be off putting and wrong (taboo), but yes at the same time the female author is cognizant of an uncomfortable truth. That truth being that with some exception an adult woman having sex with a teenaged boy will usually be seen as a far lesser crime than the opposite scenario. You can even see that in the way this series’ companion manga (13 koibumi) handles its own taboo relationship; where it’s aggressively chaste in comparison. Speaking for myself as a man, I remember very clearly that when I was Jun’s age (14-16) that I would’ve gladly banged any decently attractive woman between the age of 15-50 without complaint, and I’m far from the only man who’d admit to that; so take that for what it is worth.
