I am both surprised... and not, that the idiotic culture war started in my dumb country is still being dragged in here. People are not being
WESTERN SJWs for saying that what happened here is sexual assault, if not outright rape. It... is. Unwanted sexual contact when one party cannot consent is... it's not good folks. It's not a good thing, folks. The reason it doesn't feel like it is because this is a sex comedy at this point. The stakes are out the window, he doesn't even know what's going on. She got horny from his tissues and went to see his penis, which was depicted as a sea slug, and through an absurd series of events his penis ended up in her mouth, and he had a sex dream and THAT somehow involved him grabbing her head and thrusting into her throat, instead of... I donno, anything real?
If you examine this as a real event, you're going to have literally one option left: oh, this was sexual assault if not outright rape of a minor. But
unlike the teacher, which had, at its core, the dark and emotionally real idea that she was proving the director who rejected her years ago wrong by seducing this teenage boy who is directing a film, this only has absurdity.
Edoka is so strongly attached and motivated to please and seduce Shirasawa because she was
humiliated and
deeply scarred by Saiga, who sees promise in Shirasawa. She thought she could be an actress up until he rejected her completely from the role, cast someone else, and was right. She gave up on that dream, as well as that self-identification. But in Shirasawa, she sees another chance. He believes in her. He thinks she's a great actress that can give a serious performance. He encourages her to try again, that it doesn't have to be big roles, that she shouldn't just give up. In seducing him, in making him love her, she could prove Saiga wrong. She can use this boy to tell the man who destroyed her self-worth a decade ago that he didn't understand her. Shirasawa is straightforward. He's not lying to Edoka, nor is the manga telling us anything other than that she is capable of great performances. But it's not enough for her for him to be right. Saiga has to be wrong. Saiga has to have missed out. So, the hot springs events, concluding with Shirasawa getting angry and yelling "I'm not Director Saiga," showing that he understood what was going on there.
What, exactly, is the emotional core here? If anything, the only emotions being toyed with are Touka's, who has come to believe that Shirasawa deeply loves her and wants her completely. Not because of anything he really did, but because of her own inability to understand other people's emotions and the fact that she pretended to be Kaho. Dude literally did a porno mouth rape of her and didn't even wake up, and she left a cryptic note. This is not a serious thing. Do not think about it seriously.
Small reminder that It only seems wholesome because she dropped her vibrator in the previous chapter, moments like this are pretty scarce actually
(And it would have been better if she hadn't dropped it )
No, moments like this are not rare at all. The intimacy, romance, and vulnerability of that scene suffused the work. Until recently. And it'd be wholesome with the vibrator, too;
that was what was so fucking good.
It was about people coming to understand each other, and the two leads falling in love, while making something erotic. The barriers that the characters put up between each other, the difficulty navigating those, what it means and what it
should mean to expose something intimate to someone during the making of erotic material. The high school setting melted away in the sincere portrayal of a young man determined to make something
GOOD and a young woman trying to understand herself as a sexual being. Her pride in his work, and his respect for her ability to be great on camera, underpinned all the intimacy and romance of the manga. But there, too, is a barrier. Self imposed, both willfully and not, between director and actress. Shirasawa fundamentally does not know how to get close to people. This is why he films them. His father is gone, and he's struggling to live up to his legendary legacy in his own way. Kaho is
basically the only one who's been able to articulate why he is distant. She's basically the only person who actually understands him. But he's afraid to get close, not just because he doesn't know how, but because his father always said that it was vital that the director never fall in love with the actress. Because if he does, he won't be able to make something worth watching.
In that lies an inherent final conflict: prove his father wrong. Break the barrier that his father imposed. Show the world a work born of love, and show that it can be something amazing.
It
was
so
fucking
good
guys