And she can't enter a relationship throughout that time why, exactly?
Not with him, is my point. She absolutely can meet and date other people and those people are going to add to her experience and understanding of who she is and what she wants out of life but, like, it would probably be better for someone so young to date someone her own age vs someone like the protag.
Second, maturity or experience do not equal age. Some people are immature at forty; others get more life experience than they know what to do with when they're
too young to drink.
Yeah, fully agree with all this and this is my argument from the get go. Maturity is not equal to someone's age. The legal definition of "an adult" is also a piss poor way to gauge someone's ability TO BE an adult as well. I've made the exact argument that people sometimes "figure themselves out" WAY later in life than the common understanding of when that should happen. Life is messy AF, there's no singular right path. We need to be more flexible with our understanding of "adulthood" and realize that maybe it happens later than we think it does normally.
Third, plenty of couples with more than a dozen years of difference that work out fine.
Generally, this modern-age American idea that a woman upon reaching the age of majority is capable of making decisions like doing sex work ("sex work is work!!!") or making abortions ("her body, her choice!!"), but is somehow incapable of picking her partners, if she happens to prefer older men, is patently absurd.
This.... I don't agree with because that's not the thing we're grappling with here. This isn't an Americanism, this is how human psychology is. It doesn't matter that's she's a girl, this same issue is present for boys too. Maturity takes time AND experience. The lead male protag is WAY more experienced in life than the female protag. There's a LARGE disparity in experience here. He is ALWAYS going to be ahead in life experience and also physiological changes. She hasn't had time at all to experience life. She's had some terrible stuff happen, had terrible people in her life (including her own mother), but she hasn't fully grappled with all that. This is what the story is about.
There is also the tropes that these type of stories always arrive too. There's a reason that I was personally dreading this confession, because I've read too many stories where a younger person in their teens meets and older person in their 30's and the younger person confesses and insists and two just get together and the story ends with a happy tone. It's kinda gross.
Finally, once again, life is complex and not clear cut. There is a good difference between someone in their teens/20's dating someone else that in their 30's/40's vs someone that's in their 30's dating someone in their 40's (or just move both ages 10 years forward). Once again, I personally believe that maturity takes more time than people give it credit and for a person to be "fully formed" it might take them well into their 30's.
But there is not firm rule to this stuff, this is all just gut feelings and experience. My own experiences are heavily coloring my arguments here but I have see a lot of people get taken advantage of well into their 20's by older people (mostly men).
Yoshida is right to let Sayu go, so that she doesn't feel bound and obligated; but if time passes and her feelings do not change, there is literally not a single reason why they shouldn't be able to enter a successful relationship.
This depends on what happens during the time skip. If she just kept her head down and didn't really interact with others or date people and try to understand more of herself, then no I don't agree. But if she did put herself out there and TRIED to relate to more people and got some good life experiences, then yeah. It just REALLY depends on what this story is trying to shoot for. Right now, I'm happy where it's landed but we still have more plot to go. This still has room to be greater than what it is or worse. We'll see.
