@Miros I'm glad you picked up on my very deliberate use of "in her mind", because that's the crux of the point I'm trying to make: a high school girl who ran away from home is making (bad) decisions while being in a situation where she is threatened and pressured. It's easy being rational from our point of view and say that she should react or act differently, but the way she's acting in this situation is perfectly human and realistic. Gonna go on a tangent for a bit: a lot of women get raped or abused and don't go to the police (or at least not immediately), to a lot of people's dismay. The reason for this is, even though the guy did something bad to her and should be punished for it, women face obstacles such as victim blaming, children getting caught up in the separation/divorce/instability, having to live through everything again and exposing themselves when telling their story, being ashamed and blaming themselves for what's happening to them, going through all kinds of shameful medical procedures to get it assessed (which are useless if the victim needs time to process what happened before even being able to muster up the courage to go to the cops)... and so on. Victims have been beaten into submission, not necessarily physically, and that's also reinforced by their own minds. The hurdle of getting law enforcement involved is greater than you think, and you don't even know whether something's going to come out of it. This is something people really should try to understand and empathize with, to be isolated and stuck in this kind of thought process. Don't forget that at the start of the story, Sayu was under the impression that she had to offer her body in exchange for a roof over her head, which shows how warped you can become after a while, even though
she was the one being taken advantage of as she was depending on these guys. But was it actually abuse? Yes.
Sayu blames herself for what's happened to her, she's going to lose everything she cares about, and she'll have to go back to her parents. Add to this that she's an imperfect human being, that she's feeling cornered and doesn't have the maturity to make (in our eyes) rational decisions and that the situation would be the same if the cops got involved.
How is him taking advantage of this not manipulation and coercion? He is the one in control, not her.
Again, we also don't know why she ran away from home. I'm fairly certain it's gonna be something a bit more serious than her parents having eaten her pudding she was looking forward to after a super fun day at school. 🙃
I know what it's like to shake your head and yell at stupid people in manga/anime/TV shows/movies and I do it as well, but this isn't a situation warranting this. I'm perfectly aware this is an "NTR bait arc" but, that isn't what I'm reacting to nor why I'm being so vehement about this. It's the fact that people yet again manage to put the blame on her for being threatened and that shit like this happens everywhere in the world, every single day, and that victims don't feel safe enough to actually come out with it, for any of the reasons above. It's a lot more complicated than "she should just do x or she shouldn't have done y".
Anyway, I went way too deep into this rabbit hole for my own good, I don't think I can add anything more to this so this is gonna be my last intervention on the topic.
Have a nice day!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abusive_power_and_control#Psychological_manipulation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abusive_power_and_control#In_an_intimate_relationship
