Another manga I can add to the list of "extremely troubling and deeply disturbing" not because of the manga itself, but because of what it represents.
The manga itself is pretty tame and inoffensive, with a rather cliched romance plot.
It's the implications around it that I find unsettling. My main worry is who is supposed to be the target demographic? Considering the circumstances of the male lead, this reads as a thinly veiled fantasy aimed at middle aged, morose salarymen. The male lead is basically a stand in for the reader to vicariously live their fetishes. The fact that this is a light novel adaptation makes it even worse, since it means that adult men are searching for their escapist fantasies in works with simplistic and trite levels of writing aimed at teenagers.
And then there's the fridge horror (more like fridge outrage), of what sort of person takes in a teenaged runaway girl and doesn't bother to ask her why she ran away, doesn't try to find out if she ran away from an abusive situation, doesn't go to the police or try to help her in any meaningful way. No, he just gives her a place to sleep and slowly lets her grow emotionally attached to him.
And that's creepy as fuck.