You strong bud 🫂I mean, yeah. That's how it tends to be seen. My father stopped beating me because he recognised that he was spreading the same violence he hostile himself hated. Hooray!
...Except that physical violence was replaced by emotional violence and even now it's a bit harder to get through to anyone that it's just as bad and can crush a child's psyche the same if not worse. It took me many years to even recognise that what I went through was abuse in the first place.
Now that you put it so clearly, he is indeed a psychopathI actually didn't expect the teacher to put together events like this. Which makes him even worse in my eyes, because he figured out what actually happened, realized that the kid's not at fault but was taking drastic measures to avoid doing something that she said over and over she didn't want to do but her mom won't listen, realized that the father hitting the daughter means that she doesn't have a parental figure who listens to her, and went "... okay, I can work with this."
He wants to screw the mother, so yeah... Emotional manipulation is also far more complicated and harder to see than bruises.
The story is getting convoluted af, in my eyes. The dad doesn't even know why he hit her and that is just bonkers in my eyes. He's been the most calm person through all those years of abuse and then he hits his daughter because what? She is telling the truth?
I broadly agree, and I'll just add (from experience) that as victims of the abuser neither the daughter nor the husband really know to question the reality in front of them in the first place; this dynamic is the only one they know, and one that has been imposed upon them with self-righteous authority.To take in multiple lenses; we have the father's story, the mother's story, and the daughter's story.
The easiest one to explain is probably the daughter's story. She comes from a home hanging onto a string that might as well make it a broken home. Her story is about navigating a place where her parents can only understand half of her own story, and in doing so, are both to deaf to her struggles.
The mother's is ironically the middle of the most difficult. She has been condition, from her own upbringing, to recognize how things fit in certain criteria. That children and partners are disciplined by force, its why she's always throwing things at her husband and why she felt comforted by her husband hitting her daughter. Odds are she herself came from a broken home and is perpetuating that cycle.
The father is the most complicated because ironically he's both the most passive, as he third parties talks to his daughter who he thinks doesn't like him, and who's wife is very blatantly abusing him but since he himself has no basis on what a relationship is like, he thinks its normal. He doing everything right at the wrong times, such as the dress. Where it a situation before the daughter is vehemently against the dress, the wife would have been seeing him as comforting presence rather than a malevolent.
Likewise, all us readers can see that they. Do. Not. Communicate. In a healthy manner.
Then you have the outside forces. The single mom who's trying to steal away a loyal to a fault husband. The piece of shit teacher overstepping and preying on an emotionally vulnerable women and will not act on the child's best interests. Then you have the son of the single mom who's trying to do right, but sometimes ends up overstepping somewhat like the teacher because he's pigheadedly stubborn as a child should be. Ultimately what separates the child from the teacher is that the child doesn't know better, he's naive innocence but ultimately brash and clumsiness comes his age. The teacher is a malevolent force and DOES have a grasp of what he's doing, he just think he's right because of his own moral superiority.
I think "loyal to a fault" is doing a lot of lifting there, but I am... somewhat surprised at how much flak the single mom gets for looking at a clearly fucked up situation with an instain mother who abuses basically everyone else in the household and going "hey so it'd be pretty cool if like, the mom here was better right, like that'd be super cool, right, also I'm cool and hot and responsible and like the father as a person and want himI broadly agree, and I'll just add (from experience) that as victims of the abuser neither the daughter nor the husband really know to question the reality in front of them in the first place; this dynamic is the only one they know, and one that has been imposed upon them with self-righteous authority.
I'm also unsure I agree with your framing of "single mum trying to steal away a husband" as much as someone who tries to help another person leave an abusive situation. For his own long-tern well-being, Rintarō must leave Kasumi, perhaps taking Ichika along, but only if he learns how to actually be a parent.
I broadly agree, and I'll just add (from experience) that as victims of the abuser neither the daughter nor the husband really know to question the reality in front of them in the first place; this dynamic is the only one they know, and one that has been imposed upon them with self-righteous authority.
I'm also unsure I agree with your framing of "single mum trying to steal away a husband" as much as someone who tries to help another person leave an abusive situation. For his own long-tern well-being, Rintarō must leave Kasumi, perhaps taking Ichika along, but only if he learns how to actually be a parent.