Fed-Kun's army
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2018
- Messages
- 234
Basically said everything I thought about the manga.So I find myself extremely squeamish about this manga. It has two problems:
A) The depiction of a clearly underage-coded fmc being infatuated with clearly adult mc, who instead of shooting her down keeps playing with her, while assuming a seemingly parental role. Nothing in my opinion exemplifies this dynamic better than the ending, in which the main characters undergo a ceremony clearly modeled on a marriage (and other characters comment on that, so it's seen that way in-character, too), including exchanging rings and all - except when the girl goes for a kiss on the lips, the guy smirks and suggests she settles with kissing the back of his hand. As for me, that alone takes the manga past ambiguous titles like Bread and My Momo and right to stuff like Usagi Drop. If the classic meme template were to be applied, the one about hating videogames because they "appeal to the male fantasy" - the fantasy this manga seems to appeal to is pedophilic grooming, and I am not really comfortable with that.
B) The depiction of the reason for aforementioned infatuation, which isn't the mc being great in any way, or putting effort into the relationship, or anything - it's just the lack of abuse previously normal in fmc's life. I understand that's a common enough trope in manga to explain romance without mc having to do anything but being a halfway decent human being, but it doesn't make it any better. The two do not even really meaningfully communicate; they barely do stuff together other than eating; they learn each other's names like halfway into the manga.
Those problems, and particularly (A), are like the mirror from the Snow Queen - once stuck in your eye, they make the scenes that seemed innocent and wholesome appear grotesque and downright uncomfortable. Stuff like giving an essentially homeless girl cookies or a new dress, with her exaggerated joyous reactions, looks ominous when you think of it as pedophile fantasy scenarios under an extremely thin veneer of dogwhistle deniability.
Honestly, at first I defended it since children having "crushes"(confusing admiration with romantic feelings due to depictions in films, etc) on adults is pretty normal, but the more that I continued reading (especially in the last few chapters), the weirder things got. Especially with Evan going as far as to reciprocate/tease her in order to keep her under her protection... I was really hoping that the romance tag was just wrong, but my god, the comment section doesn't help at all.
Why can't people just not sexualize a literal child figure
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