THANK YOU. Really a shame that there are likely adults here that need it explained to them that minors can't consent. Liking age gap or taboo romances are one thing, but people being so ready to die on this hill is creepy af.
At the current time in the manga Nanjou isn't a minor anymore (well, admittedly that's an assumption, but to my understanding generally you're already 18 when you graduate high school in Japan, and some can even be closer to 19). Should the teacher have "shut her down" in the past? Most likely yeah when applying real life standards, but at the same time it's not like anything illegal happened either. Folks call this grooming when it's basically the exact opposite - the word is so misused most of the time that it's not even remotely meaningful anymore. You can't exactly "groom" someone who's single-mindedly pursuing
you from the start. Even if she should've cut off any contact but didn't doesn't make it grooming which is an
active method of sexual predation. This not being that doesn't make them the most wholesome duo in the history of romance fiction, sure, but neither is it automatically super-disgusting the way many people call it.
I don't have a personal horse in the race (so to speak) as far as real life relationships go but it's not really about dying on this particular hill either - it's about a wider perspective in general which is something many people lack on any given topic. After all lot of things about romance are just a matter of perspective and a gray scale rather than black and white. If pointing that out is creepy, I suppose so be it. But people instantly labeling things they don't personally agree or identify with as disgusting is how we get homophobes and suchlike too. People like judging other people. And don't get me wrong, I entirely agree that children should be protected from adult "sexual predation." But this relationship as presented in this story really doesn't qualify as such to me. Gray area morally, granted, but
not predation (except
by Nanjou, I guess). And at least for me personally that's what I object to when I see these criticisms; basically people not even understanding the situation properly.
And yet at the end of the day... we all here could keep discussing it 'til the heat death of the universe and it wouldn't make one bit of difference, because everyone's firmly made up their minds long before the discussion started.