I agree. I actually enjoyed the story, but I was truly hoping for an ending where Kei dies. Pedophilia is one the things I hate the most in the world, so I was truly hoping for him to die.
I don't care about his past. His past is not an excuse for becoming a pedophile. The one thing I'm happy about is since he has Yui, he won't be targeting multiple kids. I understand the "age of consent" is 13 in Japan, but just because it's legal does not make it right.
The worst part is that the author makes it seem ok to do that if its love and compares it with homosexuality. Its NOT the same thing. An adult and a child and two men together are two veeeeeery different things.
When I started reading I almost dropped it, but then I thought there must be some kind of "killing stalking" or "warehouse" type of outcome at some point. Nope. Touching a child who doesn't have the capacity to tell wrong from right or desire from the need to please or hasn't any notion of what self respect and limits are, is a big no no for me. I totally agree with you - legal definitely doesn't make it right.
YES. I totally agree with you. Pedophilia and homosexuality are COMPLETELY different things. That part also made me extremely frustrated. How can it be love when one party systematically takes advantage of the other? Next thing you know rapists get away with it cause they raped with love?
mmm I think you got things wrong? At no point their relationship is portrayed as something positive or healthy. You can see that they both ended up pretty fucked up from this situation, and the fact that they started taking drugs suggest that their problems are not over, and worse stuff is gonna happen in the future for sure. Their current situation is just some temporary peace. Just because the characters refer to it as "love" doesn't mean we are supposed to take it that way. That's just what they think, and how they cope with their own traumas and mental hang ups.
Also I want to add that I'm not defending any of their actions, or think that what they are doing is right in any way. But I think that's the point of the story: to show a twisted relationship, and how both characters corrupted each other until they got in their current situation.
I don't think that the sum of their relationship is portrayed as being positive at all. But the fact that the characters do hold the rhetoric that what they are doing is okay because of love repulses me. While I do understand it all adds up and it's a story and that's how the author chose to depict their fall, I don't approve of the dialog and I think it's tasteless, especially the parallel made with homosexuality and patching everything up with the word "love". It's not that I don't understand, it's that I just don't like that part.
Ah I see. Personally I'm not bothered by those elements.
The fact that it's willing to handle such tasteless topics while at the same time being so brilliantly crafted is part of what makes it so fascinating to me.
You're right that their relationship isn't positive at all. The thing is though that this situation is supposed to be traumatizing, and you can see the effect it has had on Kei, to the point it also made him a pedophile. What makes it seem contradictory is the part that although Kei is negatively affected by this, he still tries to go meet his oji-san because apparently he loved him? Wouldn't he want to stay away from him? It's incomprehensible to me how this can be his coping mechanism.
What traumatized Kei wasn't his experience with Oji-san, it was the way his family and society treated him after it was found out. Of course as a child he wasn't able to tell that what Oji-san was doing was wrong, and, because of the way everything went down, he wasn't able to learn it, and in the end he tried to do the same with Yui.
Imagine being a child, doing something you think it's perfectly fine, and then have everyone found out about it and react the way his family did in the story. No one ever took the time to explain things to him properly, they just told him it was wrong and made him go through a living hell. He was never able to understand why it was wrong, he just did what he was told to avoid more punishment.
The "normal life" to him was absolute agony. It makes sense that he would long for the days when he was with his Oji-san because, in the end, that's when he was the happiest.
His way of coping is not going back to Oji-san, it's being with Yui, because Yui is the only person willing to accept him the way he is, since they both went through something very similar.
In the end the point of the story is showing how you can't just change people's minds by telling them that what they are doing is wrong, because they will never truly change in the end. They might be able to adapt temporarily, like Kei and Yui did, but after time they will just go back to the way they were, because they just acted normally out of fear of being rejected by society, not out of their own conviction.
Holy shit, amazing comment
Like wtf. Who publishes stuff like this? This is disgusting. I hope they OD together. Thank fuck they can't have kids. I thought Yui and Mai were going to kill him in a really gore scene. Not down with this shit.