Ok but let's be real, "the main love interest not being a rapist" is an incredibly low bar, that it looks like this manga will STILL fail at. If he's seventeen then it's statutory rape.
Also it would have been a lot less creepy if the seme wasn't clearly horny over a kid in a highschool uniform right from the beginning. Age gaps are sometimes fine if both people are of age but some of the scenes feel like he's borderline grooming this vunerable kid who needs money and is missing a father/older brother figure in his life. If he'd straight out said it from the start it's less weird than getting a kid to come to your house, then slowly escalating things by lightly kissing them and making them sleep in the same bed as you etc.
It's not just the age gap itself that is the problem, age gaps are sometimes totally fine but this is not a healthy portrayal of an age gap relationship. After all, we the audience know the uke is into the seme, but the older character clearly does not, which makes his actions very questionable.
Grooming is, and I quote, “the action by a pedophile of preparing a child for a meeting, especially via an Internet chat room, with the intention of committing a sexual offense.”
At the begging, they said that the seme was 32 and had a 12 year old gap with the uke. Why is a 20 year old still doing in high school? Idk maybe he repeated a year.
My point is, that a 20 year old is a full fledged adult, an the seme wasn’t preparing him for nothing.
Age gap is one thing, and grooming is other. Please don’t confuse them
He's not 20, the translator used Korean raws, in Korea ages are increased by one or two years. So the uke is a teenager. Grooming is about an adult slowly preparing someone for sexual contact which the seme absolutely is doing. That's why he so badly wanted him to work at his house, because he was already turned on by him from the beginning. Grooming also isn't something that exclusively happens to children (that definition is not very good, , it's less about age and more about power. If someone is in a vunerable position (like, for example having to make enough money to look after their three siblings) then they are more likely to accept someone being inappropriate towards them, doing things like normalising sexual situations. So yeah, maybe it's not 100% clear whether or not it's grooming, but it's not a million miles away. Still creepy.
Here's a link about adult grooming. https://www.survivorsuk.org/question/grooming/#:~:text=Adult%20grooming,%E2%80%93%20or%20prepared%20%E2%80%93%20for%20abuse.
Ah thanks for telling me about the adult grooming thing, I didn’t know about that.
Also, I get everything you’re saying and agree to some point, but I guess it’s not that weird to me for a teenager to date someone older since my friends, people I know and myself did when we were 17-18.
Anyways, my point is that I hope people could stop hating on this so much.
Once again thanks for telling me about the adult grooming since I didn’t know :))
My parents are like 10 years of gap, I'm telling you you won't really see it that much as time goes on.
And yeah, there is much worse than this. Seme DIDN'T RAPE HIM LIKE WTF.
And actually pls keep reading till the end if y'all had read the raws right now you would be SHUTTING THE FUCK UP.
mangaka didn't ask you to read it so? ╮(￣▽￣)╭