just something i’ve noticed, in the last few years since the furuba reboot,
teens now object to uo/kureno and tohru’s mom/tohru’s dad way way wayyyyy more than i ever did as a teen. and like, i get why, but i’m still like, were my teen experiences really that different?
like, for me, i had friends who were like uo: bad home life, started being The Adult In The House when they were like 10/11, by the time they’re 17 they’re working and they relate best to people a lot older than them. hell, when i was 17 i was in college -- i had a great home life but i still saw my peer group as the 18-24 year olds! so uo, an adult before her time, meeting kureno, who graduated high school and then was chucked straight into complete social isolation and has a definite case of arrested development, seemed like a socially-acceptable enough fit. maybe sideways glances, but nothing to make a scene over. it was way better than what my real life friends were getting when they were dating much older men. uo has real agency, she’s not dependent on him for anything, and kureno is actually a stand-up dude! practically a dream relationship when compared to.... some dudes. (god, jessica, why did you keep dating those assholes.)
tohru’s mom and dad, idk, i thought tohru’s dad was like 19, maybe 20 tops and 15ish and 19ish isn’t exactly a nightmare scenario. i wouldn’t recommend it in real life but i knew plenty of kids who dated in that range at my high school and it’s in line, if on the young side, with the ages people got married in the historical fiction and even history books i was devouring at the same time. i knew a girl who got married at 16 to her 19 y/o boyfriend so that she had wife’s rights when he got deployed and would be able to be with him in heaven if he got killed in action. (like i said, i wouldn’t have recommended it, but i get it -- there’s real security in being married, even very young, in certain situations.)
idk, i see them compared to disturbing predatory relationships and i just don’t think that’s the best comparison. i really do think they analogue much more closely to the less predatory relationships i saw in my personal life than the scarier ones that i know do happen. uo and tohru’s mom aren’t exactly loretta lynn, here, in my opinion.
so it just strikes me as odd seeing long denunciations of these relationships. i don’t know if i’m just a geezer at not-yet-30, or if there was something about my own upbringing that’s different from that of the new audience, or if i’m seeing an outlier minority, or what. and look: i’m not saying you have to like them! heaven knows i dropped many a manga for uncomfortable depictions of age gaps (dengeki daisy comes to mind). i just think this difference is interesting and worth having a discussion about.
