Reviews

Jun 28, 2021
Mixed Feelings
Where do I even start to open this can of worms?
There's a bunch of people who seem to like it and consider it wholesome and to a certain extent I can see why. There are scenes that could be perfectly wholesome if not for the overall situation.
Likewise there are people who condemn it for all the legal and moral issues within the story. Those claims are absolutely valid but through all those issues I feel there are some quite valuable things to be learned as well if you change your perspective a bit.

Let's get the smaller things our of the way before we tackle the big issue:
The sound exists and personally speaking the art feels somewhat off at times but one can probably put up with it just fine.
Apart from the main 2 the characters seem to have only the most basic depth to them and barely matter anyway while Sayu and Yoshida do get a fairly reasonable development.

Now for the legal and moral issues: potential grooming, sexual abuse of minors, pedophilia, the way they address suicide, taking in a minor without parental agreement and possibly also parental neglect
In my opinion none of those are properly touched upon, some aren't even addressed at all.
Grooming: Nobody questions whether Yoshida might be grooming Sayu and while I do not think he (consciously) did so, he certainly had all the means to which is still worrying.
Sexual abuse of minors: All anyone ever questioned was whether or not he would get sexual with her seeing as she can recount tales of all the times she was pressured into those type of things so man would let her stay in their homes. This is mentioned as being horrible and both illegal as well as morally wrong but I can't remember anyone helping her work through the toll this would have to take on her. To Yoshida's credit though he does decline her every offer because of (in part) her age.
Pedophilia: Isn't discussed at all. Yoshida does mention he won't fall for highschool kids but his colleague casually calls Sayu cute, Sayu's brother doesn't seem to mind the idea of this grown adult loving his underage sister and you can not convince me that Yoshida did in fact not catch feelings for this minor.
Suicide: This is in itself not touched upon properly but to be fair from the viwers perspective there was no way we could have possibly touched it any better than it has been done. Not without sacrificing the storyflow anyway.
Taking in a random minor: This is illegal for a reason but we only ever get told that it is in fact illegal while we get shown all the positives it had for Sayu to be taken in by Yoshida. There's gotta be SOME way to make you question whether this really is the right thing to do.
Parental neglect: Well, not with that kind of mom though. You can basically piece together that there is an issue here but we only really get Sayus side of the story, nobody acknowledges it really and it's kinda taken care of in a weird way.

To end this on a less sour note I'll double down on being able to take away good lessons from this as well.
Those being 'Helping others regardless of what you get out of it', 'Being able to accept help', 'Not compromising on ones own morals' and 'Being able to face the past and move on'

All in all I didn't particularly like it or hate it but it absolutely isn't for everyone.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
What did you think of this review?
Nice Nice0
Love it Love it0
Funny Funny0
Show all
It’s time to ditch the text file.
Keep track of your anime easily by creating your own list.
Sign Up Login