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REVIEW: Bunny Drop GN 9

...My father was 24 years older than my mother; they were related – my grandfather (my mother’s father) and my father were cousins and good mates; and my mother knew my father well from childhood. Like Rin and Daikichi, my mother was the headstrong, wilful one while my father was the mild, generous one. By all accounts it was a relatively happy marriage between two consenting, equal adults.

I say “by all accounts” because I know all too well what the real problem is with such a marriage. The man will die many years before the woman, something that people here aren’t imagining. My mother was left a young widow - I never met my father. This, of course, is a practical problem, not an ethical or polemical thought exercise. Four years later my mother married a man within 12 months of her own age, surely meeting the approval of everyone here given all the rhetoric in this thread. He was an abusive man and it was an unhappy marriage...

I just wish people would get over their precious beliefs and try some empathy instead.

Mohawk52 wrote:

insert name here wrote: Mohawk52 wrote: Single parenthood is the same regardless of gender. Maybe it should be, but it isn't. And I suspect that an analysis of gender roles may be useful to interpreting the work here. You obviously aren't a parent then.

Maybe not, but I don't see how that invalidates my analysis. I'd like to think that my lack of experience aboard whaling vessels doesn't disqualify my ability to interpret Moby Dick. Gender, like capital or other socio-symbolic constructs, operates at different levels of abstraction. The division of labor in the raising of children has been historically gendered, and I think this is going to effect how it is represented in culture.

TarsTarkas wrote:

You can judge her and belittle her feelings as you like, but I doubt she cares what we think.

Here comes Captain Moral Relativity to let us all know that the best way to think about every gross thing that happens in anime is to be as accepting and super OK with it as is humanly possible!

Quote:

I just wish people would get over their precious beliefs and try some empathy instead.

Empathy is not the issue here. Bad writing is.

Way too many people on this thread acting like Daikichi and Rin are actual people with autonomy and wills that we're supposed to respect rather than characters in a story written by an author. Rin didn't "choose" Daikichi, Unita Yumi chose to have Rin fall in love with him. The choice we should be questioning isn't "does a child have a right to fall in love with their parent?" but rather "should an author write a story that has a child wind up in a sexual relationship with her guardian?"

As much as you may see your parents relationship reflected in this one because of the age difference, age difference is not the concern we have here. It's that the author depicts what was, for many volumes, an explicitly guardian-child relationship converting into a romantic relationship. That is where the squick comes from. I have rooted for a lot of big age-difference relationships over the course of my lifetime as a reader, but in none of them did the older man help the younger girl through a bedwetting phase, or take her to kindergarten, or raise her from childhood.

The fundamental problem with Bunny Drop is twofold:
1) Unita is saying that foster parents aren't "real parents" and therefore a romantic relationship with them is okay. This is an insult to every foster parent who ever existed.
2) Unita is saying a guardian-child relationship can be easily turned into a husband-wife relationship, implying that the two are somehow analogous. This perpetuates the idea of women as the "junior" partner of a relationship, under the authority of her husband. Age-difference relationships are not inherently unequal, but one where the husband was literally her guardian for more than ten years is never, never going to be anything resembling an equal relationship.

This isn't about individuals making choices in mates, this is about a writer choosing a very bad road for a story to go down. There are lots of well-written stories where characters have a big age-gap, but this is not one of them.

I just watched a version of Les Miserables. The ending of Bunny Drop makes me think what if Cosette ended up with Jean Valjean instead.

Zac wrote:

TarsTarkas wrote: You can judge her and belittle her feelings as you like, but I doubt she cares what we think. Here comes Captain Moral Relativity to let us all know that the best way to think about every gross thing that happens in anime is to be as accepting and super OK with it as is humanly possible!

Not really, I agree that it is not acceptable, and perhaps that even the writer, wrote the story she did to force a convoluted reasoning.

My problem is you all make it seem so simple, all Daikichi has to do is what you want, and everything is going to be rainbows and flowers for Daikichi and Rin, no chance for it to be a tragedy.