Unita Yumi, you are on notice.
Dec. 3rd, 2011 10:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
opusculasedferaSo I have seen Bunny Drop recced around as an adorable manga that's like Yotsuba& (which everyone should read instead of this because it's fabulous forever) but more realistic, and the beginning lives up to this, but I have...reservations...about the ending.
It begins the way everyone says it does: Daikichi adopts his grandfather's illegitimate daughter (he's 30, she's 5 or 6) when she shows up at the grandfather's funeral and no one seems to know what to do with her. He discovers that raising a kid is actually quite difficult. But then...
There are 4 volumes of his first year or so with her and it's pretty cute, even as someone who is not really interested in children in the abstract (I have baby cousins who are the best ever, everyone else's kids can go hang, you know how it is). It deals with the fact that single parents have it tough: he has to take a shittier job so he can pick her up from daycare, just as he's realising that more money would be nice as he has another person to think about; people are really judgy about him being a single parent; etc. Unita is pretty good about all this and he meets other single parents and married parents and it's really quite nuanced about the differences and similarities between the experiences of working parents, stay-at-home parents, single, married, male, female, and how different combinations of these characteristics change everything again. There's a lovely moment later when Rin, his adopted daughter, is thinking about parents and realises that the common factor that says 'parent' to her is a kind of gently frazzled look because parenting is hard all round. Daikichi becomes close to his daughter's best friend's mum and they bond over the difficulties of parenting and how he is quite good at understanding her son because they are quite similar.
It then jumps to 10 years later. Rin is 16 and in highschool, it's still mostly good. This bit is all observations about dealing with teenagers and discussion of how some things societally have changed parenting. Frex, Daikichi's sister is only now having her first kid, although she got married at the end of the first section, and it's all about how it's easier for women now to put these things off and how this does help them keep their jobs (a big part of the first 4 volumes is discussion of how women are expected to quit once they have kids) because they have the experience and the ability to demand time off. There's a moderately cute subplot about how Rin's best friend from childhood, Kouki, now has the world's biggest crush on her and she's not really interested and keeps saying he's like a brother, although they're so close everyone assumes they're dating. It generally seems to be going well and it looks like either way this falls out, whether they date or not, the message will be okay: either "they do like each other and being close friends with your partner is important" or "siblings-by-choice can be just as close as blood-related siblings." And then it goes off the rails.
Rin announces that the reason that she's not interested in Kouki is because she's in love with Daikichi, the man who has raised her since she was six, and who, it is made explicit, is the only guardian she truly remembers. This doesn't start out too terribly, it seems like it's going to be about how relationships are complicated, the differences between how people see blood relatives and adopted relatives, and how these perceptions don't actually match up to reality. Daikichi seems legitimately horrified because he has always thought of her as a daughter and it looks like it's going to be about Rin coming to terms with her place in his life as his adopted daughter, especially when she meets her bio-mum and it's just really awkward (the narrative is pretty good about her bio-mum as well, although Daikichi is a bit "you didn't want your awesome daughter! How could you not! I am judging you!", I felt like the narrative understood that she was in a tough situation.) But no, her mum reveals that Daikichi's grandfather is not Rin's bio-dad, so Daikichi and Rin could actually get married legally. Apparently this was the only obstacle because Daikichi gives her two years of highschool to properly make up her mind and the ninth and last volume ends with her graduation, at which point she comes home and is like "so, we're going to be together now, yes? I would like to have your baby!" and it's immensely creepy!
First, this completely ruins all the awesome messages of the early volumes about what family is and how this is complicated. Next, the problem with the two of them that anyone else would see was never that that degree of blood kinship was too high for a legal marriage, the problem is that he clearly thinks of her as a kid! His kid! There's another quite good moment when she's in highschool and he looks at some of the 19/20 yr olds at work and realises that he can't see them as anything except children because they look the same age as Rin to him! Also, more than 20 years age gap, plus parental relationship? So creepy! Creepy forever!
It's also weird to me because there isn't really a good discussion about her feelings for him that isn't just her saying that she wants to be together forever. Maybe it's just because I interpreted all the early bits where she says this as being about her insecurities as an adopted kid (not that I mean that all adopted kids have this issue, but she certainly seems to for other reasons as well) and she interpreted Daikichi's encouragement to go away to uni as pushing her out of his life instead of as him being super-parental and "my kid should have everything they want and the best opportunities possible!"? But it doesn't seem like there's anything there except the vague desire to be with him forever and then babies, suddenly, at the end.
For one, it really refuses to go to the sexual-attraction place, on either side and that's kind of important! (He is definitely not asexual anyway and it doesn't seem like she's intended to be, there's a tiny amount of attraction subtext with some of her highschool classmates.) If it's too creepy to go into him perving on his sixteen year-old daughter, maybe that should have been a hint, Unita Yumi! Obviously this isn't the only thing that's important in a relationship, but it would have helped be some kind of change from the parent-child relationships depicted in the whole rest of the series, which are also about how parental relationships last a lifetime, even if you do develop other kinds of relationships as well. At the end it's just like "Babies. Babies now." and they both stand there are look really physically uncomfortable around each other and it's so weird!
This is admittedly trampling hard on some things that are definite lack-of-interest buttons for me, if not squicks: I don't like giant age gaps and huge power imbalances and people who are only interested in babies. But even so, it seems weird and suspect that this is the happy ending.
I just can't decide if I should full on warn people or not. Because I really enjoyed the first 6/7 volumes and I don't want no one to read them, which is probably what would have happened if I had been told "and they fall in love at the end," (although I do kind of wish I'd known!) but I also feel like they would have been worse if I had known they were leading up to this. There are now all these moments in the earlier volumes that I can't look at without going "is this supposed to indicate that their love is fine and not at all creepy? That their relationship was never really parental?" Because there are a few moments that are amusingly role-reversed (she cooks for him and wakes him up in the morning), but at the time this seemed like it was going for "look, being a parent is hard and you can't always be the 'perfect' parent who does everything for your kids, it's fine if sometimes your have to do things together" which is so much less creepy! But now seems more creepy!I can't really recommend it, although I would like some people to read it to see if my reactions are uncommon. I know a lot of the recs I saw earlier were at least a year or so ago when the last volume hadn't come out and presumably people didn't know this was what was going to happen, so I'd like to see if this changes things for people.
It begins the way everyone says it does: Daikichi adopts his grandfather's illegitimate daughter (he's 30, she's 5 or 6) when she shows up at the grandfather's funeral and no one seems to know what to do with her. He discovers that raising a kid is actually quite difficult. But then...
There are 4 volumes of his first year or so with her and it's pretty cute, even as someone who is not really interested in children in the abstract (I have baby cousins who are the best ever, everyone else's kids can go hang, you know how it is). It deals with the fact that single parents have it tough: he has to take a shittier job so he can pick her up from daycare, just as he's realising that more money would be nice as he has another person to think about; people are really judgy about him being a single parent; etc. Unita is pretty good about all this and he meets other single parents and married parents and it's really quite nuanced about the differences and similarities between the experiences of working parents, stay-at-home parents, single, married, male, female, and how different combinations of these characteristics change everything again. There's a lovely moment later when Rin, his adopted daughter, is thinking about parents and realises that the common factor that says 'parent' to her is a kind of gently frazzled look because parenting is hard all round. Daikichi becomes close to his daughter's best friend's mum and they bond over the difficulties of parenting and how he is quite good at understanding her son because they are quite similar.
It then jumps to 10 years later. Rin is 16 and in highschool, it's still mostly good. This bit is all observations about dealing with teenagers and discussion of how some things societally have changed parenting. Frex, Daikichi's sister is only now having her first kid, although she got married at the end of the first section, and it's all about how it's easier for women now to put these things off and how this does help them keep their jobs (a big part of the first 4 volumes is discussion of how women are expected to quit once they have kids) because they have the experience and the ability to demand time off. There's a moderately cute subplot about how Rin's best friend from childhood, Kouki, now has the world's biggest crush on her and she's not really interested and keeps saying he's like a brother, although they're so close everyone assumes they're dating. It generally seems to be going well and it looks like either way this falls out, whether they date or not, the message will be okay: either "they do like each other and being close friends with your partner is important" or "siblings-by-choice can be just as close as blood-related siblings." And then it goes off the rails.
Rin announces that the reason that she's not interested in Kouki is because she's in love with Daikichi, the man who has raised her since she was six, and who, it is made explicit, is the only guardian she truly remembers. This doesn't start out too terribly, it seems like it's going to be about how relationships are complicated, the differences between how people see blood relatives and adopted relatives, and how these perceptions don't actually match up to reality. Daikichi seems legitimately horrified because he has always thought of her as a daughter and it looks like it's going to be about Rin coming to terms with her place in his life as his adopted daughter, especially when she meets her bio-mum and it's just really awkward (the narrative is pretty good about her bio-mum as well, although Daikichi is a bit "you didn't want your awesome daughter! How could you not! I am judging you!", I felt like the narrative understood that she was in a tough situation.) But no, her mum reveals that Daikichi's grandfather is not Rin's bio-dad, so Daikichi and Rin could actually get married legally. Apparently this was the only obstacle because Daikichi gives her two years of highschool to properly make up her mind and the ninth and last volume ends with her graduation, at which point she comes home and is like "so, we're going to be together now, yes? I would like to have your baby!" and it's immensely creepy!
First, this completely ruins all the awesome messages of the early volumes about what family is and how this is complicated. Next, the problem with the two of them that anyone else would see was never that that degree of blood kinship was too high for a legal marriage, the problem is that he clearly thinks of her as a kid! His kid! There's another quite good moment when she's in highschool and he looks at some of the 19/20 yr olds at work and realises that he can't see them as anything except children because they look the same age as Rin to him! Also, more than 20 years age gap, plus parental relationship? So creepy! Creepy forever!
It's also weird to me because there isn't really a good discussion about her feelings for him that isn't just her saying that she wants to be together forever. Maybe it's just because I interpreted all the early bits where she says this as being about her insecurities as an adopted kid (not that I mean that all adopted kids have this issue, but she certainly seems to for other reasons as well) and she interpreted Daikichi's encouragement to go away to uni as pushing her out of his life instead of as him being super-parental and "my kid should have everything they want and the best opportunities possible!"? But it doesn't seem like there's anything there except the vague desire to be with him forever and then babies, suddenly, at the end.
For one, it really refuses to go to the sexual-attraction place, on either side and that's kind of important! (He is definitely not asexual anyway and it doesn't seem like she's intended to be, there's a tiny amount of attraction subtext with some of her highschool classmates.) If it's too creepy to go into him perving on his sixteen year-old daughter, maybe that should have been a hint, Unita Yumi! Obviously this isn't the only thing that's important in a relationship, but it would have helped be some kind of change from the parent-child relationships depicted in the whole rest of the series, which are also about how parental relationships last a lifetime, even if you do develop other kinds of relationships as well. At the end it's just like "Babies. Babies now." and they both stand there are look really physically uncomfortable around each other and it's so weird!
This is admittedly trampling hard on some things that are definite lack-of-interest buttons for me, if not squicks: I don't like giant age gaps and huge power imbalances and people who are only interested in babies. But even so, it seems weird and suspect that this is the happy ending.
I just can't decide if I should full on warn people or not. Because I really enjoyed the first 6/7 volumes and I don't want no one to read them, which is probably what would have happened if I had been told "and they fall in love at the end," (although I do kind of wish I'd known!) but I also feel like they would have been worse if I had known they were leading up to this. There are now all these moments in the earlier volumes that I can't look at without going "is this supposed to indicate that their love is fine and not at all creepy? That their relationship was never really parental?" Because there are a few moments that are amusingly role-reversed (she cooks for him and wakes him up in the morning), but at the time this seemed like it was going for "look, being a parent is hard and you can't always be the 'perfect' parent who does everything for your kids, it's fine if sometimes your have to do things together" which is so much less creepy! But now seems more creepy!I can't really recommend it, although I would like some people to read it to see if my reactions are uncommon. I know a lot of the recs I saw earlier were at least a year or so ago when the last volume hadn't come out and presumably people didn't know this was what was going to happen, so I'd like to see if this changes things for people.
