Why do you assume they're uncomfortable with the given context? Not attacking. Just curious because I only read one comment and they even tagged it as baseless. They could simply just be fabricating for fun.
You’re right—that was an assumption on my part, and the poster did clarify what they were responding to.
This story is quite challenging on several levels: ethically, sure, but also on the level of plausibility and consistency of characterization.
The main issue, what critics call an “interpretive crux,” is what exactly are we to make of Mai?
The basic story tropes here are not unfamiliar (age-gap, reverse size-gap, the younger character (apparently) coming on to the older one, etc.). But the extreme nature of the specifics (Mai’s age, her physical development, her seductive affect) are rarely seen outside of hentai. This kind of age-gap and “wholesome” just doesn’t compute (or rarely does—I imagine there must be some parallels in the wide universe of manga). So this story inherently does pose a lot of (at this point) unanswered questions.
But I think there’s an important distinction to be made between what the text (as authored) is doing and what people make up in their heads. A valid interpretive hypothesis needs to be based, however tentatively, in the specifics of the text.
In the case of predictions about uncompleted serial stories, there’s also the weaker “evidence” of typical genre tropes and conventions that might apply—stories often use these to signal where they’re going without being completely overt about it. This story doesn’t really allow readers to put much weight on such things, though, because of its unusual premises.
As I said, readers are free to fabulate on a story any way they like. But unless a theory is grounded in something in the text, it is, at best, not very helpful in positing answers to the story’s questions.
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