I would just like to remind anyone who’s wondering why Mei acts so disinterested in sex that she was in a sexually abusive engagement with Amemiya for who knows how long and subsequently took that abuse out on the person she now loves. She probably still doesn’t associate sex with… good things.
Or that could just be my copium headcanon lol
Which indeed it is. There is absolutely zero textual evidence that Mei has ever had sex, let alone was abused multiple times by Amemiya. We do know for sure that he subjected her to an unwelcome semi-public kiss.
A number of readers have attempted to explain Saburouta’s clumsy and inconsistent characterization by pretending to get inside Mei’s head. If the author wanted to indicate such a motivation for Mei’s current behavior as opposed to the explicit explanations we have been given, she has had ample opportunity to do so.
while i cant exactly defend saburouta's clumsy inconsistent characterization AT TIMES, if you go back and really read the first volume its pretty apparent through mei's behavior towards yuzu that she has been through some shit. the way mei throws herself all over yuzu and completely disregards her boundaries is reason enough to believe that sleezy teacher not only took advantage over her but also completely butchered her perception of what a healthy, consensual relationship is. whether this is just readers head cannons or subtext is unclear as we don't have explicit confirmation BUT its still worth noting. also, citrus is a drama but its also a cute romance as well so the author's reluctance to delve into explicit sexual assault is more than understandable.
I don't think readers are quite aware of how much this defense of Mei as an alleged sexual assault victim, if accurate, actually amounts to a scathing indictment of Saburouta as a shitty writer.
Let's stipulate that an unwanted kiss, whether by Rapey-sensei on Mei or by Mei on Yuzu is indeed a form of sexual assault, and that Mei's attitude about physical intimacy initially is not a healthy one--the question at hand is whether Mei's current reluctance to engage in any but the most trivial skinship is primarily due to the psychological trauma of a number of undepicted and unmentioned off-panel sexual experiences which would have occurred prior to the earliest chapters of the first series.
It's a writer's job to establish the motivations of their characters within the text, and we have in fact been told why Mei is acting the way she is toward Yuzu when she says,
"Before marriage, there's dating, and we've only just started. And in order to respond to [Yuzu's] sincerity, I should properly go through the steps from the very beginning."
She goes on to say, "I would be lying if I said I didn't want to touch her, but . . ." then she leaves the rest of the statement hanging. This is all very much in keeping with Mei's overall depiction throughout both series as a hyper-principled rule follower. There has been no suggestion whatsoever that her unpleasant experience with her first fianceé, which was depicted in the first chapter of the first series and has never been recalled or alluded to again, has anything at all to do with her actions nearly 100 chapters (counting specials and extras) later.
There's the further point that the exact same behavior that supposedly has turned Mei into a [semi-autistic] Broken Bird also turned Yuzu from being fully committed to comphet into a gung-ho faux-incestous lesbian pretty much instantaneously, leaving open the question of what exactly the Citrus universe has to say about the consequences of uninvited physical intimacy.
EDIT: I’m editing this to clarify my poorly-expressed point, but leaving the original phrase in so that later responses in the thread make sense.
Trying again: Mei’s emotional responses in Citrus+ have been so repressed that readers have postulated several hypotheses to explain her affect, including that she is a traumatized victim of chronic sexual abuse, a theory which is based on a single scene in the first chapter of the previous series, or that she is profoundly neurodivergent, which is not based on anything in the text. In my view, these are both simply headcanon attempts to rehabilitate the author’s slipshod characterization of what was once the most interesting character in the series.
last edited at Jan 21, 2023 9:53AM
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