I think part of the reason age-gap or student×teacher stuff can bother people so much, unlike violence in action movies, is the way it relates to the core conceit and what a reader/viewer is looking for.
With action movies, you're looking for cool action scenes, likely with a side of bad people getting what they deserve. Violence, and quite a bit of law breaking, doesn't really conflict with that. In fact, it's probably an explicit part of what you're looking for.
Conversely, with romance manga, you're often looking for an exploration of the characters' relationship, which means you're a lot more likely to both notice and focus on the implications and issues created by unsavory details like age gap and student × teacher relationship. This can also get in the way of extending the fantasy, like picturing them meeting each other's friends, if you're the type who likes to imagine your own scenes.
The other issue is that potentially abusive power imbalances like this are a lot closer to real life, so it's a lot easier to picture yourself in the place of one of the characters, or in a similar position, and not like how that makes you feel when you start applying real life logic to that image. By contrast, even though you probably wouldn't like being in an action flick in real life, those kinds of things are divorced enough from most people's experience that it's much easier to maintain the fantasy logic, and ignore the more realistic consequences, when picturing yourself in those scenarios.
I think Sal Jiang can help me demonstrate what I mean. Imagine if the main character's relationship in Black & White was presented like the relationship in Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko!. Being told that you're looking at the start of a beautiful and loving relationship, while watching the two characters hurt each other and just generally be awful human beings, would be a bit uncomfortable. But, of course, Black & White isn't Ayaka and you're not reading it to see a loving relationship. You're reading it for the absolutely toxic yuri and fantastic hate-sex between two people who heard Fie on Goodness and thought it would be a good song to base their lives on.
With all of that said, at least for me, this premise is absurd enough and the power dynamic is inverted enough, that I'm mostly just curious to see where it goes.
last edited at Jun 14, 2025 12:39PM
