#AUUUUGHHHHH ((ripping my hair out)) anyway.

[soubiapologist]

i do think loveless is hated in part for being up front about its subject matter. there’s plenty of beloved shoujo (and other media) where the romance is treated as awesome despite there being a massive age gap or power indifference. i’ve never seen shugo chara but i’ve heard there’s an age gap almost as large as soubi and ritsuka’s in that and everyone’s just like “it’s a shitty element but you can ignore it” but when loveless makes the problem unignorable people are like OUUUGHHHHH IM SO MAD. like damn that’s crazy. there’s a character in loveless who also ignores the shitty things her show love interest (i mean. in the way loveless even has love interests) does despite them being uh, PRETTY FUCKING BAD AND UNIGNORABLE, because she loves him, and it gets people HURT. bad. like. god

cardcaptors has sakura’s parents have a massive fucking age gap, sailor moon has a gap with tuxedo mask and usagi. many such cases etc etc. but part of the problem is that the framing allows for these things to be glossed over even if briefly discussed. characters that are teens and really just kids themselves are easily read as adults by younger readers, who the media is targeted towards. you can argue that it’s just an empowering fantasy for kids if you want but i implore you to ask yourself what exactly “empowering” means in this context. with loveless though the age gap is. well almost “fetishized” to a degree and that makes it completely unignorable so that the story can actually start ADDRESSING IT now that there’s no denying or glossing over it. to make something taboo makes it a focus, it bring to light our desires and disgusts, facilitating a discussion about the morality of the actions taking place.

you ARE supposed to feel sympathy for soubi and i think that’s hard for a lot of people to swallow, but the thing is? the sympathy you feel for him, if you’re following the material, doesn’t sublimate into wanting him and ritsuka to be together, not romantically or sexually at least, it sublimates into wanting him to stop. (and i think that’s something a lot of people who have suffered abuse at the hands of a loved one can relate to; they don’t want their loved one punished, they want their loved one to STOP, and part of the reason some people don’t report abuse is LITERALLY because they don’t want their loved one taken away for various reasons) and i think the idea that abusers CAN stop and CAN change and CAN get better and are PEOPLE with motivations on systemic levels is a scarier thought to a lot of people than the idea that abusers are just some ontological category of evil that someone actively and maliciously chooses to identify into and permanently stays in and must by appropriately punished for, whatever that implies. because then we’d have to grapple with all the ways that that very mentality leads to abuse, and all the times that not only we were abused, but that we abused others. i think people see the phrase “empowering abusers to be better people” and stop after the first two words.

in end of evangelion misato kisses shinji on the lips and teases sex in an effort to get shinji to save the world. i’m pretty sure misato knows DAMN well how shitty this is. but we understand her motive in manipulating and sexually abusing a child because the stakes are so high. we know it’s shitty but we feel bad for her and we feel bad for shinji. when soubi does something similar and it’s ambiguous to how bad he understands this to be because of his perspective being warped by the abuse he suffered and is still suffering people are (rightfully) horrified but then put the media down and condemn it. misato gets her redemption as much as you can call it that when she dies, but soubi, soubi keeps going. abuse feels like the end of the world, but it isn’t, not really. the earth keeps turning with everyone in it. what happens when the stakes are “lower”, when there is no end of the world, when there is no karmic death to free your mind from what you’ve done or had done to you. what’s left to do when it’s just

you

and me

and the things we’ve done

and the things we haven’t yet found the strength to do

and there is no magic

there is no giant robot

there’s no end of the world

it’s just us

and our bond

whatever it may be

and the language we use to communicate

what will we choose to say?