#hoshino ai should be able to kick people in the ankle at full force and then get laid with very nice boy who is kind to her

[aihoshiino]

quick heads up for canon typical discussions of sex & underage sex specifically in this post

not necessarily a meta so much as a general ramble (<- shout out to the me of 1 Hour Ago who started typing an Ai post sincerely believing this would be true), but an aspect of Ai's character I'm always really sort of fascinated and saddened by that the text (understandably) doesn't as much go into is her fucked up relationship with her own sexuality. the consistency with which she refers to herself as 'dirty' specifically sticks out to me a huge amount and it reads so strongly to me as Ai perceiving herself as being dirty/impure or somehow Bad for being like... an person with healthy sexual desires and a sex drive.

there's a lot of subtext-adjacent stuff to suggest the twins' dad wasn't her first sexual partner and i do think that's the interpretation that both interests me the most and makes the most sense to me - I don't imagine a girl who wasn't taught what a door chain was for was given the best sex education - to imagine Ai, lonely and unsure of how to connect with people, stumbling into intimacy too quick as a stopgap or a shortcut to the thing she really wanted; warmth, affection, love.

is this necessarily Good Or Healthy? no, but it's also not the shameful, dirty thing that the idol culture's obsession with purity has led her to believe. it's just another way the environment she's in has forced this impression on her that her normal, achingly human problems are things she has to cover up and hide like dark secrets.

i also don't think the ways she was subjected to constant objectification and misogyny as she grew up can be discounted as influences here, either. B-Komachi is specifically identified in Viewpoint B as "[...]a group focused on romance above all else", "[...]promoting that sort of intense romantic fixation...". Specifically, the word gachikoi is used in Japanese, which is used to describe fans with intense and explicitly romantic fixations with the object of their fandom.

Ai was twelve years old when B-Komachi debuted and was being sold to and evaluated as an object of romantic (and implicitly, sexual) desire by adult men old enough to be her fucking father. At the same time, it was drilled into her that she was expected to be eternally pure, eternally available, eternally loving, eternally virginial and to never betray those fans. Is it any wonder that she ended up with such a completely fucked up relationship to her own body and sexual desires that she was apologizing for them with her dying breaths to a man who had just murdered her for having them?

i don't really have a closing argument for this post honestly lol just. whoof! ai really is so endlessly sad and fascinating to me. every time i rotate her a bit i find some new facet to her character that i can spend hours turning over in my head.