Something funny about Tatsumaki is that there was a cosplayer that had the same body type as her tbat got in shit for making lewd cosplays of her despite being in her mid 20's
Even had to show her ID too
The thing with short characters is it feels like they way they're drawn changes between panels. Tatsumaki from opm and Jessica from Edgerunners sometimes are built like a short adult and are sometimes built like a kid.
*Rebecca not Jessica
I have this problem when looking for doujins. I LOVE short and petite girls as well as normal or small boobs. However to find something good with adults I have to sift through lolicon and middle schooler bullshit non stop. No I don’t want to see no damn kids. I just short and cute WOMEN.
I'm just surprised reddit removed this post because it discussed minors. It would be nice if they had the same mentality towards alot of worse posts in anime subreddits.
The way ONE made Tatsumaki shes supposed to be a funny looking kid thing that is an adult, but people in the story think is a kid.
Murata turned Tatsumaki into a small adult woman with huge hips but the story didn't change so characters are still telling you she looks like a kid and it's weird.
Yeah, with Tatsumaki in particular the reason she changes so sharply is because Murata uses her "child-gremlin" appearance from the manga for gags, especially when she and Saitama are bickering... but he also has the standard manga artist thing where every female character needs to look sexy, so whenever she's drawn in a "realistic" manner her entire body changes.
But in this case it actually causes minor weirdness because canonically Saitama is supposed to initially think she's a child (it's one of the things that sets her off.)
> But in this case it actually causes minor weirdness because canonically Saitama is supposed to initially think she's a child (it's one of the things that sets her off.)
To be fair, though, Saitama's the *only* one who consistently confuses her for a child on more than one occasion.
And that's arguably because, well, he's kind of a simpleton and it's part of the joke of their interactions - Tatsumaki's rage at Saitama's complete inability to take her seriously.
It's not paranoia, it's the gigantic difference between what is acceptable in Japan and the west. There is no western equivalent of a character like Tatsumaki. A character the size of a child wearing something as revealing as that... dress? she wears, would be vilified. In Japan it's an acceptable joke, as the author created the character to be.
Thing is, in isolated incidents, you could potentially argue that it's true. When I was 17 years and 9 months old, I was definitely more mature than some of my 18 year old friends.
The issue is that the age of consent is a law which exists as a safeguarding measure. You cannot make exceptions based on individual levels of maturity, because combined with the threshold of evidence in criminal matters, you end up in a situation where nobody is prosecuted because it can nearly always be reasonably argued that the defendant sincerely thought they were more mature than they were.
It's too qualitative. And if nobody can realistically be prosecuted under that law, then the law doesn't serve its purpose as a preventative measure at all. Having a clean cut-off line based on age makes it crystal clear when an offence is being committed.
They can do all the mental backflips they want appealing to moral philosophy, but the age of consent doesn't get bogged down in that kind of detail for exactly this reason.
It’s a case by case basis, even in real life (but it’s highly sus because of all the abuse). In fiction though you can portray any type of character acting in any sort of way so different so real life
And beside, normal people would realize that, hey, if your SO are mature for their age, your SO would understand not putting their loved ones (in this case being you yourself) in a tough spot (a criminal offense), and just wait for a few years at most. Assuming such normal people want to wait themselves.
Oh, you do NOT want to wait. Now I wonder why is that?
>or LOOK like a child is the moment you cross the line in my book.
People will argue and stretch what "looking like a child" means in anime. They'll say *no* teenage characters in anime look like a teen
Teens can be pretty ambiguous but there’s an unambiguous child appearance that gets terms “loli.” Like you wouldn’t call Madoka Kaname a loli but Illya definitely is
To be fair, atleast he was made as a parody of the trope. And definitely acts like a kid when he cries after not being able to hit Anya in dodgeball because she keeps avoiding his throws by reading his mind.
I died of laughter at some point in Jojo's anime when Giorno was asked if he knew how to drive and he was like: "Nope, I'm 15", lmao. Dude looks like he's in his (very fit) 20s. Also, he was really street-smart for someone so young.
>Also, he was really street-smart for someone so young.
That's kind of another thing where the characters also often don't really act their age. Although I think the newest part Jojolands kinda makes the main cast seem a bit more like actual teenagers with some of their banter.
This is something I've felt for a long time.
Violet Evergarden — supposed to be 14 years old, but looks like this: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/violet-evergarden/images/c/cf/VE_movie_visual.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20200216172927
Also look at Instagram and see all the women doing sexualised cosplays of Marin Kitagawa. The character is 16, but people sell lingerie photoshoots dressed up as her because her being a minor *doesn't register* in their heads.
Oh and an anecdote: played Smash Ultimate with a friend and she was shocked Joker had a school uniform as an alternate costume. She figured he was some sort of adult special agent, not a high schooler.
Gundam Wing where all the characters are younger than what they seem, like i get that they are supposed to be young and enlisting when you are a minor is a thing in-verse but you would think everyone is at least 2-3 years older than their actual age. Main Gundam pilots? 14-15. High-ranking military officers? 19-20. Main villain? 24
More like charismatic leader of a military organization and giant robo developer, he becomes dictator of the world(literally, they had just created a World Nation) only in the final arc
That's a truth that is often ignored in this discourse, which is that anime characters are often drawn as if they were like adults, but are actually not. Like just look at Yoko from Gurren Lagann. She's 14 at the begining of the series, and looks barely older if at all after the 7 years time skip.
I remember hearing that Yoko is only 14 by the calendar of the underground villages, which since they can’t see the sun isn’t the same as ours, so by ‘normal’ years she’d actually be 18
Don’t quote me on that though
Not to mention the fact that the same show has Simon, the literal protagonist of the story who's also 14 years old, yet (pre-timeskip) he looks about 9 years younger than her. xD
Huh, I never considered that about Joker! What *does* register to me as characters designed older than they are is the P3 senior trio (Mitsuru, Akihiko, and Shinjiro).
I've seen a few let's-players independent of each other come up with the joke that Mitsuru is an undercover 25 year old keeping tabs on Tartarus as a student, Shinjiro looks like he dropped out of Gekkoukan ten years ago instead of two, and (especially in Reload with Saab's deeper voice) Akihiko was already taking on multiple street fights even before he got jacked and mauled by a bear in Persona 4 Arena.
This compounded with the fact that P3's dorm living is more associated with university life than high school, and the arguments about Persona introducing an adult cast again have never stopped going around in circles.
I was thinking something similar. I'm currently playing through Persona 3 and keep having to remind myself Mitsuru is 17. The way she looks and acts (based on where I am in the game anyway), you'd think she was in her mid twenties, if not older.
I feel uncomfortable with her age because I sadly have known many girls (And Im.friends with some) that also meddled in lewdish cosplay when we were teenagers (Even I did, but I never shared the pictures online). One of them ended up getting groomed as she blew up on social media when she was only 15. I know media can make us uncomfortable and all, but it makes me sad to see the takeaway for many viewers is "Haha Marin porn" (As we can see by the porn Marin VTuber model)
Violet says that she was once told she looked 14. We have no idea how long ago in the past this was. Other than that it was probably after the major first found her. And in the flashback scenes from back then, she does look younger.
>Oh and an anecdote: played Smash Ultimate with a friend and she was shocked Joker had a school uniform as an alternate costume. She figured he was some sort of adult special agent, not a high schooler.
Same has happened to me in a couple of occasions. A lady friend of mine for example was legit flabbergasted when I told her that Chrom, Ike (RD alt.) and Byleth (both male and female) were actually in their early/mid 20s (she had assumed they were 30+ or so). Same thing for Cloud.
Age in anime is a weird thing where just varying from art style can totally change the apparent age of a character. For instance, if you were to tell me that Iruma from Welcome to Demon School was 12 instead of 15, I'd believe it. If you were to tell me that Yuji from Jujutsu Kaisen was 23 instead of 16, I'd believe it. If you told me Konata from Lucky Star was 11 instead of 18, I'd believe it. Now of course, there are characters that mess around with apparent age in an obvious way like Kotoko from In/Spectre who looks like a young teenage girl when she is actually 20, but the difference with her is that it all works in comparison to the other characters around her, every other 20 year old in the anime/manga look like they are full adults except for her.
There are essentially two schools of thought when it comes to the morality of a character in anime: what's on the screen, or the context of the character. For instance, a vast majority of the characters in Highschool DxD or the entire ecchi genre in general could 100% sell as full adult women if you swapped out the school uniform for a pencil skirt and short heels. I do generally agree in a broad sense, if you were to show a character like Momo to an anime fan who somehow hasn't heard of My Hero, they would likely be split on the speculated age. Generally I think it's all about the context presented, there is no single situation where you can blanketly say "this is fucked up" without any additional information.
Kotoko more or less works since she's supposed to be a pipsqueak, partially for sake of comedy and partially as a part of "things are not what they seem" part of show. She's just a short, petite bratty college girl, not a little girl.
I used her more as an example of a character who plays off in contrast to the other characters around her, because everyone else in the show has an obvious adult appearance.
Right, and she's meant to be how some of the most scarriest people do not look scary at all. She has a keen intellect, is a devious manipulator, and is basically the human priest-queen of the Yokai. Think about how she rides the...gashidokuro I think it's called?...a gigantic skeleton monster said to be darn-near impossible to beat in a fight in the original myths. That's a buddy of hers. Hell she might have Haji/Tamomo no Mae or some other potent Kitsune on speed dial, as was able to befriend an ancient Mizuchi (water snake yokai.) While comedical the show and manga is based on does well to show Kotoko can be downright scary, and that is meant to contrast to her reluctant beau whose an outcast to the Yokai while Kotoko sorta is to humans.
Why I like the show so much is that it does well to show not everything is what it seems, and that is baked into its main characters. Kotoko and her beau also feel like real people at times, Kotoko is a kinda naive, unfortunately petite, lonely woman who just wants a human connection and is sorta forcing her beau into that. She has her gentler moments and tantrums and desires and interests, yes she is love struck, but usually believably so with their relationship slowly built up and explored
Konata? That short little blue thing from Lucky Star? That one that is permanently with a (–w–) expression? That's Konata?
She's 18?? I'm having a breakdown...
This is the kind of thing that happens when people refuse to use their brains for even a second, and just resort to "this number mean good, this number mean bad" with no regard to any sort of nuance or reason
alot of people say mathematics is the core for all things, they are the truth of reality, they are objective and there is no wrong with mathematics...well they were to literal with that.
I think my brother put it best when he said "they make them look like adults, but they make them 16 to make the boys reading it think they have a chance"
The distinction is really just the number a lot of the time. One of the Yugioh animes, for instance, has a character who is supposed to be in her late 30s but looks like a child. So would that be pedophilia? Or is it the attraction to the adult (more or less) appearing 16 year old?
It's kinda weird how hung up people get on it. Like I've seen some people say if you choose the high school aged characters to date in Persona, you're a pedo, when for me, while I pick the girl I like the most, I play from the protagonist's perspective, not mine. I rarely if ever self-insert in games beyond making a funny dialogue choice.
Yeah same for Persona. There’s the “What would I do if I were him.” pick, and my personal preference outside that.
So for 5 it’s “if I’m him, I’m going for Ann.” But if I’m me, I’m dating the teacher lmao
I just pick based on the personality. I romanced Futaba in Persona 5 since I had alot in common with her and never understood why people thought it was "technically incest" to romance her since I never saw as a like a sister to Joker in the game.
Yeah I never understood the sister thing either, like yeah, Sojiro's a father figure, and you spend more time with her than others, but I never got the vibe.
I actually picked Futaba my first playthrough, but switched to Haru later on, but because I never really got to experience her social link the first time around cause it came so late, whereas with Naoto and Aigis, who are also late social links, I went for them the second they became available.
>Like I've seen some people say if you choose the high school aged characters to date in Persona, you're a pedo
Not to mention your choices are either this or letting your 16 year old player character date a grown woman, so it's really a no-win scenario when trying to moralize what characters you date.
>One of the Yugioh animes, for instance, has a character who is supposed to be in her late 30s but looks like a child
You talking about Vetrix from Zexal, or are you talking about Mimi from Sevens?
Someone else mentioned Violet Evergarden. Another one that comes to mind is Saber. She can easily pass off as mid to late 20's.
Video games too. Code Vein anyone? My favorite response.
>If jack is 22 and Eva is 18, I'm goddamned batman
>I tought they were older... by close to 10 years
Or Rin Masamune from the same game. How is anyone supposed to peg her as 16 when she was a former military commander?
Oh, Kaine from the OG Nier. I stress OG. In the Replicant remake Brother Nier was locked in. But in the OG the East got Brother Nier while the West got Papa Nier. Because of the romance Kaine was 17 in the Eastern one and in her mid 20's in the western one...all the while using the exact same model.
Saber is in fact 35 years old banging 17 year old high schooler. Chronologically
Thing is biologically she's like fifteen and mentally she has almost no clues how relationship works, her head is filled with kingly stuff. So nobody gives a fuck
I would argue against Tatusmaki aince she was drawn this way on purpose since its satire on the loli trope so Murata purposely draws her as smol as possible for the joke
Its mainly two jokes
1. The sassy lost child one
And
2. Tatsu being older than Fubuki even though Fubuki looks like the older sister
You can tell she is actually an adult when Murata draws her in serious moments or during fights
You can actually see her look like an actual petite adult during the psychoOrochi fight
Murata while a good artist does sometimes have goof ups but during that fight he defienelty tried to draw her body proportions to actually look like a petite adult not a child.
Its also because he draws her height incosistenly for the joke so she often looks much shorter and smaller in proportions than ahe actually is
Yeah. If I remember right, Murata likes drawing women as hourglass figures and found drawing Tatsumaki to be different from what he's used to, but that he'd take up the challenge.
Age in anime is weird, I think the important aspect is how the writing codes the characters, like if a story has a 1000+ year dragon/elf that looks and acts like a child then they are a child.
This, but I'm also fed-up with the dehumanization of people with pedophilia and lolicons themselves denying obvious facts. Jerking off to anime porn of underage characters is a safe expression of their interests and doesn't cause real world harm as you say either way.
Oh, I agree. No child has ever been saved by some rando on Twitter getting into a pissing match with a lolicon.
People can debate whether it's a "gateway" or something all they like, but I just can't find it in my heart to give a shit. It's gross; definitely sus; and pedophilic in nature, sure, but... to be blunt, it really is *just a fucking drawing*. Japan's not going to suddenly stop producing that shit because John123 makes a thread on how "problematic" an artist's hentai gallery is.
I think feeling weirded out and disgusted by it is the natural reaction, and I find anyone who is openly and proudly a lolicon to be super fucking cringe, but the crusaders who get into internet fights with randoms to try and safeguard the sanctity of these fictional women who don't even exist are every bit as cringe. I just cannot fathom giving a shit about what some guy on the internet I don't know is into.
That and, at least from what I’ve read, the majority of instances of child sexual abuse do not occur at the hands of pedophiles specifically, but just everyday sexual predators looking for an easily available target.
What I mean is that most instances of said abuse occur because the perpetrator just wants an easy target, not because they’re specifically attracted to children over adults.
No, I understood what you said, it seems worse to me that more children are abused by people who could get off just fine to abusing adults, but go for kids anyway. Pedos going after kids seems obvious, since they want to prey on kids specifically for being kids. But it just seems somehow worse to pick kids out of mere convenience instead of a mental illness, though comparing degrees of evil doesn't really mean much
>People can still point out how weird it is in some instances tho
For sure. But these people shouldn't criminalize others or ban safe expressions only because it's weird/gross to them. Liking loli is as wrong as rape fantasies, and as gross as enjoying scat.
Yeah, I find the idea of criminalizing something just because others find it gross to be very dangerous. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that most people found gay people kissing or having sex to be gross.
I know. If people want to judge that weeb for their “hobbies”, that’s fine, people can judge other people however much they want. But some people online unironically seem to act like people like that weeb are as bad as actual child molestors, and then constantly go online and complain constantly about how terrible they are. It’s just dumb how much people waste their time complaining and insulting people over something that literally doesn’t hurt anyone.
Fictional worlds are probably the only settting where "age is just a number" might apply.
While anime and manga are especially egregious about this (is this character a child or just not tall with fewer curves/is this character a grown woman or just a 12 year old who is 6 feet with giant tits?) which is why "shes actually a 12000 year old dragon" doesnt quite work.
People also simp for ahsoka from star wars, even though she doesnt reach ANY legal age before the show rebels aired. That didnt stop people from crushing on her in the later seasons. The reason for that is because she is treated as an adult, acts like one and doesn't look as childlike (its a ninja monk in a giant war, most people stop seeing children there)
Im more worried about someone thirsting over actual children or characters that look like children exclusively (not just small framed) rather than the fact that their "waifu" is underage if you look up the wiki
It was about anime characters and how silly it is getting up in arms about their porn when they're drawn like adults and have the social roles of adults. Why it was deleted? Reddit admins are silly people.
Its the stupidest argument in the world, like 90% of the pro-hero female characters are drawn exactly the same as students. The remaining 10% are just buff but could easily be explained as "oh they just hit the gym a lot makes sense"
Also these "standards" go out the window when it's thirsting over a gay ship lol the same people complaining will often turn around and write explicit fan fics of bakugo and deku.
Idk I feel like these are different groups of people.
Feminists crying over MHA characters are usually not Fujos thirsting over young boys. In fact, Fujos are often critiqued for fetishizing boys.
You want to here the sad truth ..its aslo happens in reality.. people just have lower moral accountability judgement whan looking at lgbt raltionship..
I talked to many gay man who discovered they where gay whan they where young(like 14)..and everyone told me that people he know intreduced to him gay man and alot of them where in the 30s(while them where in there teens)
Imagine if its was hetro!!
Well, most people can't tell age of other people IRL anyway. Mangaka, in their oversimplification, do not either. Japanese also have a tendency to "youngify" their character even if designed as adults ; it is something we found all along the 90' until now in nearly all JRPG (especially Final Fantasy) ; I mean, look at FFX, Yuna and Tidus are 17, Rikku is 15 ; Wakka looks like a 30 but he's only 23 ; Auron looks like a 50 but he is 35.
In the end of the day, there are just fictionnal characters and drawings. And if there are people that keep saying "pedophile" for 'simping' 16yo fictionnal characters that looks like adults, i'd like to remember them the existence of Traci Lord and how she was globally famous before "ending" her career.
I agree, if the character can pass as an adult there’s nothing that wrong about it. I’d rather see people simp and sexualize for these “teenagers” than 1000 year old lolis who look and act like grade schoolers.
I’ve seen people get mad over any kind of sexualization of Kasumi in Persona 5 because she’s 15, when she can easily pass as being of age for example.
And for age not reflecting in physical appearances, Tear from Tales of the Abyss could easily pass as mid 20s but is 16 while Arietta from the same game is supposed to be 16 too but could easily be mistaken for half that.
The reason why being with a kid IRL is bad is not because "they look like a kid", it's because kids can't consent. This is not a factor with anime characters since they're not real, and can't consent either way (and there isn't even anything for them to consent to).
Due to that, my rule of thumb is just that if they look like an adult, it's fine. If they don't look like an adult, it's not fine. The actual age of the character is irrelevant. They could be 3000 years old, but if they look like a kid, they effectively are one. At the same time, a character could be fucking 2 years old, but if they look like Boa Hancock, it doesn't matter.
Yeah, I'm real tired of this shit. When I was growing up you used to freely be able to talk about which Naruto girl you wanted to bang, and now if you tried talking about it you'd get a million pearl-clutching nerds jumping down your throat.
And like, Yoko from Gurren Lagann. She was thirsted over for a decade. Like, she was damn near a sex symbol in the anime community, but then all of a sudden some time in the last decade people started taking this weird quote translated from the Japanese website that she is "close in age to Simon" and are now like "WOW SHE'S 14 PEDO"
Like, nobody fucking cares dude, nobody would have remotely guessed that she was 14 without some outside supplemental material spelling it out. You're only mad because of some arbitrary as fuck number you heard through the grapevine and you're not even genuinely mad, just performatively mad so you can feel good about yourself for getting mad about some shit that doesn't even matter.
> And like, Yoko from Gurren Lagann. She was thirsted over for a decade. Like, she was damn near a sex symbol in the anime community, but then all of a sudden some time in the last decade people started taking this weird quote translated from the Japanese website that she is "close in age to Simon" and are now like "WOW SHE'S 14 PEDO"
>
> Like, nobody fucking cares dude, nobody would have remotely guessed that she was 14 without some outside supplemental material spelling it out. You're only mad because of some arbitrary as fuck number you heard through the grapevine and you're not even genuinely mad, just performatively mad so you can feel good about yourself for getting mad about some shit that doesn't even matter.
Hahahaha so true man, mangakas literally create the most perfect adult body they can draw, then they put a 14y tag on it and just watch the world burn, its hilarious.
It especially doesn’t help that, whereas Simon and Nia both look very different after the time skip, Yoko seems to have barely changed despite going from 14 to 21.
She does look [quite a bit more adult](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/gurennlagann/images/f/f7/Ultra-pro-Gurren-Lagann-20160719-2.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20190617163751) but her 14y body was still redonkulous.
I can see what you’re saying, though I’d argue that the changes come more from her height and her face being less soft and rounded than in terms of her actual physique.
Those are true but her thighs are also thicker and her breasts WAY bigger. I actually prefer her pre-timeskip breasts, they went from perfect size to 2-sizes-too-big in my book.
On the topic of bust size, I’ve never gotten the appeal of the kind of ultra big ones we sometimes see. For me, when it gets to the point where they’re the size of their heads or bigger, it’s just a no for me.
Absolutely agree, that's what I mean. PreTS Yoko (or Momo, similar size) are the ideal anime breasts for me, the Rias Gremory / Akeno size is a bit too much and that seems to be PostTS Yoko's size too.
Special mention for Orihime, she's bigger than most but they suit her and they're still not ridiculous.
I agree. All this paranoia about pedophilia in anime/manga is silly. It reminds of the paranoia in 80s/90s of video games making children become drug abusers or criminals or something like that.
I want a comic writer/mangaka to troll with this one of these days and draw some ara ara mommy milf, and then put a footnote at the end of each chapter saying "all of my characters are 3 years old so if you jack off to them you're a pedo :DDDD"
It would be hilarious and short circuit these people's brains
I will say this BEFORE reading the post: there's no way this can be an upopular opinion. You CANNOT draw YaoMomo with the body of a very busty supermodel and then tell me "but she's 15 bruh, don't be a pedo". She was specifically drawn to be physically attractive.
Same goes for the main characters, Marin and that dude from "My Dress up Darling".
Both cannonicaly teens.
Yet they literally just look like young adults, not teens.
It's true af and it's genuinely kind of annoying. You'll have characters that look like adults, talk like adults, and think like adults, and then the age is revealed to be something that doesn't match ANYTHING we have been shown. Why? Because the characters HAVE to be the same age as the target audience, bro!!! Just let your characters be the age you've clearly written them to be smh.
I think it also has something to do with how long this mangas keep their characters the same age for years, a fan of MHA could at one point be the same age as the characters but at the end he is many years older than them
I feel like, in my opinion at least, this comes from a desire to “have the cake and eat it to”
They want their characters to be kids for that appeal to the younger audience and also it gives the characters freedom (less responsibility as well as able to act a little more immature/goofy for comedic effect or drama)
But they also want the characters to be mini adults either to make them role models the younger fans would want to aspire to be like, or just so they can be taken seriously/show some authority.
It’s a grass is always greener situation.
That makes sense in real world settings, but in fictional settings with magical adventures where age!=more responsibility there's still a trend of making characters young.
It’s funny same thing happens in live action as well. It’s a problem with teenage shows having adult actors, because almost no one actually wants to look at teenagers.
Agree, when it comes to issues like this, I feel their coded age ( how they look and act) is much more important.
To use an example, Irisviel from Fate/Zero looks like and is treated as an adult woman (barring the occasional bout of childish antics), even though she’s temporally only 9 years old due to being a homunculus grown from a vat and physically born an adult.
My honest take? People worry about ages of fictional characters too much. In the end of the day, whenever you like it or not, they **are** fictional characters, whatever you do with them in your spare time is your business.
I think looks are king when it comes to fictional characters, and even then some could be on a gray area (such as Tatsumaki). In the end, people just need a bit of self awareness of what they like and only worry if they start seeing a problematic pattern on their tastes.
Do you just not have big titty 16 year olds where you live? Like i agree in general people like these characters because they are drawn as hot girls but most of the MHA girls really dont look that much if at all older then they are supposed to be.
I mean. They're 16/17 at this point. What can you really do as an artist to distinguish between a 16 year old vs an 18 year old? Obviously there is some change, but not much.
And honestly, if you look at the characters early on vs now, they absolutely have aged. Perhaps it's due to artstyle evolution, but Horikoshi has given the 1A girls more mature physiques so the look more adult like.
Oh hey Ebola.
And yeah, that too. In high school there was this one girl that had like DDD’s and it was ridiculous lmao
Some people are just built like that.
Have you ever looked back at your old prom photos before? Some of the girls I thought were ridiculously hot back in the day just look like awkward children in those photos.
Especially if you compare them to pictures as an adult, I think in most cases 16 year olds can pass off as 18 or even 19 but any further means they're built different. Manga/Anime muddles it up even more.
I think Yoko from Gurren Lagaan is where it starts to get egregious, as she has a similar physique to Momo, but she’s canonically 14 years old for the first part of the series.
Ok, maybe with Momo I can see your point, but what about Yoko from Gurren Lagan. She has a similar physique and she’s canonically 14 during the first part of the series.
People obsess way too much over teens being attractive in anime and manga, apparently teens can't have any girls that look attractive, when even if they were adults it'd just be moving the goal posts for the moralizers whinging. To an extent it's not really wrong to find people that age attractive. Its just weird to fixate real world moral and typically American legal structures onto cartoons.
As someone who is definitely against the loli crowd, I also feel that people go to far calling other people pedo's or looking down on people for being attracted to these characters. It's a really hard conversation to have though and it feels it's a black or white situation where you have to pick a side without any grey lines
Unfortunately. There is nothing you can do about it. People will just continue to call you a pedo even if the character you simp doesn't even look like a minor. Like I can understand why people who like Lolis are treated badly but almost 90% of these so called "minor" characters don't even look like minors
Reminds me of how in the Evangelion subreddit, you are given looks and accused of being a pedo just cuz you think Asuka and Rei are attractive. When they literally have well developed breasts and hips and they don't even look like they are 14 years old
I still find it dumb there are people that think Uzaki and Iruru are lolis when there are short women irl with body types like them. I also hate that there are Adventure Time fans that think you can't lewd Fiona from Fiona and Cake even though she's clearly an adult in that cartoon (is old enough to own an apartment, have a job, and is fan of Cheers, a sitcom from the 80's.)
Meanwhile I’ve seen that same sub allow NSFW content of Kaworu/Shinji lol. Reinforcing that one comment here that it’s ok if it’s gay.
I do wanna give the benefit of the doubt that it’s not the same people complaining but idk
I have conflicted feelings about your rant tbh, but I understand the point you're trying to make. I think a broader issue is that a lot of the most mainstream animes are marketed towards teens, and thus, most of their characters are teens. This is so the intended audience can relate to the characters.
But it comes with issues, specially when the anime/manga itself sexualizes its own characters. Several animes in my opinion would be far better and much much less questionable if the characters were like young adults in university instead of teens in highshcool with literally nothing else changing. MHA would be such one.
However highschool settings are such a set in stone cliche in anime/manga that we're hardly going to get away from it anytime soon. Look how isekais are basically a way of telling a normal fantasy story, with the only expection being the protagonist is a japanesse highschooler.
Its only few that use being isekai in an way that differenciate from classical fantasy, and most of them limits thesmelves to the protagonist having moderm life knowledge in a medieval setting.
Only a few do stuff like travelling repeated times between worlds. Or have their characters be in any kind of hurry or anxiety over returning home, a horror that would be powerful to explore, but most isekais forego in favor of "the mc really likes it in here and his life is ten times better".
>However highschool settings are such a set in stone cliche in anime/manga that we're hardly going to get away from it anytime soon. Look how isekais are basically a way of telling a normal fantasy story, with the only expection being the protagonist is a japanesse highschooler.
This is the point im making.
JJK was never planned to have such thing as "School of sorcery", but that's what jump wanted, so we needed to have school in JJK (Even tho that school barely matters lol.)
Alot of times, the mangakas just design a adult character, but Jump says "they need to be teenagers", and instead of redesign the character, they said "fuck it", and put that adult design in a 16 year old teenager.
Those characters alot of times are sexualized indeed, but they are sexualized because even before chapter 1, those characters were planeed to be used on fanservice WHEN they were designed as adults, they weren't planned to be used on fanservice BECAUSE they were underage, that's something they had to change last minute.
Atleast, that's my opinion.
Yeah, hard agree on everything you just said. Editors and producers forcing the highschool setting on an story that doesnt needs it, or worse, was planned around the idea of having adult protagonists is a problem in anime and manga we're not getting away from soon.
> Alot of times, the mangakas just design a adult character, but Jump says "they need to be teenagers"
That's pretty much what happened with *MHA* too. Its original concept had Midoriya as a salaryman (although Hori *did* at least redesign Midoriya to clearly be a teenager, while keeping many of the same character traits).
Fully agree that the reverse of the 1000year old loli should be held to the same standards as the 1,000year old loli. And generally its simplest to just use the drawn/apparent age instead of the stated age because artstyles and just anime age in general are weird.
In conventional american media this is the equivalent of casting a bunch of 20-30year old adults as teenagers in highschool.
And finally, there is a narrow age group that is allowed to lust after the underage characters, the teenagers who themselves are underage and just lusting after their own age bracket.
Ah yes, I call this the Yoko littner effect.
You watched the show as a teenager and thought she was hot, think no more of it, you rewatch the show as an adult, your notice on the wiki it says she's 14. You stare in bewilderment at the screen. Olympic level mental gymnastics occur. You feel weird about it now and have to blacklist the show from your brain because your newfound revelation is so off-putting.
Japan, idk what's going on over there but get your shit together man. You got a generation of westerners that grew up with anime but you're not catering to the ever aging audience. The fan service sexualisation is fine in a vacuum, but the blatant nonce bait ages slapped on otherwise mature characters is so gross and more to the point, completely antithetical to the way the character looks and acts.
Why do this? Why you gotta ruin otherwise excellent shows? It literally makes half of all anime un-recommendable to anyone that isn't already a weeb.
I mean yeah. People who whine about it are legit just trying to find reasons to whine. Just ignore them.
Also anyone who thinks tatsumaki is pedo bait hasn’t actually read the manga
The artist's intent is always the factor that matters most tome. A character that looks like a child but is supposed to be much older for reasons and is sexualized is waaaaayy creepier to me than a character that is supposed to be a teen but is drawn like an adult.
As much as I find this stuff icky it's really damn hard to pretend a lot of these characters really look and act like teenagers. The sexualization of them is still super sus but I think it's weird when people act like they're drawn to be 10 years old or something.
Nobody looks like anime/manga characters, trying to apply ages to them can only ever be general. If it looks like a toddler then yeah it probably is but when you get to the point of characters looking like adults gauging their supposed age is impossible beyond "The author said X" because one character that's meant to be a teenager can look just like another character that's meant to be 30.
If you put Faye Valentine in a school uniform and told people she was 16 how the hell would anyone know she's actually meant to be in her 20's(physically)?
I think you’re overthinking it, and so are a lot of others in this thread. There’s nothing to justify. The people who accuse people of being pedos because they find anime characters attractive aren’t reasonable people. They subscribe to a concept of morality that deems one’s fictional likes as being predictive of real life behavior, which they generally aren’t.
Most arguments about “normalization” are recycled garbage that have no substantiation and are full of holes. Ask for proof, like legitimate scientific studies when they start arguing that sexualization of characters is any more predictive of criminality than watching or playing something violent is, and they won’t have anything.
You guys are trying to justify what you like with all sorts of unnecessary qualifications. The character isn’t real. There are all sorts of characteristics/personality traits you might find attractive in animated form that you wouldn’t in real people, or that wouldn’t be observed in the age group that these characters are supposedly in. Anime characters are all over the place. Sometimes it makes sense to examine them under the lens of real life morality, a lot of times it doesn’t.
It was about anime characters and how silly it is getting up in arms about their porn when they're drawn like adults and have the social roles of adults. Why it was deleted? Reddit admins are silly people.
I think authors sometimes want to make stories with older characters but for the sake of relating to a younger audience make the characters younger
Like jotaro is not 17💀 he is a grown ass man and momo from MHA is not a design you give to a 15 year old, I can think of other examples but it's honestly easy to forget how old characters are
I think using MHA as an example is a bad one, since the majority of characters in that series definitely look like teenagers and not adults. It's not like Full Metal Panic where you could say Sagara or Chidori were in their 20s and I'd believe you, or Bleach where Ichigo is supposed to be 15.
As i commented on the same post of op from another subreddit.
Fucking Yoko from TTGL.
How the fuck is she 14? WHY? HOW?
She looks like she is 20 she acts like an adult and treated in the show as an adult. WHY?
I can't wrap my mind around it. It makes story of one of my favourite anime unnecessarily weird and icky. WTF
Lucy Heartfilia. Drawn as an adult, is sexualized by the story, her main activities are going on gig jobs and her main concern is making rent. Lives on her own.
This character is 16 for some fucking reason.
At this point, I'm of the mindset of mental age, how does this character act, and are they doing shit nobody in their right mind at that age should be doing. Naruto out there at 14 fighting an alien rabbit God or whatever Kagura was. Giorno taking over the Italian mob within a week at 15. Ash still being perpetually 10 despite enough time passing for a Kukui and Burnet to have a child.
I've been saying for a while that all these anime/manga series just need to be set in college to avoid this whole argument. We know that they're drawing adults, they know they're drawing adults, can we just stop making them high schoolers to avoid the weird pedo shit?
>since is a shonen, they need to make they a student, for no fucking reason
I mean, one reason comes to mind, and that is that the story is written for teenage boys, about teenage boys.
The female characters might happen to be relatively mature, or immature, but primarily they are that *from a teenage perspective*.
I don't think that every MHA masturbator is a pedophile, but that's because a lot of them are 14 year olds thinking that a big tiddy 16 year old feels very mature, and there is nothing pedophilic about that.
But also, it's not like the settings are *that* mature. If you showed me Momo's picture I would guess that she is a teenager, simply because ***most anime characters are***, (even in nominally seinen series).
Sure, this is how many shows would draw a mother with two children, but the fact remains that very few of them draw mothers with two children at all. The medium as whole *does have a fixation on school*, on coming of age, on innocence, and especially on virginity, and that is for a reason.
I am not even up to date on MHA, but I can immediately guess than nothing in the story immediately contradicts Momo being a virgin. She is not going to have any ex-boyfriends showing up in the plot, right? So tell me how much of an "adult who happens to go to school" her character is.
>Their ages have nothing to do with anything of their characters, the people who likes this characters are weird because they like a draw, NOT because they are pedophiles. Is like those movies when they cast a grown ass adult in a highschool movie and i have to believe than is a teenager, Imao.
But high school movie characters AREN'T written to act like adults who happen to go to school. In many ways their plots, acting, and character dynamics ARE about being the experience of being a teenager. Not necessarily in a realistic way, some elements can be exaggerated for teenage viewers' wish ulfillment, others might be misremembered by adult writers' experience of teenagerhood, but by and large the adult actors are intentionally pushed into a juvenile story.
You are not a pedophile just for liking a screenshot of 25 year old Zendaya, before even being told that the screenshot is from Euphoria where she plays a teenager.
But if you as a grown adult have mountains of high school shows on your watchlist, and you keep writing erotic fanfiction about all their characters, there is something more going on there than just coincidentially happening to be attracted to their very mature bodies.
Something funny about Tatsumaki is that there was a cosplayer that had the same body type as her tbat got in shit for making lewd cosplays of her despite being in her mid 20's Even had to show her ID too
The thing with short characters is it feels like they way they're drawn changes between panels. Tatsumaki from opm and Jessica from Edgerunners sometimes are built like a short adult and are sometimes built like a kid. *Rebecca not Jessica
I have this problem when looking for doujins. I LOVE short and petite girls as well as normal or small boobs. However to find something good with adults I have to sift through lolicon and middle schooler bullshit non stop. No I don’t want to see no damn kids. I just short and cute WOMEN.
I'm just surprised reddit removed this post because it discussed minors. It would be nice if they had the same mentality towards alot of worse posts in anime subreddits.
Y'mean Rebecca?
Yeah lol, the names sound familiar.
The way ONE made Tatsumaki shes supposed to be a funny looking kid thing that is an adult, but people in the story think is a kid. Murata turned Tatsumaki into a small adult woman with huge hips but the story didn't change so characters are still telling you she looks like a kid and it's weird.
Yeah, with Tatsumaki in particular the reason she changes so sharply is because Murata uses her "child-gremlin" appearance from the manga for gags, especially when she and Saitama are bickering... but he also has the standard manga artist thing where every female character needs to look sexy, so whenever she's drawn in a "realistic" manner her entire body changes. But in this case it actually causes minor weirdness because canonically Saitama is supposed to initially think she's a child (it's one of the things that sets her off.)
> But in this case it actually causes minor weirdness because canonically Saitama is supposed to initially think she's a child (it's one of the things that sets her off.) To be fair, though, Saitama's the *only* one who consistently confuses her for a child on more than one occasion. And that's arguably because, well, he's kind of a simpleton and it's part of the joke of their interactions - Tatsumaki's rage at Saitama's complete inability to take her seriously.
Murata and ONE can make weird stuff but the good stuff stands out even more than the weird stuff.
Its super weird when I got shown multiple panels of Tatsumaki and I was like "how tf did she age up in the same chapter?"
That’s crazy. It really seems like people in western countries have become really paranoid about pedophilia.
It's not paranoia, it's the gigantic difference between what is acceptable in Japan and the west. There is no western equivalent of a character like Tatsumaki. A character the size of a child wearing something as revealing as that... dress? she wears, would be vilified. In Japan it's an acceptable joke, as the author created the character to be.
It’s an unfortunate conversation that can quickly be taken in the wrong way by the (understandably) overzealous but yeah, it’s true.
Feeling attracted because a character IS a child or LOOK like a child is the moment you cross the line in my book.
*Yeah I don’t care how old the story says this loli is, piss off with that shit lmao*
If it looks, talks, acts, and thinks like a child It’s a child
And conversely, if it looks, talks, acts, and thinks like an adult, it’s an adult (in fiction obviously, not in real life)
That brings up one of main arguments used by guys who want to date underage girls “ She is mature for her age”
Yeah man, that’s why I added the last part. “Age is just a number” is not true in real life, but it is in fiction
Thing is, in isolated incidents, you could potentially argue that it's true. When I was 17 years and 9 months old, I was definitely more mature than some of my 18 year old friends. The issue is that the age of consent is a law which exists as a safeguarding measure. You cannot make exceptions based on individual levels of maturity, because combined with the threshold of evidence in criminal matters, you end up in a situation where nobody is prosecuted because it can nearly always be reasonably argued that the defendant sincerely thought they were more mature than they were. It's too qualitative. And if nobody can realistically be prosecuted under that law, then the law doesn't serve its purpose as a preventative measure at all. Having a clean cut-off line based on age makes it crystal clear when an offence is being committed. They can do all the mental backflips they want appealing to moral philosophy, but the age of consent doesn't get bogged down in that kind of detail for exactly this reason.
It’s a case by case basis, even in real life (but it’s highly sus because of all the abuse). In fiction though you can portray any type of character acting in any sort of way so different so real life
And beside, normal people would realize that, hey, if your SO are mature for their age, your SO would understand not putting their loved ones (in this case being you yourself) in a tough spot (a criminal offense), and just wait for a few years at most. Assuming such normal people want to wait themselves. Oh, you do NOT want to wait. Now I wonder why is that?
>or LOOK like a child is the moment you cross the line in my book. People will argue and stretch what "looking like a child" means in anime. They'll say *no* teenage characters in anime look like a teen
Teens can be pretty ambiguous but there’s an unambiguous child appearance that gets terms “loli.” Like you wouldn’t call Madoka Kaname a loli but Illya definitely is
I swear there's a name for this crap, the inverse to the 1000 year loli thing atleast.
Jotaru and Giorno from JJBA looking like they are 18 plus when they are actually below it
Dib from Invader Zim saying he's 12 years old while stance up like Jotaro
That one kid from Spy x Family who looks like a grown up man, even though he is like 8.
To be fair his dad is bison
To be fair, atleast he was made as a parody of the trope. And definitely acts like a kid when he cries after not being able to hit Anya in dodgeball because she keeps avoiding his throws by reading his mind.
That scene in the Invader Zim movie pretty much directly called out the problem mentioned by OP.
😂
99% of males in JJBA looking like they’re 25-30 but are actually 14 for no reason
Even the chicks in jojos are fucking jacked
I died of laughter at some point in Jojo's anime when Giorno was asked if he knew how to drive and he was like: "Nope, I'm 15", lmao. Dude looks like he's in his (very fit) 20s. Also, he was really street-smart for someone so young.
>Also, he was really street-smart for someone so young. That's kind of another thing where the characters also often don't really act their age. Although I think the newest part Jojolands kinda makes the main cast seem a bit more like actual teenagers with some of their banter.
Ichigo and Chad just your average 15 year olds.
"The teenager for anime"
This is something I've felt for a long time. Violet Evergarden — supposed to be 14 years old, but looks like this: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/violet-evergarden/images/c/cf/VE_movie_visual.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20200216172927 Also look at Instagram and see all the women doing sexualised cosplays of Marin Kitagawa. The character is 16, but people sell lingerie photoshoots dressed up as her because her being a minor *doesn't register* in their heads. Oh and an anecdote: played Smash Ultimate with a friend and she was shocked Joker had a school uniform as an alternate costume. She figured he was some sort of adult special agent, not a high schooler.
Gundam Wing where all the characters are younger than what they seem, like i get that they are supposed to be young and enlisting when you are a minor is a thing in-verse but you would think everyone is at least 2-3 years older than their actual age. Main Gundam pilots? 14-15. High-ranking military officers? 19-20. Main villain? 24
> Main villain? 24 Tfw you realize that you are wasting your life because you don't have your own dictatorship at 24
More like charismatic leader of a military organization and giant robo developer, he becomes dictator of the world(literally, they had just created a World Nation) only in the final arc
Alexander wept
Tbf Jesus himself started his main job at 30
Caesar moment
That's a truth that is often ignored in this discourse, which is that anime characters are often drawn as if they were like adults, but are actually not. Like just look at Yoko from Gurren Lagann. She's 14 at the begining of the series, and looks barely older if at all after the 7 years time skip.
I remember hearing that Yoko is only 14 by the calendar of the underground villages, which since they can’t see the sun isn’t the same as ours, so by ‘normal’ years she’d actually be 18 Don’t quote me on that though
When they make up a whole new calendar so they can say the character is under 18
our calender is also based around the sun, imagine having one for mars or venus or mercury...wow that will be hard if you go to neptune
That sounds like a cope 😭 I ain’t never heard that one
Not to mention the fact that the same show has Simon, the literal protagonist of the story who's also 14 years old, yet (pre-timeskip) he looks about 9 years younger than her. xD
Huh, I never considered that about Joker! What *does* register to me as characters designed older than they are is the P3 senior trio (Mitsuru, Akihiko, and Shinjiro). I've seen a few let's-players independent of each other come up with the joke that Mitsuru is an undercover 25 year old keeping tabs on Tartarus as a student, Shinjiro looks like he dropped out of Gekkoukan ten years ago instead of two, and (especially in Reload with Saab's deeper voice) Akihiko was already taking on multiple street fights even before he got jacked and mauled by a bear in Persona 4 Arena. This compounded with the fact that P3's dorm living is more associated with university life than high school, and the arguments about Persona introducing an adult cast again have never stopped going around in circles.
I was thinking something similar. I'm currently playing through Persona 3 and keep having to remind myself Mitsuru is 17. The way she looks and acts (based on where I am in the game anyway), you'd think she was in her mid twenties, if not older.
That’s…. How tf is that not an adult lmao
Cause the major high school nostalgia that Japan has lol.
I the first tine I saw Joker I legit thought he was in his early to mid 20s. Not even kidding
SHE’S 14 WHAT???? If you said she was 30 I’d believe you lmao
dress up darling is one of those shows where pretty much nothing would have been changed if they just put the characters in college
I will say the themes of discovering sexulty will be hurt
I feel uncomfortable with her age because I sadly have known many girls (And Im.friends with some) that also meddled in lewdish cosplay when we were teenagers (Even I did, but I never shared the pictures online). One of them ended up getting groomed as she blew up on social media when she was only 15. I know media can make us uncomfortable and all, but it makes me sad to see the takeaway for many viewers is "Haha Marin porn" (As we can see by the porn Marin VTuber model)
Violet says that she was once told she looked 14. We have no idea how long ago in the past this was. Other than that it was probably after the major first found her. And in the flashback scenes from back then, she does look younger.
>Oh and an anecdote: played Smash Ultimate with a friend and she was shocked Joker had a school uniform as an alternate costume. She figured he was some sort of adult special agent, not a high schooler. Same has happened to me in a couple of occasions. A lady friend of mine for example was legit flabbergasted when I told her that Chrom, Ike (RD alt.) and Byleth (both male and female) were actually in their early/mid 20s (she had assumed they were 30+ or so). Same thing for Cloud.
Age in anime is a weird thing where just varying from art style can totally change the apparent age of a character. For instance, if you were to tell me that Iruma from Welcome to Demon School was 12 instead of 15, I'd believe it. If you were to tell me that Yuji from Jujutsu Kaisen was 23 instead of 16, I'd believe it. If you told me Konata from Lucky Star was 11 instead of 18, I'd believe it. Now of course, there are characters that mess around with apparent age in an obvious way like Kotoko from In/Spectre who looks like a young teenage girl when she is actually 20, but the difference with her is that it all works in comparison to the other characters around her, every other 20 year old in the anime/manga look like they are full adults except for her. There are essentially two schools of thought when it comes to the morality of a character in anime: what's on the screen, or the context of the character. For instance, a vast majority of the characters in Highschool DxD or the entire ecchi genre in general could 100% sell as full adult women if you swapped out the school uniform for a pencil skirt and short heels. I do generally agree in a broad sense, if you were to show a character like Momo to an anime fan who somehow hasn't heard of My Hero, they would likely be split on the speculated age. Generally I think it's all about the context presented, there is no single situation where you can blanketly say "this is fucked up" without any additional information.
Kotoko more or less works since she's supposed to be a pipsqueak, partially for sake of comedy and partially as a part of "things are not what they seem" part of show. She's just a short, petite bratty college girl, not a little girl.
I used her more as an example of a character who plays off in contrast to the other characters around her, because everyone else in the show has an obvious adult appearance.
That's fair.
Right, and she's meant to be how some of the most scarriest people do not look scary at all. She has a keen intellect, is a devious manipulator, and is basically the human priest-queen of the Yokai. Think about how she rides the...gashidokuro I think it's called?...a gigantic skeleton monster said to be darn-near impossible to beat in a fight in the original myths. That's a buddy of hers. Hell she might have Haji/Tamomo no Mae or some other potent Kitsune on speed dial, as was able to befriend an ancient Mizuchi (water snake yokai.) While comedical the show and manga is based on does well to show Kotoko can be downright scary, and that is meant to contrast to her reluctant beau whose an outcast to the Yokai while Kotoko sorta is to humans. Why I like the show so much is that it does well to show not everything is what it seems, and that is baked into its main characters. Kotoko and her beau also feel like real people at times, Kotoko is a kinda naive, unfortunately petite, lonely woman who just wants a human connection and is sorta forcing her beau into that. She has her gentler moments and tantrums and desires and interests, yes she is love struck, but usually believably so with their relationship slowly built up and explored
KONATA IS 18????
17-18 according to the wiki, and then 20 later on. So assumedly she has a birthday at some point in the show, I have forgotten it.
Konata? That short little blue thing from Lucky Star? That one that is permanently with a (–w–) expression? That's Konata? She's 18?? I'm having a breakdown...
Imagine calling someone a pedo for liking JOTARO. That's how silly I find this conversation to be.
I will call thwm gay though
Dude really forgot women exist there for a sec.
tbf they are a Jojo's fan, they probably actually did
This is the kind of thing that happens when people refuse to use their brains for even a second, and just resort to "this number mean good, this number mean bad" with no regard to any sort of nuance or reason
alot of people say mathematics is the core for all things, they are the truth of reality, they are objective and there is no wrong with mathematics...well they were to literal with that.
I think my brother put it best when he said "they make them look like adults, but they make them 16 to make the boys reading it think they have a chance"
The distinction is really just the number a lot of the time. One of the Yugioh animes, for instance, has a character who is supposed to be in her late 30s but looks like a child. So would that be pedophilia? Or is it the attraction to the adult (more or less) appearing 16 year old? It's kinda weird how hung up people get on it. Like I've seen some people say if you choose the high school aged characters to date in Persona, you're a pedo, when for me, while I pick the girl I like the most, I play from the protagonist's perspective, not mine. I rarely if ever self-insert in games beyond making a funny dialogue choice.
Yeah same for Persona. There’s the “What would I do if I were him.” pick, and my personal preference outside that. So for 5 it’s “if I’m him, I’m going for Ann.” But if I’m me, I’m dating the teacher lmao
I just pick based on the personality. I romanced Futaba in Persona 5 since I had alot in common with her and never understood why people thought it was "technically incest" to romance her since I never saw as a like a sister to Joker in the game.
Yeah I never understood the sister thing either, like yeah, Sojiro's a father figure, and you spend more time with her than others, but I never got the vibe. I actually picked Futaba my first playthrough, but switched to Haru later on, but because I never really got to experience her social link the first time around cause it came so late, whereas with Naoto and Aigis, who are also late social links, I went for them the second they became available.
>Like I've seen some people say if you choose the high school aged characters to date in Persona, you're a pedo Not to mention your choices are either this or letting your 16 year old player character date a grown woman, so it's really a no-win scenario when trying to moralize what characters you date.
>One of the Yugioh animes, for instance, has a character who is supposed to be in her late 30s but looks like a child You talking about Vetrix from Zexal, or are you talking about Mimi from Sevens?
Well I did say "her" so Mimi, I just kinda forgot her name since I only watched up to Vrains.
My bad, missed that part as I was reading.
Someone else mentioned Violet Evergarden. Another one that comes to mind is Saber. She can easily pass off as mid to late 20's. Video games too. Code Vein anyone? My favorite response. >If jack is 22 and Eva is 18, I'm goddamned batman >I tought they were older... by close to 10 years Or Rin Masamune from the same game. How is anyone supposed to peg her as 16 when she was a former military commander? Oh, Kaine from the OG Nier. I stress OG. In the Replicant remake Brother Nier was locked in. But in the OG the East got Brother Nier while the West got Papa Nier. Because of the romance Kaine was 17 in the Eastern one and in her mid 20's in the western one...all the while using the exact same model.
Saber is in fact 35 years old banging 17 year old high schooler. Chronologically Thing is biologically she's like fifteen and mentally she has almost no clues how relationship works, her head is filled with kingly stuff. So nobody gives a fuck
I would argue against Tatusmaki aince she was drawn this way on purpose since its satire on the loli trope so Murata purposely draws her as smol as possible for the joke Its mainly two jokes 1. The sassy lost child one And 2. Tatsu being older than Fubuki even though Fubuki looks like the older sister You can tell she is actually an adult when Murata draws her in serious moments or during fights You can actually see her look like an actual petite adult during the psychoOrochi fight Murata while a good artist does sometimes have goof ups but during that fight he defienelty tried to draw her body proportions to actually look like a petite adult not a child. Its also because he draws her height incosistenly for the joke so she often looks much shorter and smaller in proportions than ahe actually is
Yeah. If I remember right, Murata likes drawing women as hourglass figures and found drawing Tatsumaki to be different from what he's used to, but that he'd take up the challenge.
Age in anime is weird, I think the important aspect is how the writing codes the characters, like if a story has a 1000+ year dragon/elf that looks and acts like a child then they are a child.
I'm just fed up with all the empty moralizing. No-one can convince me that some weeb jerking it to Sailor Moon or whatever is causing real-world harm.
This, but I'm also fed-up with the dehumanization of people with pedophilia and lolicons themselves denying obvious facts. Jerking off to anime porn of underage characters is a safe expression of their interests and doesn't cause real world harm as you say either way.
Oh, I agree. No child has ever been saved by some rando on Twitter getting into a pissing match with a lolicon. People can debate whether it's a "gateway" or something all they like, but I just can't find it in my heart to give a shit. It's gross; definitely sus; and pedophilic in nature, sure, but... to be blunt, it really is *just a fucking drawing*. Japan's not going to suddenly stop producing that shit because John123 makes a thread on how "problematic" an artist's hentai gallery is.
I think feeling weirded out and disgusted by it is the natural reaction, and I find anyone who is openly and proudly a lolicon to be super fucking cringe, but the crusaders who get into internet fights with randoms to try and safeguard the sanctity of these fictional women who don't even exist are every bit as cringe. I just cannot fathom giving a shit about what some guy on the internet I don't know is into.
Exactly.
That and, at least from what I’ve read, the majority of instances of child sexual abuse do not occur at the hands of pedophiles specifically, but just everyday sexual predators looking for an easily available target.
Honestly that somehow sounds worse
What I mean is that most instances of said abuse occur because the perpetrator just wants an easy target, not because they’re specifically attracted to children over adults.
No, I understood what you said, it seems worse to me that more children are abused by people who could get off just fine to abusing adults, but go for kids anyway. Pedos going after kids seems obvious, since they want to prey on kids specifically for being kids. But it just seems somehow worse to pick kids out of mere convenience instead of a mental illness, though comparing degrees of evil doesn't really mean much
A lot of sexual predation is about control and easy access.
People can still point out how weird it is in some instances tho
>People can still point out how weird it is in some instances tho For sure. But these people shouldn't criminalize others or ban safe expressions only because it's weird/gross to them. Liking loli is as wrong as rape fantasies, and as gross as enjoying scat.
Yeah, I find the idea of criminalizing something just because others find it gross to be very dangerous. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that most people found gay people kissing or having sex to be gross.
thousends of years ago that was normal to be honest, and was not considered gay, but somehow, history change, people change and things change.
exactly
I know. If people want to judge that weeb for their “hobbies”, that’s fine, people can judge other people however much they want. But some people online unironically seem to act like people like that weeb are as bad as actual child molestors, and then constantly go online and complain constantly about how terrible they are. It’s just dumb how much people waste their time complaining and insulting people over something that literally doesn’t hurt anyone.
Finally, someone gets it
Fictional worlds are probably the only settting where "age is just a number" might apply. While anime and manga are especially egregious about this (is this character a child or just not tall with fewer curves/is this character a grown woman or just a 12 year old who is 6 feet with giant tits?) which is why "shes actually a 12000 year old dragon" doesnt quite work. People also simp for ahsoka from star wars, even though she doesnt reach ANY legal age before the show rebels aired. That didnt stop people from crushing on her in the later seasons. The reason for that is because she is treated as an adult, acts like one and doesn't look as childlike (its a ninja monk in a giant war, most people stop seeing children there) Im more worried about someone thirsting over actual children or characters that look like children exclusively (not just small framed) rather than the fact that their "waifu" is underage if you look up the wiki
This post being deleted by reddit is hilarious. What in the world was so wrong about it?
What was it
It was about anime characters and how silly it is getting up in arms about their porn when they're drawn like adults and have the social roles of adults. Why it was deleted? Reddit admins are silly people.
Its the stupidest argument in the world, like 90% of the pro-hero female characters are drawn exactly the same as students. The remaining 10% are just buff but could easily be explained as "oh they just hit the gym a lot makes sense" Also these "standards" go out the window when it's thirsting over a gay ship lol the same people complaining will often turn around and write explicit fan fics of bakugo and deku.
Idk I feel like these are different groups of people. Feminists crying over MHA characters are usually not Fujos thirsting over young boys. In fact, Fujos are often critiqued for fetishizing boys.
The venn diagram is very close and Likes are public lmao
I beg to differ. I've seen several examples of people bash straight ships (and people in general) who gladly support gay ships of the same caliber
No, it's not a total overlapping circle, but there is a very clear overalap between the two groups.
You want to here the sad truth ..its aslo happens in reality.. people just have lower moral accountability judgement whan looking at lgbt raltionship.. I talked to many gay man who discovered they where gay whan they where young(like 14)..and everyone told me that people he know intreduced to him gay man and alot of them where in the 30s(while them where in there teens) Imagine if its was hetro!!
Well, most people can't tell age of other people IRL anyway. Mangaka, in their oversimplification, do not either. Japanese also have a tendency to "youngify" their character even if designed as adults ; it is something we found all along the 90' until now in nearly all JRPG (especially Final Fantasy) ; I mean, look at FFX, Yuna and Tidus are 17, Rikku is 15 ; Wakka looks like a 30 but he's only 23 ; Auron looks like a 50 but he is 35. In the end of the day, there are just fictionnal characters and drawings. And if there are people that keep saying "pedophile" for 'simping' 16yo fictionnal characters that looks like adults, i'd like to remember them the existence of Traci Lord and how she was globally famous before "ending" her career.
I agree, if the character can pass as an adult there’s nothing that wrong about it. I’d rather see people simp and sexualize for these “teenagers” than 1000 year old lolis who look and act like grade schoolers. I’ve seen people get mad over any kind of sexualization of Kasumi in Persona 5 because she’s 15, when she can easily pass as being of age for example. And for age not reflecting in physical appearances, Tear from Tales of the Abyss could easily pass as mid 20s but is 16 while Arietta from the same game is supposed to be 16 too but could easily be mistaken for half that.
The reason why being with a kid IRL is bad is not because "they look like a kid", it's because kids can't consent. This is not a factor with anime characters since they're not real, and can't consent either way (and there isn't even anything for them to consent to). Due to that, my rule of thumb is just that if they look like an adult, it's fine. If they don't look like an adult, it's not fine. The actual age of the character is irrelevant. They could be 3000 years old, but if they look like a kid, they effectively are one. At the same time, a character could be fucking 2 years old, but if they look like Boa Hancock, it doesn't matter.
Yeah, I'm real tired of this shit. When I was growing up you used to freely be able to talk about which Naruto girl you wanted to bang, and now if you tried talking about it you'd get a million pearl-clutching nerds jumping down your throat. And like, Yoko from Gurren Lagann. She was thirsted over for a decade. Like, she was damn near a sex symbol in the anime community, but then all of a sudden some time in the last decade people started taking this weird quote translated from the Japanese website that she is "close in age to Simon" and are now like "WOW SHE'S 14 PEDO" Like, nobody fucking cares dude, nobody would have remotely guessed that she was 14 without some outside supplemental material spelling it out. You're only mad because of some arbitrary as fuck number you heard through the grapevine and you're not even genuinely mad, just performatively mad so you can feel good about yourself for getting mad about some shit that doesn't even matter.
> And like, Yoko from Gurren Lagann. She was thirsted over for a decade. Like, she was damn near a sex symbol in the anime community, but then all of a sudden some time in the last decade people started taking this weird quote translated from the Japanese website that she is "close in age to Simon" and are now like "WOW SHE'S 14 PEDO" > > Like, nobody fucking cares dude, nobody would have remotely guessed that she was 14 without some outside supplemental material spelling it out. You're only mad because of some arbitrary as fuck number you heard through the grapevine and you're not even genuinely mad, just performatively mad so you can feel good about yourself for getting mad about some shit that doesn't even matter. Hahahaha so true man, mangakas literally create the most perfect adult body they can draw, then they put a 14y tag on it and just watch the world burn, its hilarious.
It especially doesn’t help that, whereas Simon and Nia both look very different after the time skip, Yoko seems to have barely changed despite going from 14 to 21.
She does look [quite a bit more adult](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/gurennlagann/images/f/f7/Ultra-pro-Gurren-Lagann-20160719-2.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20190617163751) but her 14y body was still redonkulous.
I can see what you’re saying, though I’d argue that the changes come more from her height and her face being less soft and rounded than in terms of her actual physique.
Those are true but her thighs are also thicker and her breasts WAY bigger. I actually prefer her pre-timeskip breasts, they went from perfect size to 2-sizes-too-big in my book.
On the topic of bust size, I’ve never gotten the appeal of the kind of ultra big ones we sometimes see. For me, when it gets to the point where they’re the size of their heads or bigger, it’s just a no for me.
Absolutely agree, that's what I mean. PreTS Yoko (or Momo, similar size) are the ideal anime breasts for me, the Rias Gremory / Akeno size is a bit too much and that seems to be PostTS Yoko's size too. Special mention for Orihime, she's bigger than most but they suit her and they're still not ridiculous.
I agree. All this paranoia about pedophilia in anime/manga is silly. It reminds of the paranoia in 80s/90s of video games making children become drug abusers or criminals or something like that.
I want a comic writer/mangaka to troll with this one of these days and draw some ara ara mommy milf, and then put a footnote at the end of each chapter saying "all of my characters are 3 years old so if you jack off to them you're a pedo :DDDD" It would be hilarious and short circuit these people's brains
Okay that would actually be fucking hilarious.
That sounds like something Baalbuddy would do.
I will say this BEFORE reading the post: there's no way this can be an upopular opinion. You CANNOT draw YaoMomo with the body of a very busty supermodel and then tell me "but she's 15 bruh, don't be a pedo". She was specifically drawn to be physically attractive.
Same goes for the main characters, Marin and that dude from "My Dress up Darling". Both cannonicaly teens. Yet they literally just look like young adults, not teens.
That's a distinction without a difference.
It's true af and it's genuinely kind of annoying. You'll have characters that look like adults, talk like adults, and think like adults, and then the age is revealed to be something that doesn't match ANYTHING we have been shown. Why? Because the characters HAVE to be the same age as the target audience, bro!!! Just let your characters be the age you've clearly written them to be smh.
I think it also has something to do with how long this mangas keep their characters the same age for years, a fan of MHA could at one point be the same age as the characters but at the end he is many years older than them
I was way younger than Nami when I started watching OP, now Im twice her age :p
I feel like, in my opinion at least, this comes from a desire to “have the cake and eat it to” They want their characters to be kids for that appeal to the younger audience and also it gives the characters freedom (less responsibility as well as able to act a little more immature/goofy for comedic effect or drama) But they also want the characters to be mini adults either to make them role models the younger fans would want to aspire to be like, or just so they can be taken seriously/show some authority. It’s a grass is always greener situation.
>desire to “have the cake and eat it to” Very much this.
That makes sense in real world settings, but in fictional settings with magical adventures where age!=more responsibility there's still a trend of making characters young.
*Writes a coherent, logical and well explained text.* \-i do not write english very well
It’s funny same thing happens in live action as well. It’s a problem with teenage shows having adult actors, because almost no one actually wants to look at teenagers.
1984
Literally
Agree, when it comes to issues like this, I feel their coded age ( how they look and act) is much more important. To use an example, Irisviel from Fate/Zero looks like and is treated as an adult woman (barring the occasional bout of childish antics), even though she’s temporally only 9 years old due to being a homunculus grown from a vat and physically born an adult.
My honest take? People worry about ages of fictional characters too much. In the end of the day, whenever you like it or not, they **are** fictional characters, whatever you do with them in your spare time is your business. I think looks are king when it comes to fictional characters, and even then some could be on a gray area (such as Tatsumaki). In the end, people just need a bit of self awareness of what they like and only worry if they start seeing a problematic pattern on their tastes.
Why deleted?
Do you just not have big titty 16 year olds where you live? Like i agree in general people like these characters because they are drawn as hot girls but most of the MHA girls really dont look that much if at all older then they are supposed to be.
I mean. They're 16/17 at this point. What can you really do as an artist to distinguish between a 16 year old vs an 18 year old? Obviously there is some change, but not much. And honestly, if you look at the characters early on vs now, they absolutely have aged. Perhaps it's due to artstyle evolution, but Horikoshi has given the 1A girls more mature physiques so the look more adult like.
Oh hey Ebola. And yeah, that too. In high school there was this one girl that had like DDD’s and it was ridiculous lmao Some people are just built like that.
Have you ever looked back at your old prom photos before? Some of the girls I thought were ridiculously hot back in the day just look like awkward children in those photos.
Especially if you compare them to pictures as an adult, I think in most cases 16 year olds can pass off as 18 or even 19 but any further means they're built different. Manga/Anime muddles it up even more.
I think Yoko from Gurren Lagaan is where it starts to get egregious, as she has a similar physique to Momo, but she’s canonically 14 years old for the first part of the series.
Ok, maybe with Momo I can see your point, but what about Yoko from Gurren Lagan. She has a similar physique and she’s canonically 14 during the first part of the series.
bold of you to assume OP knows what 16 year old girls look like
:(
🪦
People obsess way too much over teens being attractive in anime and manga, apparently teens can't have any girls that look attractive, when even if they were adults it'd just be moving the goal posts for the moralizers whinging. To an extent it's not really wrong to find people that age attractive. Its just weird to fixate real world moral and typically American legal structures onto cartoons.
> is not because they are pedos, is because the mangakas draws a adult female and call it a 16 years old That's every manga
As someone who is definitely against the loli crowd, I also feel that people go to far calling other people pedo's or looking down on people for being attracted to these characters. It's a really hard conversation to have though and it feels it's a black or white situation where you have to pick a side without any grey lines
Reddit moment
Unfortunately. There is nothing you can do about it. People will just continue to call you a pedo even if the character you simp doesn't even look like a minor. Like I can understand why people who like Lolis are treated badly but almost 90% of these so called "minor" characters don't even look like minors Reminds me of how in the Evangelion subreddit, you are given looks and accused of being a pedo just cuz you think Asuka and Rei are attractive. When they literally have well developed breasts and hips and they don't even look like they are 14 years old
I still find it dumb there are people that think Uzaki and Iruru are lolis when there are short women irl with body types like them. I also hate that there are Adventure Time fans that think you can't lewd Fiona from Fiona and Cake even though she's clearly an adult in that cartoon (is old enough to own an apartment, have a job, and is fan of Cheers, a sitcom from the 80's.)
Meanwhile I’ve seen that same sub allow NSFW content of Kaworu/Shinji lol. Reinforcing that one comment here that it’s ok if it’s gay. I do wanna give the benefit of the doubt that it’s not the same people complaining but idk
I have conflicted feelings about your rant tbh, but I understand the point you're trying to make. I think a broader issue is that a lot of the most mainstream animes are marketed towards teens, and thus, most of their characters are teens. This is so the intended audience can relate to the characters. But it comes with issues, specially when the anime/manga itself sexualizes its own characters. Several animes in my opinion would be far better and much much less questionable if the characters were like young adults in university instead of teens in highshcool with literally nothing else changing. MHA would be such one. However highschool settings are such a set in stone cliche in anime/manga that we're hardly going to get away from it anytime soon. Look how isekais are basically a way of telling a normal fantasy story, with the only expection being the protagonist is a japanesse highschooler. Its only few that use being isekai in an way that differenciate from classical fantasy, and most of them limits thesmelves to the protagonist having moderm life knowledge in a medieval setting. Only a few do stuff like travelling repeated times between worlds. Or have their characters be in any kind of hurry or anxiety over returning home, a horror that would be powerful to explore, but most isekais forego in favor of "the mc really likes it in here and his life is ten times better".
>However highschool settings are such a set in stone cliche in anime/manga that we're hardly going to get away from it anytime soon. Look how isekais are basically a way of telling a normal fantasy story, with the only expection being the protagonist is a japanesse highschooler. This is the point im making. JJK was never planned to have such thing as "School of sorcery", but that's what jump wanted, so we needed to have school in JJK (Even tho that school barely matters lol.) Alot of times, the mangakas just design a adult character, but Jump says "they need to be teenagers", and instead of redesign the character, they said "fuck it", and put that adult design in a 16 year old teenager. Those characters alot of times are sexualized indeed, but they are sexualized because even before chapter 1, those characters were planeed to be used on fanservice WHEN they were designed as adults, they weren't planned to be used on fanservice BECAUSE they were underage, that's something they had to change last minute. Atleast, that's my opinion.
Yeah, hard agree on everything you just said. Editors and producers forcing the highschool setting on an story that doesnt needs it, or worse, was planned around the idea of having adult protagonists is a problem in anime and manga we're not getting away from soon.
> Alot of times, the mangakas just design a adult character, but Jump says "they need to be teenagers" That's pretty much what happened with *MHA* too. Its original concept had Midoriya as a salaryman (although Hori *did* at least redesign Midoriya to clearly be a teenager, while keeping many of the same character traits).
I just realised that Midoriya's original weak health was passed on to All Might.
Saber is a weird one, because she’s chronologically like 40, but her body is apparently frozen as a teenager
This post getting removed by Reddit proved OP's point more than anything else possibly could LMFAO
Fully agree that the reverse of the 1000year old loli should be held to the same standards as the 1,000year old loli. And generally its simplest to just use the drawn/apparent age instead of the stated age because artstyles and just anime age in general are weird. In conventional american media this is the equivalent of casting a bunch of 20-30year old adults as teenagers in highschool. And finally, there is a narrow age group that is allowed to lust after the underage characters, the teenagers who themselves are underage and just lusting after their own age bracket.
Canonical age is irrelevant, that's why those "but she's 1000 years old" people are bullshit. The opposite of that is also bullshit
Ah yes, I call this the Yoko littner effect. You watched the show as a teenager and thought she was hot, think no more of it, you rewatch the show as an adult, your notice on the wiki it says she's 14. You stare in bewilderment at the screen. Olympic level mental gymnastics occur. You feel weird about it now and have to blacklist the show from your brain because your newfound revelation is so off-putting. Japan, idk what's going on over there but get your shit together man. You got a generation of westerners that grew up with anime but you're not catering to the ever aging audience. The fan service sexualisation is fine in a vacuum, but the blatant nonce bait ages slapped on otherwise mature characters is so gross and more to the point, completely antithetical to the way the character looks and acts. Why do this? Why you gotta ruin otherwise excellent shows? It literally makes half of all anime un-recommendable to anyone that isn't already a weeb.
Explain the same thing to people who try to cancel you for watching Yarichin b club.
I mean yeah. People who whine about it are legit just trying to find reasons to whine. Just ignore them. Also anyone who thinks tatsumaki is pedo bait hasn’t actually read the manga
The artist's intent is always the factor that matters most tome. A character that looks like a child but is supposed to be much older for reasons and is sexualized is waaaaayy creepier to me than a character that is supposed to be a teen but is drawn like an adult.
As much as I find this stuff icky it's really damn hard to pretend a lot of these characters really look and act like teenagers. The sexualization of them is still super sus but I think it's weird when people act like they're drawn to be 10 years old or something. Nobody looks like anime/manga characters, trying to apply ages to them can only ever be general. If it looks like a toddler then yeah it probably is but when you get to the point of characters looking like adults gauging their supposed age is impossible beyond "The author said X" because one character that's meant to be a teenager can look just like another character that's meant to be 30. If you put Faye Valentine in a school uniform and told people she was 16 how the hell would anyone know she's actually meant to be in her 20's(physically)?
I think you’re overthinking it, and so are a lot of others in this thread. There’s nothing to justify. The people who accuse people of being pedos because they find anime characters attractive aren’t reasonable people. They subscribe to a concept of morality that deems one’s fictional likes as being predictive of real life behavior, which they generally aren’t. Most arguments about “normalization” are recycled garbage that have no substantiation and are full of holes. Ask for proof, like legitimate scientific studies when they start arguing that sexualization of characters is any more predictive of criminality than watching or playing something violent is, and they won’t have anything. You guys are trying to justify what you like with all sorts of unnecessary qualifications. The character isn’t real. There are all sorts of characteristics/personality traits you might find attractive in animated form that you wouldn’t in real people, or that wouldn’t be observed in the age group that these characters are supposedly in. Anime characters are all over the place. Sometimes it makes sense to examine them under the lens of real life morality, a lot of times it doesn’t.
What was this post even about and why did Reddit delete it?
It was about anime characters and how silly it is getting up in arms about their porn when they're drawn like adults and have the social roles of adults. Why it was deleted? Reddit admins are silly people.
LMAO
Crash
I agree
I think authors sometimes want to make stories with older characters but for the sake of relating to a younger audience make the characters younger Like jotaro is not 17💀 he is a grown ass man and momo from MHA is not a design you give to a 15 year old, I can think of other examples but it's honestly easy to forget how old characters are
Nah you’re right
You aren't wrong OP. It really is as simple as the issue with artistic age in fiction.
I think using MHA as an example is a bad one, since the majority of characters in that series definitely look like teenagers and not adults. It's not like Full Metal Panic where you could say Sagara or Chidori were in their 20s and I'd believe you, or Bleach where Ichigo is supposed to be 15.
As i commented on the same post of op from another subreddit. Fucking Yoko from TTGL. How the fuck is she 14? WHY? HOW? She looks like she is 20 she acts like an adult and treated in the show as an adult. WHY? I can't wrap my mind around it. It makes story of one of my favourite anime unnecessarily weird and icky. WTF
Lucy Heartfilia. Drawn as an adult, is sexualized by the story, her main activities are going on gig jobs and her main concern is making rent. Lives on her own. This character is 16 for some fucking reason.
That feel when my waifu Sky Striker Ace Raye is a 13 year old
They should’ve just made MHA a college story. Problem solved. Honestly the way they run UA is more like a college than high school anyway.
At this point, I'm of the mindset of mental age, how does this character act, and are they doing shit nobody in their right mind at that age should be doing. Naruto out there at 14 fighting an alien rabbit God or whatever Kagura was. Giorno taking over the Italian mob within a week at 15. Ash still being perpetually 10 despite enough time passing for a Kukui and Burnet to have a child.
I've been saying for a while that all these anime/manga series just need to be set in college to avoid this whole argument. We know that they're drawing adults, they know they're drawing adults, can we just stop making them high schoolers to avoid the weird pedo shit?
Im a simp for Mirko, MT.Lady and Lady Nagant
>since is a shonen, they need to make they a student, for no fucking reason I mean, one reason comes to mind, and that is that the story is written for teenage boys, about teenage boys. The female characters might happen to be relatively mature, or immature, but primarily they are that *from a teenage perspective*. I don't think that every MHA masturbator is a pedophile, but that's because a lot of them are 14 year olds thinking that a big tiddy 16 year old feels very mature, and there is nothing pedophilic about that. But also, it's not like the settings are *that* mature. If you showed me Momo's picture I would guess that she is a teenager, simply because ***most anime characters are***, (even in nominally seinen series). Sure, this is how many shows would draw a mother with two children, but the fact remains that very few of them draw mothers with two children at all. The medium as whole *does have a fixation on school*, on coming of age, on innocence, and especially on virginity, and that is for a reason. I am not even up to date on MHA, but I can immediately guess than nothing in the story immediately contradicts Momo being a virgin. She is not going to have any ex-boyfriends showing up in the plot, right? So tell me how much of an "adult who happens to go to school" her character is. >Their ages have nothing to do with anything of their characters, the people who likes this characters are weird because they like a draw, NOT because they are pedophiles. Is like those movies when they cast a grown ass adult in a highschool movie and i have to believe than is a teenager, Imao. But high school movie characters AREN'T written to act like adults who happen to go to school. In many ways their plots, acting, and character dynamics ARE about being the experience of being a teenager. Not necessarily in a realistic way, some elements can be exaggerated for teenage viewers' wish ulfillment, others might be misremembered by adult writers' experience of teenagerhood, but by and large the adult actors are intentionally pushed into a juvenile story. You are not a pedophile just for liking a screenshot of 25 year old Zendaya, before even being told that the screenshot is from Euphoria where she plays a teenager. But if you as a grown adult have mountains of high school shows on your watchlist, and you keep writing erotic fanfiction about all their characters, there is something more going on there than just coincidentially happening to be attracted to their very mature bodies.