A review of a disgusting manga (Love’s Reach) and a bit about JJK
Lately, I have been fighting a great internal battle. It’s one I find myself facing time and again, over and over, one I tend to lose. Wanting to watch a show while my brain screams at me that I can’t actually watch it. I finally got tired of running away from my interests and I hunkered down to re-watch the first two seasons of Jujutsu Kaisen with the end goal of being able to start the long-awaited third season before it finished airing. While I’m pretty sure the first part of the season did finish airing before I could get to it, I still got through the Shibuya Incident arc a second time (no, it wasn’t easier and yes, it did hurt just as bad as the first time). I really didn’t want to do it, but Yuta called to me and I’m tremendously invested in these characters. I lined it all up perfectly. I would watch the last few episodes of S2 before I had to go into a closing shift, and then the day after, my day off, I would start S3 and see how far fate would take me. Fate took me three episodes in before I burnt out and got a migraine at the same time.
I decided to not stress, I will have more days off eventually so it’s not like I had to watch it all then and there. The animation in the first few episodes goes so incredibly hard that I immediately thought about starting the manga. As I type this out I wonder if I’m a masochist… Well, anyway, that’s not going to happen anytime soon haha
I hear you saying, “You can just read it somewhere else!” and you’re right. I’ve got the first volume bookmarked just in case the waiting becomes unbearable. However, I’m currently in the first ‘I can fix myself’ phase of this year, so I want to not give in to instant gratification as much as I normally would. Waiting a few weeks to read the first volume is not going to kill me. Since I had my library app out already I figured why not borrow a few random titles and see what type of stuff Libby has to offer. That’s when, by a stroke of rotten luck, I found Love’s Reach by Mikimoto Rin. For starters I am not a fan of student x teacher stories, so the synopsis alone gave me the ick BUT! the migraine had ruined my plans and I didn’t have anything better to do…. so I read the first three volumes.
I feel the need to make a very clear statement about this before I actually start talking about any part of this manga or any other piece of media I may mention in this article. This is very important for me to make perfectly clear because you don’t know me and I refuse to be lumped in with anybody that thinks any differently from myself. I believe all non-offending pedophiles and hebephiles should be castrated and all offenders should be put to death. Cool? Cool.
I am not a believer that your likes when it comes to fiction are a 1:1 to your morals in real life. Personally, I am a big fan of pieces of fiction with darker elements so long as it isn’t based on real cases and some lines aren’t crossed. I feel that any balanced, coherent person will understand what I’m saying here. Listen, I have spent a big part of my life in online fandom spaces, okay? I know how it is in the world of fiction as I assume you do as well. Having said that, I have watched some really fun morally-ambiguous dramas before, Minato’s Laundromat (I never finished it so I’m unsure how problematic it gets), What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim, or The Silent Wife to name a few. I have even watched student x teacher stuff and enjoyed it, Mr. Sahara & Toki-kun was very cute imo, but this manga left me feeling angry after every volume despite it having so many appealing qualities to it.
Love’s Reach was a Shōno manga published by Kodansha through the magazine Bessatsu Friend. The story was serialized monthly from 2008 until 2011, ultimately creating 10 volumes of student-teacher loving once it was put all together (barf). The art style Mikimoto uses for this work is pretty fun. The design of our main victim- I mean, victim- I mean… character, Yuni, reminds me a bit of Hagashimura’s characters in Princess Jellyfish.
You know? She could be Tsukimi’s cousin or something. Everyone else has a pretty standard, bland manga look and aren’t worth the space in this article. Apart from being beautiful, she’s written to be a bit of a weirdo as well as the smartest girl in school. I’m going to be honest, if this didn’t have a crazy predator problem I would love to hail her as autism representation, but that would be a bit too realistic. Throughout the three volumes she is shown to be lots of fun to be around, generally well liked, loved by her family, and yet all of these things are overlooked by the fact that she is supposedly in love with her teacher??? \
So, the story (as far as the three volumes I read) goes like this. Yuni’s homeroom teacher has a baby and is on maternity leave and this predator is her grade’s substitute homeroom teacher as well as their English teacher. Yuni says she hates him so much that despite her being the top student in the school, she has a lower grade in English than she should. The idea is that she’s so distracted by her hot teacher that her grades are failing and so he makes her stay after school for tutoring. This man literally starts grooming her from the jump and she goes from hating how awful of an adult he is to being head over heels in love. To summarize this entire post: the plot sucks ass. Nothing happens, not really. In every chapter there is some sort of maybe threat to their secret relationship: another teacher finds out about them and blackmails Yuni into becoming her own living doll to take perverted photos of (casually throwing in a lesbian predator), a boy becomes friends with Yuni and makes the teacher jealous, a mysterious woman is hanging around the teacher making Yuni jealous, her dad finds out about them and is against their plans of marriage!! Nothing changes by the end of any of those stories. Several people find out about the fact this teacher, who is twenty-four years old, is dating his sixteen year old student and nobody brings it up to the authorities. The school doesn’t find out, her parents end up agreeing to their engagement. Despite the fact that their relationship is explicitly a secret, nobody is all that scandalized by it nor by the abhorrent behavior of this teaching professional.
I don’t want to clog up this article with massive images (I really need to learn how to make images fit better in these…) but I feel like I need to show examples of just how bad this manga actually is.
I went into this expecting it to be like the few teacher-student romances I have seen before, where the relationship, although creepy at its core, is very innocent. The student falls first and the teacher is overall an upstanding citizen (sans the fact they fell for a student). I’m used to the stories having the student be on their last year of high school and for there to be very clear lines the relationship does not cross. The teacher does not kiss, touch, look at the student inappropriately. There are no caresses, no innuendos, absolutely no sexual behavior. In the stories I am used to the couple agrees to keep things more than PG and leave the actual romance for after the student’s graduation. This manga is not like that. At some point in the first volume the two agree to only get together when his contract ends and they are no longer student and teacher. Never mind the fact she would have still been sixteen… Surprise! His contract gets an extension and guess what? The relationship does not end! In fact, it worsens!
The amount of kissing these two do is nauseating. They go at it so often it drove me insane. In classrooms, in the bathroom, in a ferris wheel, in the school library. The way this man is predating on this teenage girl is so blatant and unnerving, and yet it’s played off as the most normal thing. There were several instances where the character of the teacher would call out how different their maturity levels are. He would call her wants childish, or she would go out of her way to wear makeup and get better at fashion because “he would look better with a grown woman.” I am not kidding, she really did say that at one point. The relationship is abusive, of course. This guy is a chronic womanizer and is constantly making Yuni jealous. He dismisses her and berates her, insults her and even slaps her one time. All in the name of love, right?
Poor Yuni is constantly being put in uncomfortable situations, constantly getting predated on. It feels like torture porn of a minor, it’s horrible. She’s constantly being humiliated! There are many many many instances where the creepy female teacher (who is still included into her circle after she tried to take up-skirt shots of Yuni) puts Yuni in suggestive costumes for her own pleasure, moments where Yuni is blatantly sexualized. For crying out loud, this author made several panels specifically so that Yuni would fall in front of her teacher while she wasn’t wearing underwear (after she gave her panties to the creepy female teacher so she would leave her alone about getting that up-skirt shot btw…). Another classmate steals a kiss from her, the teacher takes photos of them together while Yuni is ill and sleeping. Each chapter serves the same purpose of humiliating Yuni, have the teacher sexually assault her, and have a short-lived obstacle that threatens the relationship.
And he really does assault her!
There is even a chapter where the topic of sex is introduced. Physical intimacy is discussed between Yuni and her friend, who is active with her boyfriend. Being intimate with a partner is certainly a topic that comes up for teens, and I for sure think it can be brought up in media for teens. Hell, if you want to talk about teenagers having a one-sided crush on their teachers and how they have childish fantasies about them, that’s fine by me as well (there is currently a running comic on instagram by plushelisa that tackles this and is super charming). I don’t think this manga needed an arc where Yuni warms up to the idea of her and her teacher getting intimate. The worst part is that it’s alluded that they are sexually intimate to some extent. I really don’t think that tweens and teens reading their monthly release of Bessatsu Friend should have been reading a man in his mid-twenties asking a teenager if he can touch her.
It really goes to show how unprotected kids have always been, even before the age of instagram and snapchat. I have gone through online grooming. If this article reaches enough people I’m sure at least a handful of you have also been through similar experiences. Having a man in his twenties take advantage of you as a young girl is not surprising, nor is it shocking, but it is disgusting. It disgusts me to see things like this normalized more and more the older I get. I really thought in some moments that the narrative was going to change and the teacher was going to be called a creep and have that be taken seriously. I thought a few times that Yuni would wake up, or more realistically be woken up by someone else, about how inappropriate her teacher is. Towards the end of the third volume we get shown a bit of the teacher’s past where he held a sexual relationship with a teacher when he was a student. This female teacher gets introduced in the present time and they reconnect. I had hope that the story would take a turn and have him recognize that his sexual relationship with his teacher was wrong, as is the one h endow has with Yuni. Of course, by the time the third volume ends he doesn’t have this realization and nobody has reported him yet. The author is constantly so close to turning this story into something worth reading that it almost makes me want to find the rest. Almost.
Like I said before, this story is ass. I would hate to spend any of my time reading through seven other volumes only for the chance that it ends with Yuni graduating and throwing her academic future away to become her teacher’s housewife. And yet, Mikimoto gets so tantalizingly close to breaking open his character for the predator he truly is so many times that it still makes me want to give them a shot. Maybe I’ll have to write my own fanfiction where Yuni’s dad isn’t so spineless and he beats the breaks off of the teacher. Much to think about.