if it's "for my daughter," I'd even make myself a social pariah!
a frank conversation about If It's For My Daughter, I'd Even Defeat A Demon Lord, Kodomo no Jikan, Bunny Drop, and grooming in anime.
CW: Grooming, Sexual Abuse
In 2019, If It’s For My Daughter, I’d Even Defeat A Demon Lord melted the North American anime fanbase’s collective brain — self included.
The show follows Dale, a skilled mercenary with little remorse for his targets. That changes when — deep in an ill-defined anime forest — a small demon girl wanders out of the bushes. One of her horns has been snapped off, and her stomach roars louder than she ever could.
Despite being conditioned to despise demons and to kill them with no remorse, the adventurer takes mercy and gives the youngling some food. The frightened child warms up to him, but soon, Dale realizes that she can’t speak the same language. She does, however, have a name — Platina, which is soon shortened to Latina.
(Yes, they really call her Latina. We are not going to talk about this right now, or ever.)
Maho’s 2019 adaptation of the 2014 self-published novel series (later published by Japanese Dungeons & Dragons publisher Hobby Japan) covers about the first three or so volumes of writing. That takes up through the first few years of Latina’s life with Dale, from ages 8 to around 10 or so. During this time, Dale begins to look after her with the help of innskeeper friends Kenneth and Rita. Latina becomes a fixture at their restaurant, as she offers to serve patrons and help with cooking. As she grows older, she begins to learn more about the complex plight of the demon races and journeying out into the world with Dale.
All of this centers Latina as a deuteragonist as opposed to subservient and beholden to Dale. Although Dale is responsible for finding her, the anime wastes no time in centering Latina’s stories. She struggles to fit in at school initially, due to her being a demon and the dominant religions being fiercely biased against her kind. Even as she finds other children to relate to, she has a difficult time feeling like she truly belongs. As such, she throws herself into cooking and cleaning with Kenneth and Rita — finding a sense of purpose there. Further, she eventually becomes an invaluable travel companion.
It is important to note that Latina at no point considers Dale a paternal figure. She never refers to him as her father, as the title is from his perspective — a perspective that the show routinely proves wrong. Latina had parents before her horn was snapped and she was exiled; she’s not looking for a replacement. Instead, she was simply let loose in the world way too young and is now trying to grow up around a teenager. But that teenager — a trained killer and demon slayer — doesn’t know the first thing about relating to and understanding her kind. They’re RPG-adjacent travel companions on a long adventure. A close analog would be Cecil and Lydia from Final Fantasy IV.
I am in the process of reading the light novels for a longer pitch about this series. Throughout the initial volumes, Dale routinely expresses concerns that somebody take advantage of Latina. He fears “people who look at children the wrong way”; he sees Latina as a helpless and decidedly un-sexual child. The book goes out of its way to emphasize Dale’s infantilization of Latina, and the narration itself never frames her as sexually desirable. There is no concentrated grooming of Latina into a romantic partner, nor any perception of her as a potential romantic partner down the line. To describe what occurs in this book as “grooming” is — frankly — a bit disingenuous. Maybe I’ll feel different once I see the phraseology and narrative turns of the last few volumes, but honestly, I doubt it.
What happens in Demon Lord is an echo — down to specific plot beats and character traits — of Bunny Drop, another series unfairly characterized as “promoting grooming.” Yumi Unita’s manga was a cult hit in America at publication, but that ground to a standstill when Production IG’s animated adaptation aired. When those first waves of reviews hit, a few critics were quick to point out the “controversial” direction that the manga took. That encouraged many people — such as a young me — to spoil the ending for themselves and stop watching out of moral outrage.
This had a chilling effect on the manga in North America, which was plentiful and in ready circulation for the first handful of volumes. (I was reading it at release up to a certain point.) In the following years, the remainder was put out in scarce quantities and dried up quick. In 2024, the first five or so volumes of Bunny Drop are easily findable for under ten dollars; the last few regularly command $30-$50 price tags. To this day, the series is regularly cited as a heart-warming thing that “got gross” or “turned weird.” Many recommend just watching the anime, which cuts off well before the time skip.
Simply put: most Western readers refused to accept a child growing up, maturing into a manga-aged adult (she’s still a teenager,) and making autonomous decisions at the behest of the literal woman who created her. It was a hypocritical and frankly ridiculous double standard, considering the brazen sexuality displayed by minors in a lot of fan service-driven anime. While there’s no moral judgment there — I love a good Gainax bounce — there’s a delicious sort of irony that some anime fans are totally cool with ogling animated minors, but a non-sexualized child growing up and falling in love with a responsible adult who’s taken care of her is repulsive.
I invoke Drop because it is one of the most oft-cited parallels to Demon Lord. Because this is my blog and not a peer-reviewed, source-based piece, I’m not going to cite specific Reddit comments, forum posts, and miscellaneous reviews — this time. However, the general tone of many overt critics is that a perceived purity was ruined, and the series is now tainted by a gross thing that the readers didn’t want to think about. More distressingly, however, more than a few folks I came across voiced an attitude that “Japan always does this” — i.e. makes something that looks cute and “wholesome” (a meaningless and fascist word) but is actually “gross” or “perverted” or “weird.” Ah — anime is cool until “Weird Japan” strikes. Gotcha.
This ill-thought, imperialist attitude is — simply — very similar to arguments many Western critics have made against this series. For all their bluster, some English-speaking writers who have taken the series to task have not done so beyond this reductive perspective. “I think this is wrong and it would bad if this happened in real life.” “How could anyone do this?” Much like with Bunny Drop, Western critics wasted no time vague-mentioning what they’d heard about — secondhand — the remnant of the light novels so any potential viewer viewed it as toxic waste and steered clear. Further, the level of Randian moral relativism and prescriptive thinking is not dissimilar Gloria Steinem’s patronizing putdowns of Middle Eastern cultures. It is frankly disappointing that establishment outlets have taken this tact with the series.
Grooming is a word we have — quite simply — all lost the meaning of. It’s as simple as that. I’ve written about it, but of course, our cultural ignorance stops for no blogger. I recently watched as an indie trans musician was harassed and accused of being a groomer for dating somebody with a three-year age gap two years ago. When pushed for evidence, a secondhand source posted emotionally fraught and sensitive text messages between the two of them that — quite frankly — made nobody look like they were making great decisions at that time.
The singer came out, acknowledged her place in it, apologized, but also spoke very strongly about the weaponization of the word “groomer” in something that was clearly an issue for two people to solve. For this, she was pushed back against further, critics deleted reviews, and she now has to bare the brunt of being trans at 22 years old and labeled a “groomer” for… fucking up? Making a mistake? Owning up to, admitting that she made a bad decision to date a 17 year-old when she was 20, and moving on?
It’s easy to pick on a musician who has around a thousand follows on Twitter. It’s easy to vent your emotional baggage and point fingers when you feel personally affronted. But it’s a lot harder to acknowledge that sometimes, you aren’t the victim and your hurt is something that needs to be dealt with in private. In therapy. Somewhere that is not the site run by a conspiratorial antisemite whose trans daughter has disowned him. There are real groomers — real adults — out there targeting, cornering, and isolating vulnerable children. They’re usually not trans, and it takes a sheltered, ignorant child to point fingers like this with little to no actual claims of abuse.
Look at A Certain Voice Actor, for instance. (The man is masturbatory in searching for himself, so I have to be careful about what I say.) But for around 15 or so years, numerous grooming and sexual accusations have floated around the guy. I attempted to report on them over the course of two years, only for the story to not have enough actionably illegal material to justify publishing. I understand the rationale there now as somebody who copyedits for a news site — you need to be careful with these sort of stories — but it still stung. I harbor no ill will against the editor who worked with me, as they did everything I think they could have on an institutional level.
Still — there was a paper trail going back almost two decades that put that man’s lips on minors and his hands on women who weren’t asking for it. Because nothing was “technically illegal,” all he had to do was weaponize the Pro-Vic crowd and harass anybody who spoke up into the ground — on top of financially intimidating his victims. Lo and behold, the man’s back on stage at events like nothing ever happened. Nothing changed — he just got more careful and snagged a twenty-something right-winger baddie to keep his pud wet with. Now, it’s almost impossible to report on voice actor abuse because of Certain False Accusations of another actor, so A Certain Voice Actor — who, for legal purposes, I am not personally accusing of anything — doesn’t have to really reckon with any accusation now.
Point being — there are real dangers out there. Dangers to young people who want to mold their impressionable minds into personal snuffboxes. This is why we need to be careful when we use this word.
That goes for fiction, too.
Bunny Drop is a josei age gap romance written by an adult woman for adult women. Rin’s perspective is the primary perspective that Yumi Unita is working through. Daikichi is an adult analog, but it is clear that to Unita, this is the story of a young girl who grows up around an older person that she never sees as a parent. This relationship would be unacceptable in real life, true, because anime and manga are not real. If we’re to litigate Bunny Drop for its content like this — especially on its perceived “realism” — then we must do the same to virtually every other anime that has inappropriate content involving minors. And if we’re to do that, then we are to litigate a vast swath of an artform that has normalized sexual and romantic desires of minors since its very inception.
I need to emphasize — we should not do this. To apply our cultural standards to works of illustrated expression from other cultures is a form of extreme social privilege. It is not an ingenuous nor clever way to interrogate the artforms of anime and manga. Instead, it actually serves the purpose of silencing and damning artists who already face difficulty getting work within their hyper-conservative, post-colonial, readily sexist 21st century society. If we are to do this, why not to Story of Zahra? Woman At Point Zero? Delta of Venus? Because when critics practice this brazen cultural imperialism, their claims that anime and manga are capital-A art fall to the wayside; all of it sudden, this isn’t literature, it’s a cartoon for pedophiles.
Bunny Drop sits side-by-side with Kodomo no Jikan, another woman-helmed series that invites concern and derision when brought up in mixed company. Like Drop, Kodomo no Jikan is a complex and fraught work of social criticism centered on the failings of education styles and the hyper-sexualization of infancy in early aughts culture. It is a work by a Japanese woman who — seemingly — has anxieties about the hypersexual, hyper-Westernized identities that young girls are encouraged to embody.
When you look at the world Jikan was made in, it’s more fair to say that it is reflective of the inherent paedophilia present in children’s clothing and media of the era. After all, this is when toddlers were being sold crop tops and Dan Schneider was subliminally grooming the masses with actual child abuse content. The core tension of Watashiya’s story is that of an uptight, conservative Japanese man and a child who’s been exposed to sex way too early. The manga, too, actually grapples with the pain, the angst, and the drama of it all in earnest.
Does it portray a realistic situation remotely acceptable outside of a manga? No! That’s why it’s a manga and not real life, you big silly.
I bring these both up because they are other series often dismissed, derided, or outright damned by Westerners for their age gap relationships. Usually, the strata they’re critiqued in involves a level playing field between reality and fantasy. I find this distressing, especially because the manga-ka who have been exposed as groomers and pedarasts aren’t the ones making this material. Nobuhiro Watsuki, Kenya Suzuki, Mitsutoshi Shimabukuro, Kosuke Fujishima… these are all successful men who have all harmed children, either directly or indirectly, and barely suffered for it. Watsuki and Shimabukuro had their reputations partially rehabilitated by Eiichiro Oda; Suzuki isn’t really in the public eye anymore; Fujishima quite simply isn’t on the radar of most modern anime fans. Still, all of their work remains readily available and is successful to this day.
Meanwhile, Kodomo no Jikan has been dropped by its first NA publisher (despite that same publisher putting out Dance In The Vampire Bund!) and fell into the lap of a badly-planned Kickstarter that didn’t yield any physical print runs; the anime will likely remain unlicensed. Meanwhile, Bunny Drop fans often parrot the phrase “the manga doesn’t exist” to justify their enjoyment of the good, but truncated anime adaptation. In both instances, a significant amount of women’s work has been stripped of value and dismissed outright instead of taken in earnest and evaluated from a uniquely feminine perspective.
Further, in the case of Bunny Drop, all the credit and gravitas has been handed to its male director for not dealing with the icky, gross, emotionally stable and supportive relationship its creator projects herself onto. This is silencing women. It is silencing women’s art. It is telling women who want to explore their own complex and fraught relationship with sex and gender roles that they — quite simply — aren’t allowed to in a larger social sense. Meanwhile, their more successful male peers get to have their work reevaluated in caterwauling public eulogies because people can’t believe the Meiji Restoration apologist might be a bad guy.
This applies to the Western fanbase, too. Nick Robinson and Dylan “Howyoudoin” Kielman made oppai anime and hentai fandom open, brazen parts of their personality. Neither indicated any sort of propensity towards lolicon, and at times seemed eager to dunk on people who enjoyed it as “red flaggish,” for lack of a better term. As far as anyone was concerned, these were adult men enjoying adult women and illustrated representations of them.
That is, until it came out that Robinson was a craven sexual harasser and Kielman was an actual groomer and rapist. Robinson’s been fine in the interrim, and has a whole audience of YouTube kiddies blissfully unaware of the accusations against him; Kielman, luckily, has been strictly monitored and quarantined for his entirely unacceptable and inhuman behavior. These are both men, however, who veiled their intent behind being left-leaning, queer-friendly, pro-feminist “good boys” and actually harmed young women. In other words — my experience in the Western anime fanbase has led me to be highly suspect of social morality, as it has failed the sniff test on numerous occasions. If anything, I trust artists and fandom figures pushing boundaries and challenging perspectives (like Amelie Doree, for instance) more than those telling me not to watch something because it “encourages grooming.”
Let me tell you something — groomers don’t need encouragement. They’re doing fine on their own.
This all brings us back to For My Daughter. While Chirolu’s gender is a question mark — who says they even need one? — its story hews closer to Bunny Drop than Kodomo no Jikan. It’s a sensitive, tender portrayal of a young girl growing up around a young man and falling in love with her once she’s older. In both instances, the prospective male character isn’t even particularly enthused about it. If anything, the men themselves are the romantic interests to these stories, and their reluctance is the hurdle that must be overcome. There is no romantic or sexual attraction there; Daikichi and Dale (the real D&D) treat Rin and Latina like children, even as they get older. It’s only after the girls stake their claim and assert their desire, then refuse to back down after several years, that the story even goes in that direction.
Yes, in real life, this situation might be the result of grooming. However, in a cartoon fantasy, we need to actually listen to the feminine perspective being proffered and not apply reality to aestheticized sets of ideals. If we don’t, we run the risk of erasing work by women who are trying to navigate and push boundaries in the rigid gender norms of their country. And if we treat work like Bunny Drop and Kodomo no Jikan and For My Daughter like toxic lolicon, then we will truly not be able to distinguish between harmful art and problematic but vital art.
Besides, lolicon is also a valid form of artistic expression — isn’t it? But maybe that’s a different argument for a different time.
More on If It’s For My Daughter and Kodomo no Jikan — coming soon, but not to this blog. Stay tuned here for more anime — next week!