OJOU TO BANKEN-KUN

DESCRIPTION

CAST

CHAPTERS

ANIME DramaOjou to Banken-kun

REVIEWS

• 

  RoseFaerie

  12/100
  A Girl & Her Groomer: A twisted parental figure and the sexualization of childhood.

  I’ve been busy lately, so I haven’t been reviewing, but since the things that are making me busy are disappearing, I figured I’d make a comeback. And what’s a better series to do it with than one I personally hate?

  This is the story of Isaku, an orphaned girl, who was taken in by her grandfather who is a member of the yakuza. She’s raised as one of the gang, but her unconventional family kept her from making many friends at school. When she starts high school, she wants things to be different. However, Keiya, the yakuza member who is her guardian, decides that he will be her bodyguard and disguise himself as a student. Will Isaku be able to fit it, and are her feelings for her bodyguard and caretaker as one sided as she thought?

  I actually didn’t really know about this one until it got an anime announcement. There’s a lot of discourse surrounding this one, and people aren’t exactly excited for it. And for good reason. Age gap manga are one thing, but age gap manga where the older party raised the younger party from the time they were a child is another.

  If you’re getting Usagi Drop flashbacks you are correct. This is the love story of a 15-year-old girl and the 26-year-old man who spent 10 years of his life raising her. The story acknowledges that she’s sort of like his child.

  

  To make things weirder, Keiya is extremely overbearing. You know how there’s the stereotype about the dads being super overprotective of their daughters? Where they don’t let them dress in revealing clothes or let them date or talk to boys and want them to remain little girls forever? Keiya is like that. Like it’s already weird for a parent to be like that (which Keiya basically is), but Keiya is also romantically interested in Isaku. He doesn’t want her to grow up, but he’s also in love with her and has been in love with her since she was an even younger child. It’s this odd contrast of how he desires Isaku both romantically and sexually, and yet he also wants her to remain a child.

  Keiya personifies this perversion of fatherly love, taken in an outright pedophilic direction. He is clearly sexually attracted to Isaku, but it’s clear that he’s in love with her innocence and the traits that come from her literally being a child. She’s only just started high school, and she doesn’t have much life experience, and he wants to keep it that way. In some sense he feels like an overprotective parent, but since he’s set up as Isaku’s love interest the narrative has no intention of having him let go of her and let her explore on her own.

  Isaku has made it clear that she wants to have a normal boyfriend, despite having one sided feelings for Keiya. Her feelings make sense considering he is one of the younger members of the gang, and she never really got the chance to socialize normally. Keiya has also been grooming her since she was a small child, so that’s also a factor. Despite that, she wants to move on and find a boyfriend her own age at school. Both the narrative and Keiya won’t allow that.

  

  At one point, Isaku gets asked out by one of her classmates. They exchange numbers, and hit it off. Keiya of course becomes insanely jealous and tries to sabotage their relationship in any way possible. He does not want her to date other guys. Of course Isaku’s boyfriend turns out to be a wild partier who drinks a lot and wants to sleep with her, and Keiya has to save her. It’s the trope of trying to make the other love interests the worst people imaginable so the main ones look good in comparison. I hate it so much.

  In general, he makes it so hard for her to fit in at first. It’s like having a parent in the class, watching you and trying to help you make friends. Think about how horrible it would be for your mom to be in class and doing weird things that would ruin your chances of making friends with the kids you want to. I felt so bad for her, since she just wants to have close friends.

  Keiya is so possessive of Isaku and her body it makes me sick. He wants to be the only one who can see her in her swimsuit, and he gropes her repeatedly, commenting on “how much she’s grown” which is especially creepy considering how he literally raised her.

  The author also clearly has a thing for age regression, since she likes to draw Isaku in her current state, but dressed as a baby with rattles, pacifiers, and diapers on Twitter. One such panel made it into the manga, and it makes me think that she wanted Isaku to be younger than she was, which makes things so much worse, since she’s already very young and naive.

  

  The mangaka wants to infantilize Isaku, and the character of Keiya seems to want that too. He’s clearly attracted to her childishness and helplessness. He wants her to stay a child because that aspect of her is attractive to him. Isaku is always the damsel in distress, super innocent, and naive. Keiya has to be the one to protect this weak, defenseless girl from all the gang members and her predatory classmates. Literally every guy who is Isaku’s age wants to exploit her innocence.

  I just want to save her honestly, since it’s so obvious that she’s being groomed. It’s interesting that she doesn’t notice Keiya’s feelings for her, since his behavior is normal for her. She’s clearly so used to him being weirdly possessive of her and commenting on her body, that she doesn’t understand that it’s him flirting and not just him acting like a guardian.

  And she’s never allowed to grow up and explore. She has to be protected constantly, and sheltered even at school. Isaku wants to make friends and have a boyfriend her own age, but Keiya (and to an extent the other adults in her life) won’t allow for that. She’s shy, awkward, and innocent, but she isn’t allowed to grow past that. I can’t see her having any legitimate character development, since the men in her life are actively trying to stunt her growth as a person by not letting her gain the life experiences she should.

  As someone who was sheltered as a kid, and knew kids who were sheltered to extreme degrees, I can only imagine how she’ll turn out as an adult. Like I worry for her safety, both for her life now and for the future. She will grow up lacking certain life skills, and she’ll have to grow up fast in order to make up for all the experiences she missed out on.

  I was horribly upset and disgusted the whole time I read this. This isn’t a love story. It’s the story of a man abusing his power over a little girl to manipulate her into a relationship with him. Of all the series I have read and watched that feature minor x adult age gaps that were romanticized, none of them even come close to this one with how blatant the pedophilic undertones were. It doesn’t even try to balance the dynamic. The author wants this to be an adult and a child with their respective mindsets dating like its normal.

  Literally no one in the series questions how weird it is for this 26 year old to be pursuing the child he raised. He’s more of a parent to Isaku than her own parents were, considering how old she was when they died. It’s so gross.

  

  Any and all points I will give to this series come from the art, which is gorgeous. The characters would be so dazzling in any other series. Isaku is very cute, but after reading the series it feels weirdly insidious since the author clearly wants to sexualize her cute childlike nature. As for Keiya I would ordinarily love his design, but I hate him too much to want to look at him.

  Don’t get me wrong, the art and fashion are very appealing and beautiful, it’s just hard for me personally to wrap my head around it, since the story itself makes me feel horribly disgusted and even nauseous. So, it gets points for the art which is very nice, and that’s it.

  So yeah. I hate this manga with a burning passion, and I figure I should write this as a warning before the anime comes out. I’d strongly advise not to read it, and I highly doubt that the anime will be watchable for the average person who isn’t already a fan.

  I just find it so odd that this series out of all the high school shoujo is the one to get an anime adaptation, when there are so many better, more popular, and less creepy ones out there.

  
  Continue on AniList
• 

  usagisa

  20/100
  This Dog should be out

  Now that this manga is about to get an animated version (and I wonder, out of so many shoujo manga, why this one? (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻) and based on user RoseFaerie's review, I thought I should write about how much this manga made me reflect on some very problematic points.

  

  The story of the main couple begins many years ago, when the protagonist Isaku becomes an orphan and goes to her grandfather's house to be taken care of by the overprotective yakuza member Keiya, who from that moment on becomes her "father, mother and brother". Everything starts to get complicated as the years go by and the girl starts to have feelings for her bodyguard (father, mother, brother LOL), despite the age difference. At the beginning of the manga, the protagonist is only 15 years-old and her guardian is 26 years-old.

  Age gap is a recurring theme that we often encounter in various shoujo titles and many of them are well-executed, but in this case I felt that the age difference not only highlighted a significant gap in maturity, but it also revealed a lack of respect for Isaku's emotional well-being. The kind of relationship portrayed by the male protagonist is completely disconnected from Isaku's reality and experiences. Of course, not to mention all the issues related to him creating her (as RoseFaerie pointed out very well).

  I won't take too long to comment on very random plot facts such as, for example, why would a 26-year-old man waste time going to school? But I need to point out that Keiya's treatment of Isaku is very uncomfortable, since he treats her like a child all the time but at the same time feels attracted and doesn't let anyone near her; which actually makes sense in this manga, because 95% of the people who approach the female lead are horrible people who just want to abuse or treat her with no respect at all (sigh).

  _I hate this guy so much_

  I wish I could portray the involvement of the protagonists as something positive, but the word that best describes it is troubling. A large portion of the scenes contain very specific points of sexualization (like, for example, when both are together in a pool and Keiya refers to Isaku's body as "the way he likes it") and many of them occur even before any direct consent is given by the female protagonist. In fact, at various points, she explicitly asks him to stop. It is clear that she is just a teenager who has never had any kind of love experience and he is the super badass and super experienced guy who has been with several women (by the way, this is treated several times with the greatest naturalness in the world). The worst part is that he wants to keep her in a childlike state, but also desires a romantic (and highly physical) involvement with her.

  So, why did I continue reading?

  
  <center>Beats me. </center>
  
  Keiya is extremely handsome and the author certainly knows how to make use of that aspect in various scenes. I also reached that point of "how worse can it get?" and believe me, each time was a new surprise (LOL). The relationship with older men who created the female characters is a topic treated with utmost casualness in this title.
  
  To conclude, it's not a manga that I would recommend. I think there are several other titles with "bad boys" that are much better and less problematic. However, with the anime adaptation to come, I believe many people will become interested in A Girl & Her Guard Dog. I'm curious to see how they will address these aspects in the animation.

  Continue on AniList

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