I feel like I'm in a tiny minority. Nothing new for me.
Potential
SPOILERS, yo.
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Strawberry Eggs, like most stories, is a story about people, and stories about people are never so simple. The major message that impressed me was actually about gender. The romantic attraction between the two main characters increased the intensity and the stakes, as the blindly man-hating principal and assistant tried to find the "dirt" on Hibiki-sensei. I'm grateful that, by the end of the show, the lesson Hibiki inadvertently created by defying a bit of convention is not completely erased. I'm glad the show was able to show the budding feelings tastefully, the mutual confusion, the guilt, the awkwardness. Both characters made mistakes, they both grew stronger, and Hibiki was able to leave Kuzuha behind (for now!). I'm hopeful that at least one person walked away with something more than "pedophilia is disgusting".
The definition of pedophilia has been thoroughly messed. I see it as
sexual attraction of a person who is post-puberty to children who haven't even started going through puberty. A mutual romantic attraction between an individual, eighteen plus, and a teenage minor is not the same...it can potentially be grey whereas the former,
when acted upon, is quite black. Unlike law and society would have us believe, there's no magic number, where suddenly you are ready for everything. Congratulations, you just turned 6,574 days old! Now you are instantly mature enough to fall in love, to have all the relationships and/or sex you want! That's absurd. It is just as absurd as thinking teenagers never have relationships and/or sex at all. On the flip side, I've known twenty-somethings, fourty-somethings, fifty-somethings who will probably never be mature as Kuzuha proves herself to be. I tend to ultimately think that age differences are irrelevant, so long as all parties are mature...able to step back, able to respect. I shrug at thirty+ year differences, eight years is a drop in the pond.
If the anime was trying to promote relationships with teenagers, it did a poor job, ending with no relationship and Hibiki unemployed and forced to relocate. If it was trying to promote pedophilia, I personally believe they forgot the "pedophilia" and the "pedophile" parts of the equation. The only positive lights I see are the potential that the principal might be on the road to relinquishing her blind hatred of men, the class's recognition that Hibiki was a good teacher, regardless of his gender, and Kuzuha's forgiveness to Hibiki by running after the (slowest) train (I've ever seen). Perhaps Kuzuha and Hibiki will be able to meet in the future, under less "controversial" terms; perhaps they'll never see each other again. It's bittersweet. I believe Hibiki made the right choice, but even if the ending had turned out differently, it's not the sort of situation where I am capable of true condemnation. (And in fact, my inner romantic might have been quite full of glee.
)
Most of you had better not watch the 'sad and touching' Koi Kaze...you'll probably implode.
I do wish that there were as many counterbalancing, thought-inspiring, fictional examples of an older female and a younger man. I remember being acquainted with a real-life university senior who was dating a second or third year high school guy. Come to think of it, their ages were probably a close parallel to Kuzuha and Hibiki. It can be hard enough to live, let alone to live with certain people going out of their way to make it tougher for certain others. So, unless it's something truly negative, like abuse, I feel it is none of my business to judge.
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Scarring kids for life? Right. It's a decent show for inspiring discussion about gender, gender expression, maybe what Parent A, Parent B or Parent C considers acceptable with their respective teenagers.
What I think scars kids for life...is treating them like fragile antiques to be kept in the closet. Handling people like glass, turns people into glass, and one day they can shatter. What I find disgusting is any absolute, no exceptions, stigma and shame around age, sex, sexual "taboos", the "opposite" sex, nudity...especially any moral high ground used to establish superiority and discrimination. Constant gossip about how celebrity A is too disgustingly old for celebrity B? Teachers fired for teaching anatomically correct anatomy? Uproar about intellectual nude parties in the Ivy Leagues? Any money, any time, wasted on the BS that is marriage="man"+"woman"? I don't know how sex-ed is now, but it was woefully inadequate when I was in school. We can't keep teenagers from falling in love or wanting to experiment by keeping them in the "dark", we can only teach them the best we know, how to keep them safe from both wanted and unwanted attention, to recognise potentially dangerous situations. (During the writing of this post, I found this potentially interesting book,
Harmful to Minors. Not sure what extent I'll agree or disagree, but I might try to pick it up at a library nearby sometime)
Speaking of glass, I heard schools are banning tag and similar activities for fear of anything where one kid might push another down...
ESPECIALLY WHILE HE WAS IN GIRL MODE!!!!
Why should this matter? So it would have been better if he'd been a 'male' teacher all along? It would be even better if she was a 'female' teacher all along? So what? Yes, he should have told Kuzuha the truth, so things might not have ever escalated into a huge spectacle. Hibiki never lied about who he was. If he felt something was wrong with the way the school was run, he spoke up about it. He tried to be a good teacher to his students; it didn't matter if he was dressed up as a woman or a giraffe. The only duplicity was concerning what he was....and gender is the most over-rated dichotomy about something that is impossible to define and far more complex than a simple this or that. Let's say we replace this Hibiki with Evil Pod Hibiki, who is out to manipulate and molest Kuzuka. A non-crossdressing teacher, male or female, developing trust to abuse a student would have been just as equally reprehensible (no more, no less) as Evil Pod Hibiki.
The student is supposedly 18 but only "looks young" because of some medical condition (that only exists in the series, naturally)
No need for medical conditions for fourteen year olds to look like twenty or vice versa. If you've ever tried guessing ages; it's not so easy. If you're trying to guess the age of someone of Asian heritage, it can get much harder. There's always the genetically "lucky"/"unlucky". Makeup can do wonders. Certain trans people can be impossible to guess...even if you know (often an impossible task in itself). There are people in their fourties who could easily pass for twenties, people in their twenties and thirties who could pass as teenagers, some even as young as ~thirteen.
I think there are too many shows with "Strawberry" or "Ichigo" in the title. There need to be more anime devoted to bananas.
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What an exhausting post; if anyone manages to get through it (without imploding), there's coconut cookies and sponge cake here.
You're too sensitive. 
You're right, WC! He did make the comment, "Hurry and grow up" while she was a teenager. Gosh, and he was an adult when she was a kid, so - augh, the age!
