Zunu wrote:I think that the notion of what's "age appropriate" and "way too young" doesn't map identically across cultures. My impression is that in Japan, the idea of a young girl being play-flirtatious is less controversial than in say, the USA. I may have mentioned this before but several years back I went to see a Japanese play that was being shown in the US with cue card subtitles. One of the characters was young girl (played by an actual young girl maybe around 8 years old) who kept telling her old-man neighbor that they should be married, and he called her his "little girlfriend" or something similar. IN JAPANESE. There was nothing actually inappropriate going on, they were just innocently using terms of endearment and nothing else. But, meanwhile the English cue card subtitles were saying something entirely different, like e.g. "little sister" in place of "girlfriend." After the show the person I was with confirmed that I did not misunderstand, that the translation deliberately obscured the innuendo from the true dialog, which was entirely uncontroversial to her as a Japanese person. I even think the literal word-for-word translation would've been more misleading by making American audiences assume there was a pedo undertone, and the "wrong" translation was in fact more accurate in capturing the tone of the scene.
I get your point, but I don't think that's a comparable situation. You're describing a precocious child innocently playing with a friendly older neighbor. Neither of them are serious about it, and the audience knows it. In contrast, an idol in a fairly mature group like MM is expected to go much further, and many their fans' interest isn't so innocent.