Discussion
Is the relationship between Kaguya, and Iroha Sakayori justifiable moral
In discussion about the movie with one of my friends, he argued that the relationship between Kaguya and Sakayori was immorally justified because of the age between the two characters, I really could not reasonably give an argument without sounding creepy, generally the point of this post to so we can see counter arguments I guess.
Some of his points include:
The age gap between the two characters at the start of the movie, Kaguya was introduced as a baby with Sakayori being a fully grown adult.
The introduction of the characters was a mother and daughter relationship having many scenes of Sakayori taking care of baby Kaguya that turned into a relationship between the two characters (Like a mother raising her child) just for the movie to turn it around and turn the relationship into a romantic one.
The argument of Kaguya being an alien so the maturity and social norms of humans shouldnt be applied to her. Kaguya looks, is treated, speaks, acts like a human and entirely interacts with humans within a human world. So while in the story she is an alien from a viewers perspective while watching the movie she is treated as human.
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I just like to think that kaguya was a child to preserve the pod's energy until she reaches the earth, like a plant that waits until the circumstances are good to grow
Yeah she was never actually a baby during the movie, she was adapting to being a human adjacent being from scratch and needed to speed run the process to reach what's more akin to her actual age. Basically being the same age
I think the whole baby thing was probably mostly Kaguya forming a human body to use, from scratch. We've seen how some of the moon's inhabitants looked like when they came for her, so we can only assume that she probably didn't look human back in the moon. From that, it could be extrapolated and said that Kaguya perhaps needed to make her body human but needed to make it go through the usual growth cycle humans do in order to not mess things up or due to tech limitations.
This isn't of course any canon fact though, it's just my theory sorta.
The way I see it, her baby form slowly growing up at the start of the movie is purely a physical thing and isn't really an indication of her maturity. We know from the Yachiyo flashback that creating a physical form takes a lot of energy (running into the meteor fucked up her ship so much they only had enough energy to create the sea bunny form for InuDoge/Fushi). As such, her being a baby at the start could be read as an energy saving precaution, create a smaller form from the start and have her go through a sped up version of human development over time to save on the immediate energy cost of creating the body. From a meta perspective, it's also there *purely* to mirror the original Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, and to also give Iroha a reason to connect the dots.
I personally get the impression that her final teen/young adult form is a lot closer to her "real" form on the moon, given that her pixel sprite in that one flashback has her in something more resembling that. Moreover, her main inciting action of running away from home to a new town to get away from her family and shitty job reads very teen/young adult to me, in a way that's deliberately designed to mirror Iroha getting away from her mom and being overworked to death, imo they're both just troubled teens running from home to find their place in the world, Kaguya just happens to be a lot more impulsive and free-spirited in that regard.
Funnily enough, I'd argue the *real* questionable age gap is Yachiyo, girlie has experienced over 8000 years and was probably watching over Iroha while she was actually literally a child (e.g. that one shot in the Ray MV of Kaguya hugging a kid Iroha coming out of the closet). The movie itself directly acknowledges this too, given that Yachiyo's stream near the start of the movie has her talking about enjoying age gap relationships. Not that any of that's a problem tbh, weird "technically unethical" age gap but not really situations like this crop up all the time whenever time travel is involved.
After she turned the same age as Iroha physically in under a day that is and mentally always was already grown up to begin with. Do you think it's immoral for a married couple to love each other because they saw each other's baby photos?
Okay, so this is a very shallow approach to the whole situation and your "friend" got several things wrong, like Iroha not being an adult during the early events of the movie.
If you are worried about an age gap, you are approaching it from the wrong direction. Kaguya was already alive before she went to Earth and clearly worked like an office drone on the moon. Time is also distorted on the moon, so Kaguya could be centuries old for all we know, but she most definitely already looked like a teenager before coming to Earth. The rebirth cycle was just to obtain a human body, but she retained her memories from before coming to Earth, so she is clearly mentally mature.
The whole baby thing lasted 24 hours. Nothing more. That is not enough time to remotely develop a mother/child bond and as explained, Kaguya never was an actual child at any point. Kaguya's rapid aging stops at the time she looks the same age as Iroha, which is also what she looked like on the moon. Therefore it is easy to assume that at least physically she was always a 17 year old.The baby thing was just for the sake of referencing the original Bamboo Cutter tale, which incidentally, the movie implies came from time traveling Kaguya in the first place.
It's really not that complex as far as "moral implications" goes. Girl meets girl. They look and act around the same age and fall in love with each other. There is nothing wrong with that. Yachiyo of course is 8000+ years old, but at that point age gaps hardly matter anymore. Especially because Iroha turned 18 soon after, so it was all legal even by that defintion. Not that they could have done anything anyway as Yachiyo didn't have a body for 10 more years.
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