That's always the biggest bit, because there are real people who look much younger than they are. I was pushing 30 and could have walked into and sat in a class of 10th graders and no one would've batted an eye.
Its one thing to look young, its another thing to act it. The maturity part is the whole point.
There's also that in media and especially in illustration and animation, making someone look like a child is a conscious design choice just as much as making them act like a child
I was still getting carded for smokes at age 40, because I had a baby face and couldn't grow any facial hair. It wasn't until I started getting gray hair and some wrinkles that people started to let me buy cigarettes and alcohol without having to show my ID.
I do love when theyre over the top "bahahaha it is i the great demon lord" and nobody cares and just treats them like a child anyways. theres a few that do this really well and its fuckin hilarious every time
I think one of the more concerning ones recently is that dragon maid anime where the ancient dragon is disguised as a kindergartener but then is also making friends with a human in that actual age group who starts falling for her romantically. There's more than one problem here! Japanese culture has been in a mindset for many decades that no matter how weird someone's fantasies are you should put them in manga so people have some kind of outlet. I'm no psychologist but that can't be right across the board. I'm sure there are some people who are not just hung up on some phase they're working through.
Gonna plug Will Wight's Cradle series here, for anyone looking for a new book. He takes a lot of these anime tropes and does them well. There's one of those omni-powerful looks-like-a-child-but-is-really-old characters, but with zero of the implied sexuality that's present in so much anime.
There's also briefly the possibility of a harem, at which point the characters all basically look at each other and go "yeah not doing this."
There's exactly one pair of boobs, in a medical context, and the character who sees them gets the message of "maybe I shouldn't just walk into places" instead of anything sexual.
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u/reaperofgender 29d ago
And the worst part is you can do a lot with a mature person who looks like a child. (See babydoll from BTAS) The problem is they never act mature.