Maybe that's why she was "sick" and couldn't play alongside Miki when she was a child. She just didn't want to deal with the bad man anymore.

I've read that a lot of "high risk" girls get into the criminal subculture because of childhood sexual abuse. Kozue's also the most "street-wise" of the characters, so yeah.

zevrem wrote:

Maybe that's why she was "sick" and couldn't play alongside Miki when she was a child. She just didn't want to deal with the bad man anymore.

I thought Miki was the one who got sick . . . OMG . . .

No wonder Kozue had been so deeply scarred by the concert.

Edited to add: Crystalwren, that behavior at her age (13) is a telling sign.  I think we can be fairly certain that chances of Kozue having been sexually abused is >= that of Touga’s.

Last edited by gorgeousshutin (08-26-2013 10:21:53 PM)

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychology has this to say about it. Kozue does actually fit more of these signs than Touga does, and presents as a much more text-book case. Miki actually presents with almost none of them.

I would say there's definitely a sense I've always had of the story that includes some sort of sexual interaction between the two of them, but thinking about it now and framing it in this terms, it raises the question of who learned these things, and from where? A part of me wants to go 'Oh hay what about that boy Kozue mentions that 'loved her piano playing?' That's way past reading too much into the script though. It's likely as not an adult in their family. Unfortunately that's usually where it is. And judging just by the courses of development between the two, Kozue would seem the one likely to have been abused, or at least more abused. Miki's trauma seems to center more on her directly, where she's textbook in almost all of her behavior.

I still think it's entirely possible Touga may have been abused. He's had several more years to develop his walls around such trauma, where Kozue is very, very young to be acting as 'adult' as she does. It always kind of creeped me out how easily she 'goes on a date' with Akio, who is pretty much in the for the kill as soon as they are in the same frame. This is...expected, by her, where most would at least have to register that his intent may be different from other grownups. She just assumes the adult in her presence wants sex. Not good.

gorgeousshutin wrote:

Unless Kozue's parents are outwardly sexual even in front of their children,  and that they're an aggressive predatory female + passive, self-denial-prone male combo, I really don't see how the girl can act/react they way she does unless having undergone direct sex abuses.

She could watch a lot of TV.

Atropos wrote:

gorgeousshutin wrote:

Unless Kozue's parents are outwardly sexual even in front of their children,  and that they're an aggressive predatory female + passive, self-denial-prone male combo, I really don't see how the girl can act/react they way she does unless having undergone direct sex abuses.

She could watch a lot of TV.

If she could understand the nuances of sexual undertones - as she called the music teach on being a perv - simply from watching TV, then she really is more of a natural born genius than even Miki.

It's my personal canon that she was abused by her father and he threatened to do the same to Miki if she didn't obey him. Incest is no big deal to Kozue and that's a red flag.

@zev: Well, Mr. Kaoru does, uh, marry Anthy???  I wonder if there's anything in that for us.

So if I want to wank furiously into the text, maybe I can make something up.  I postulate (as many have done before me) that Anthy is not literally Mr. Kaoru's fiancee; it's just that for some reason, when he's imagining who his father is marrying, Miki imagines Anthy.  That's interesting in the context of this thread, isn't it?  Miki thinks it would be natural for his father to marry someone like Anthy, whom he himself has a crush on.  Can we conclude that Miki identifies with his father?  Many boys his age do.

Miki is pretty repressed and probably does have some issues surrounding sex.  The conventional wisdom about him seems to be that he's abnormally repressed.  I don't know if that's true; what do you child development people think?  Yet he's not dumb about sex.  At thirteen he already knows an implicitly sexual situation when he's in one, possibly better than I do at twenty-nine.  So if he is precocious but in denial, then maybe that's a result of the same situation that made Kozue into who she is.  Can we imagine a scenario in the early Kaoru household where Mr. Kaoru abuses Kozue, and Miki knows about it -- saw it, heard it happening, inferred it?  Miki is a moralist and would know that what's happening is wrong, but would feel he couldn't help.

So if I'm Miki in this scenario, maybe I close off sexually precisely because I identify with my dad.  Doubly so if I had an early sexual experience with my sister (maybe as a result of her play-acting with me what Dad did to her?), because in my head that means that I'm attracted to her, even if I'm not.  In order to not be like Dad -- in order to protect my sister from myself -- I have to deny my own sexuality.  And if my sister seems to be coming on to me, or trying to get my attention in a way that's colored with sex, I have to react with as much disgust for her behavior as I can muster.  I don't understand her mentality as an abuse survivor; all I know is that I'm doing my best to be different from him, and here's my sister actively encouraging me to be the same, when I know goddamn well that's wrong.  So I absolutely get into this headspace where I feel misplaced contempt for her, and maybe even fear being alone with her because of what might happen.

So there's a theory hypothesis bunch of crap I just made up that could maybe explain both Miki and Kozue in terms of the same incident or series of incidents.  What do we think?  Also, Yasha, implement strikethrough tags. 

Last edited by satyreyes (08-28-2013 01:33:24 PM)

satyreyes wrote:

Also, Yasha, implement strikethrough tags. 

Dude, I can't be everywhere at once

Arki wrote:

Is incest something that is more generally understood as wrong and much more easily recognized before it happens and thus more easily prevented? Then again, we haven't established that Kozue would have needed to be sexually abused in order to recognize potential sexual abuse.

You know, I'm not so sure about that. I think the challenge with incest, which is a third of all child sexual abuse cases (statistic from RAINN), is that it's much easier to hide the abuse behind things that appear to others as fairly innocent within the context of family. Daddy is expected to be in physical contact far more than say, a best friend's mom. And while this is complete conjecture, I almost wonder if the adult world's recognition of incest as somehow 'worse' makes them more blind to it. No one wants to believe that's what they're seeing, and there's almost always an excuse that makes it all seem okay.

I always took the scene where Kozue gets caught and acknowledges it as very consistent with the sexuality of an abused child. Alone, with her 'partner', nothing was wrong. However, the child knows very well (by threat or otherwise) that these behaviors that are normalized in the abusive situation are not okay for others to see. Children maintain their silence often under threat, but that threat is just as likely to be 'if you tell people they'll steal you away from daddy' as it is 'I'll kick the shit out of you.'

Part of what makes Nanami so creepy early on is that she has a similar mentality about her closeness to her brother. WHAT WE HAVE IS SECRET AND SPECIAL AND YOU'LL TRY TO RUIN IT BECAUSE YOU DON'T GET IT. It turns out this was completely (sort of) innocent, but the way she approached it stank of incest enough to have a lot of us on our toes for a long time.

Raze Occam wrote:

Giovanna wrote:

I think the challenge with incest, which is a third of all child sexual abuse cases (statistic from RAINN), is that it's much easier to hide the abuse behind things that appear to others as fairly innocent within the context of family. Daddy is expected to be in physical contact far more than say, a best friend's mom. And while this is complete conjecture, I almost wonder if the adult world's recognition of incest as somehow 'worse' makes them more blind to it. No one wants to believe that's what they're seeing, and there's almost always an excuse that makes it all seem okay.

This might actually explain a lot about how the underlying incest/pseudo-incest/outward incest is generally not as much of an issue in the context of Ohtori, which I'd always personally explained by it just not being a part of the "real world"... but Ohtori is an environment that would foster those beliefs because

a.) The faculty would either be unwilling to admit that a student's sexually destructive behavior came from anything other than their being deviants to begin with

b.) Kozue will always look bad by comparison to Miki, relatively speaking.

c.) The Kaoru parents are not around anyway, so it's not clear what the faculty's duty to Kozue should be; she's already removed from their household.

d.) Akio does not hire perceptive faculty members.

crystalwren wrote:

Daddy's little secret becomes Daddy's little disciple. Rather frightening, really.

Well, see the why behind how Touga turned out according to Yoji E.