I’m rewatching inuyasha and have no one to talk to about the fact that Kagura should have lived and by doing so the entire Sessh/Rin weirdness could have been completely avoided. Like I have trouble picturing Kagura pregnant but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen and half the time in fairy tales of all locales the kids pop out of the dad’s migraine or some shit and honestly they’d also make amazing godparents (or whatever the equivalent is) to a half dozen adopted mortals and their bloodlines. I’m mad about it and commenting on ao3 fics for this fandom is like screaming into the void.
It’s not the age gap it’s the raising her / being her caretaker as a small child and having all those surrogate father-daughter moments. Switching suddenly from father-daughter to love interest… 😬
Oh I see! Yes, going from a father daughter relationship to love interest is icky. As I’ve mentioned before, I kind of knew what would happen in the sequel while watching the original series, so I paid extra attention to the “ick factor” (also I don’t really see Yashahime as canon, so if there were an ick, I’d just have more reason to denounce the sequel lol).
The thing is, their relationship doesn’t really have a father daughter dynamic. He is not educating or parenting her, he doesn’t explain how the world works to her. He doesn’t console her when she is crying, he doesn’t give her affirmation, affection, or approval. He doesn’t provide for her (directly telling her to fend for herself if she needs human food). He doesn’t tell her what to do but lets her choose whether she wants to follow (or not). Their dynamic is much closer to Kagome and Inuyasha, with Sesshomaru protecting Rin from danger and running to her rescue whenever she is in trouble, and at times even pushing her away in the belief that a different kind of life might be better for her, safer, more normal. He’s not a father, nor an uncle, nor a mentor to her. He just… has her around. I’ve tried to find at least one episode where there would be an ick, an obvious “oh God that’s so weird that they will end up together” but it just never came.
As a side note, they only travelled together for some months before she started living in a human village again. So it is not like he raised her (long term) and watched her grow up from day to day.
Still, I agree it is weird, and it is weird to see this progression of their relationship, but in all fairness, it’s not as icky, weird, incestuous, or out of the blue, as I had initially assumed. I think it is more of a memory thing, when I thought back of the story, I also imagined them being in a family like relationship. But I think I just assumed that because of the straightforward (assumption of) power structures.