YMMV / Kodomo no Kodomo

• Anvilicious: An 11 year old gets knocked up because she and a boy her age were just fooling around while the city wrings their hands over whether or not sex-ed should be taught to 5th graders: kids will fool around, so it's better to give them the knowledge to understand what they're doing and the potential impact rather than let them remain in ignorance.
• Audience-Alienating Premise:
  • This is a story about an 11 year old girl who gets knocked up by another grade-schooler. Yeah.
  • And people who would be able to stomach it would probably be turned off by the art.
  • The film was almost not made and the city council of Noshiro, Akita, where the movie was shot, was reluctant to associate its city too closely with Kodomo no Kodomo. Don't expect it to get much of a release in the West.
• Angst? What Angst?: Everyone's reaction to discovering Haruna's pregnant. Only Maki even bothered to ask her if she was abused by an adult.
• Broken Base: Some point out that the manga presents some very important cases of Surprisingly Realistic Outcome. On the other hand, it relies heavily on strawmen antagonistic forces, not to make its point, but to get away with very odd decision-making to the point it can throw that same reality out of the window.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Tomoko, the pregnant 11th grader who goes to have an abortion. She only appears in the first volume but is portrayed as a very complex character who's situation is filled with drama enough, but the bigger edge to her B-plot is the lack of Glurge. Just a nearly adult girl having to deal with the situation almost on her own.
• Glurge: The manga has been criticized for being this, trying to portray a disturbing situation as an uplifting, heartwarming tale about friendship.
• Nightmare Retardant: The fact that Haruna got pregnant just from experimenting with another kid is nowhere near as bad as if Haruna had gotten raped by an adult.
• Squick: The whole plot to many. Seriously.
  • In the manga, as Haruna is giving birth, her classmate Mika gets sprayed in the face with amniotic fluid.

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