or dating or romance or finding love and companionship at all while being heterosexual or having children (a very big goal for a lot of people that demands a partner and often a lifelong one)
or if we switch the genders for a moment it could be represent women asking men out on dates, women making marriage proposals, or women finding solid companionship (look up Japanese Host Clubs for a perspective on this last one)
heck, it could even be a person attempting to get a job with the boy being an under-credentialed applicant and the girls being business owners! (in places like Nigeria, you pretty much can never get any job without bribing someone first. source: Nigerian former coworker)
Yes, it’s probably about sex, but I think we can steelalien it further and to better things. It pattern matches to a lot of things in my mind and explains a type of cultural failing that occurs in different cultures from time to time.
People have lots of different needs that a culture can make very difficult to obtain. It also clearly points out that no one person is acting particularly in the wrong for most of the story (exception obviously being the boy at the end) and the antagonist in the story is the setup of the culture itself. If the culture itself is a problem and making it that hard for a person within it to get their basic needs met then the person has a fairly strong justification for moving to a different culture rather than defecting from their own and bringing harm to others.
or dating
or romance
or finding love and companionship at all while being heterosexual
or having children (a very big goal for a lot of people that demands a partner and often a lifelong one)
or if we switch the genders for a moment it could be represent women asking men out on dates, women making marriage proposals, or women finding solid companionship (look up Japanese Host Clubs for a perspective on this last one)
heck, it could even be a person attempting to get a job with the boy being an under-credentialed applicant and the girls being business owners! (in places like Nigeria, you pretty much can never get any job without bribing someone first. source: Nigerian former coworker)
Yes, it’s probably about sex, but I think we can steelalien it further and to better things. It pattern matches to a lot of things in my mind and explains a type of cultural failing that occurs in different cultures from time to time.
People have lots of different needs that a culture can make very difficult to obtain. It also clearly points out that no one person is acting particularly in the wrong for most of the story (exception obviously being the boy at the end) and the antagonist in the story is the setup of the culture itself. If the culture itself is a problem and making it that hard for a person within it to get their basic needs met then the person has a fairly strong justification for moving to a different culture rather than defecting from their own and bringing harm to others.