Thanks very much for the long reply.

You can talk about coming of age topics and address the concepts without directly showing things on screen. Many pieces of media have done so without that, and do so with making clear the creep doing the grooming is not a positive character in the slightest.

This is indeed what gave me most conflict. The ripperdoc is a creep and didn’t seem very positive to my memory but I haven’t seen it for a quite a while. Not only was he being creepy but was basically a drug dealer (illegal BDs) preying on a kid, and was an enabler, helping David get into the fucked up life of a merc (and implanting the sande).