Apologies about the lack of paragraphs
It doesn't seem like that big of a deal to us but perhaps it's more of a deal than we think for Japanese culture.
Keep in mind it wasn't just Misaki being blackmailed but Aida too, as Aida claimed, which could have factored in by making her feel guilty and bad for Aida.
Yes, it seems to be anywhere from 5 days to about 2 weeks (or a little over 2 weeks). However, Aida doesn't say anything about any specific blackmail yet just that Kurokawa wants a date/drink with her. When Misaki refuses, Aida promises to take care of it and she trusts Aida to handle it and probably forgot about the incident.
She is reminded of it in a text message from Aida, directly during her date with the MC, when she revealed her pregnancy to the Oden Stall owner. Misaki then immediately goes to the bathroom to meet with Aida. She was caught completely off guard and had previously forgotten the incident since she trusted Aida. Aida-san claims that Kurokawa threatens to send the picture to Aida-san's business associates if she doesn't give him a Paizuri/Boobjob and a pair of her used underwear, she refuses at first and claims that she will report Kurokawa to the police but when Aida-san insists that her husband will find out if she doesn't give Kurokawa what he wants. She is given less than an hour (10:00 PM) to do so. The possibility of her husband finding out is what causes her to finally give in to the demands and ask if it's bra or panties that Kurokawa wants. Aida-san either tells her both or just the panties. She goes into a stall and takes off the requested underwear and gives it to Aida-san and Aida-san takes a picture of Misaki and the underwear before accepting it as proof that it belongs to Misaki
So Aida made her scared that her husband will find out if she goes to the police, and she didn't want to get the MC involved. She didn't want to cause any problems for him and wanted to deal with it herself.
The thing is that she was conflicted and on a number of occasions she was heavily considering either telling her husband or going to the police or even confronting Kurokawa herself, but Aida would always know about her plans/intentions before she went through with it and would always talk her down and find just the right thing to say to get her to rethink it.
Yes, I agree that things could have been avoided if different decisions were made, just that Misaki wasn't entirely to blame for everything. It was simply the fact that she trusted Aida enough to inform him of any decisions she was making before she made them and thus giving him a chance to persuade her to change her mind, one way or another. So every time she "calmed down and thought about it" as you say, Aida (or something or someone else) would always intervene before she goes through with her resolve.
Yes, that initial rape could have been avoided too, I agree, however the reason she was convinced to drink was due to them using the acting ability of Chinnen to target her big sister weakness. Chinnen seemed like a nice guy who was trying his best to stop the big bully Kurokawa, she felt bad for Chinnen and got pressured into drinking to "save" Chinnen. It was all a big con to get her drunk and drugged.
Yes, the MC should have prioritized his wife and not whatever BS Kurokawa was spouting to get him to drink. Although he would have to remain with Misaki all night because Aida and company might still try to get him to leave the room for one reason or another to get a chance to be with the incapacitated Misaki alone. The MC makes a ton of mistakes himself throughout the novel.
Yes, Aida would have tried again and again, and we cannot be sure of the fact that he wouldn't find another opportunity to succeed with a different plan. He was pretty stubborn and determined and believed that he was the one that was Netorared, since Misaki was his. Of course, he would never truly succeed in the goal of making her truly love him in a romantic sense. Throughout the various endings, he never gave up until the couple literally ran/moved away to get away from Aida's manipulations.
That's right, Aida is doomed to ultimately lose the war, even if he wins the battle.
Yep, Kurokawa was happy just to get a chance to fuck Misaki. He didn't care about dominating or manipulation or making her fall in love.
I can't really agree with you here because ending 2/3 (They're really the same ending, just from different perspectives), and endings 4/5 exist. In ending 2/3, MC notices that Misaki is missing her bra and confronts her about it, and expresses a lot of caring about her which shows just how much he loves her. This forces Misaki to realize how much of an idiot she's being and that what she's doing would affect the MC anyway, and then MC goes to talk to Aida, already suspicious that something weird was going on. Then the cum filled panties are found and things explode, then conclude with Misaki and MC leaving as far as physically possible from where Aida lives, the two of them ending up happy on a farm together, essentially in the middle of nowhere.
The point here is that when it comes to ending 2/3, Misaki is forced to realize that she's being a dumbass and that her husband AND her child were going to be affected anyway, no matter what she did. Somehow, she never stops to think about that. Ever. Which is dumb. It's EXTREMELY dumb. It's not like they were newlyweds at that point. They'd been married for 3 years at that point. By then, any couple learns that you need to communicate with one another or things get complicated. This is because living together will make a pair run into all sorts of small situations that can easily lead to conflict when sharing the same living space if they don't talk it out a bit. One of the first things any long-term couple learns is that you don't make important decisions that can affect the whole family without discussing it with your partner first.
Then there's endings 4 and 5, where Aida fails to make Misaki frustrated enough to sleep in bed with him and get fucked by him. Misaki goes home, and clearly tells the MC everything, because not long after the thing where he gets a boobjob from Misaki and cums all over her face, the two of them fuck off all of a sudden and this time, there's no clue at all where they went. Clearly, somehow, ONLY in this chain of events, Misaki had the the brain spark to realize that things were going in a bad direction, talk things out with the MC, and then the two of them just close down their respective businesses and disappear. It's notable that this happens AFTER Aida already raped Misaki right outside of her own bathroom where MC was taking a bath and had her cum.
So somehow, ONLY in this chain of events, she gets the clarity of mind to do this, when she was already under much heavier emotional duress than before AND she was in a situation where the MC had much more of a reason to hate her than before. She'd given Aida a blowjob, got fucked by him without calling for help in their own home, gave him a boobjob essentially of her own free will. Many, MANY more reasons for MC to outright hate her and want a divorce than any of the previous incidents.
The fact is that with Misaki's previous and later lines of thinking, endings 4 and 5 simply don't make any sense. Why would she come to her senses THEN, but couldn't at any time before? It's ridiculous and inconsistent.
Basically, I can't agree with your point. I can see why you'd view it that way, but I simply can't agree with it. I can only view Misaki as stupid in terms of her original choices before she became a pleasure addict. Even our clueless MC, who doesn't really have any good emotional control and we're shown that VERY clearly throughout the VN, is intelligent enough to realize that something is screwy with the whole thing when he hears about it. Somehow, Misaki doesn't question things at all, ever, which is extremely bizarre for anyone with any normal level of intelligence.
The fact of the matter is that Misaki's just dumb. Very dumb. Not unbelievably dumb though... I've met plenty of people that are dumb in various ways and her stupidity doesn't stand out that much to me. I actually knew a guy that was kind of like Misaki, who just made stupid choices in social contexts and no matter how calm and relaxed he was, he just couldn't have the lightbulb moment on his own. I'm not gonna give examples, because that'd require going way off topic AND sharing stuff that shouldn't be shared on the Internet to strangers... but suffice to say that I've seen some shit that's in some ways in the category of "life is stranger than fiction".
Oh, and this is the thing that I should probably clarify. Regardless of what my wording may imply, I do think that Misaki is for the most part a consistent and believable character. While her level of stupidity is uncommon, it is not impossible, people like her do exist in reality.
It's not necessarily bad writing that she's stupid, though I personally perceive it as lazy, and as I mentioned in my initial post, it lessens the impact of Aida's scheme significantly. Aida basically has the deck stacked on his side to a ridiculous degree, and because of that, the story, at least for me, loses some of its quality because it looks less like he properly worked to get his cake, and more like he got stupidly lucky to end up with an extremely weak enemy (the MC), extremely weak prey (Misaki) and ultimately decently strong allies (Kurokawa and Chinnen). It was basically a perfect storm type thing. Or divine intervention, I suppose.
Essentially, I enjoy these types of stories more when the character that's doing the stealing or attempted stealing isn't essentially playing on easy mode... and Aida was absolutely playing on easy mode for the most part with the only thing giving him real difficulty being the fact that he didn't have many opportunities to come into prolonged contact with Misaki to work on her. Not until the whole blackmail shenanigans happened anyway.
As for how many more opportunities he'd have gotten if the Inn attempt failed... It's really hard to say tbh. He could only make the initial attempt because Kurokawa and Chinnen were cooperating with him, however, with that scheme failing, it's difficult to say if the two would have kept it up for much longer. I do accept that Misaki's fall to the drink was pretty unlikely to be avoided, but MC not prioritizing his wife was extremely poor decision making on his part even without him knowing that anything was wrong, and I doubt the three would have been able to do anything without appearing to be extremely suspicious about things. After all, Aida was supposed to be both sick and dead drunk, and so was Chinnen. Either of them showing up at their room would have set off alarms even for the MC, and he had no reason to give a single flying fuck about Kurokawa... who should have been extremely drunk anyway.
It's notable that it took him 6 years to get that opportunity, and who can say how long it'd take to get another even IF he could secure the necessary allies to try again. Or if he'd get another opportunity at all.
So eh. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree when it comes to our stances on Misaki's character and overall intelligence level. At the end of the day, either of us can be theoretically right, but there's no way to tell because the VN doesn't at any point show us her perspective. Without that, it's impossible to accurately pin down her mental processes since we don't get any examples of her trains of thought the way we do with the MC, Aida and to an extent Shiobara.
As is, how much any of these are a problem is also a matter of personal suspension of disbelief. Stories focused on Netorare always have a number of extremely improbable things in them, and a lot of them are cliches or have been cliches for a long time. Ultimately, these type of stories are REALLY hard to make work in any real sense without shenanigans, and they work better in settings with magic or superscience or the like tbh, where you can more easily arrange someone's fall to pleasure without making the characters involved have very obvious and specific weaknesses that border on the ridiculous.
That said, it's honestly kind of weird to me that there don't seem to be more netorare stories in those types of settings. It feels like the majority of these stories are focused on modern settings, or at least ones that attempt to be closer to reality.
