What was with the pedophilic connotations?

I watched this movie when I was a teenager and remembered enjoying it. The parts I remembered were about him training her to be an assassin, the villain of the movie, and the last action scene. I thought all those things were great.

I rewatched this last night. What I didn't remember was all the scenes of her coming on to him and the part where she tells the hotel clerk they're lovers. There's even a weird song choice when she moves in with him that talks about "exciting sex" and she also briefly performs Like A Virgin to him. They even exchange "I love you" during the climax of the film.

I get that Leon isn't into her but some adult male wrote this story and made the young girl deeply attracted to the adult male in a way that seems like some creepy weirdos fantasy. It feels gross and wrong. I also feel that they made Leon a little too "nice" and "naive" to her advances. He should have done more to reject them and make it clear to her that he's an adult and she's a child. Instead he just reacted with a goofy dumbfounded look. Either way, I don't know why a movie about an adult training a little girl to be an assassin and protecting her had to be so creepy and fixated on who she was attracted to.

I did not get the feeling he was into her that way. I thought he felt a fatherly love for her and her obvious crush on him, and attempts to appear sexy to him made him very uncomfortable because he loved her as he would a daughter.

Yep... I kept holding out hope it wasn’t veering the creepy way, but at the end when he called her “Baby” I was like “Ohh daymn this’s for real”.

Luc Besson made this as a love letter to a girl he met when she was Matilda's age, later knocked up at the age of 15 and then dumped.

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The agenda originated in Europe, so their movies reflected it long before U.S. movies.

I didn't get the impression that Leon was into her that way. I got the impression that he was an incredibly good hitman but otherwise had some deficiencies mentally. He didn't do a very good job dissuading her say the way the average adult might when approached with a similar scenario, but that doesn't default to he was going to hook up with her.

What pedophilia?
There is none, not for a second throughout the movie.

There was zero sexual interest for Mathilda from Leon, absolutely none.
The movie went out of its way to make that clear, yet here are the sexually ill-educated Americans who continue to use big words they do not understand - but who cares right?

Mathilda sure had some sort of crush on him, but that has nothing to do with pedophilia, which feels stupid having to explain in the first place. Any sort of sexual affection or interest Mathilda has shown, he immediately blocked off. He reacted deeply uncomfortable and was unsure how to deal with her behavior due to his own emotional immaturity until he told her the story of his late girlfriend and Mathilda completely dropped her spiel.

Maybe look at the screen of the movie you're watching every now and then instead of being glued to your fucking phone all the time and perhaps you won't embarrass yourself in the future with such dumb posts.

Directed towards anyone who now feels enraged and upset... you're exactly the person who needed to read this.