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review-sama ga miteru part 2 (short though)
While writing up the review of another series that's doing seventy Marimite callbacks, I started writing up Marimite and the next thing I knew, it's a solid half of the post... time to do a spin-off
I've been rereading the Maria-sama ga Miteru light novels due to my poisoning, and I recently hit the difficult stretch of Yumi's second year where we're really stretching the limits of what the soeur relationship is. Yumi and Sachiko's relationship hits a rough patch; there are comparisons to adultery, cheating, abandonment, and so on, before they have a loving embrace, forgive one another, acknowledge their love for each other, and return to status quo.
This span of time is also the spot where Konno uncomfortably brings up queerness in an all boy's school environment. There's an arc where the neighboring boys' school needs the student council of Lilian's help and we're introduced to a student who's likely a trans woman in terms so transphobic that lmao I'd recommend just skipping that whole arc/novel if you don't want to get mad. This is compounded by the constant motif of Sachiko's gay (but also a selfish jerk, so points there, I guess) cousin, Kashiwagi, being a potential sexual threat to straight men, a straightforwardly homophobic trope presented as a punchline. It's obvious Konno's trying to make queerness something outside of Lilian—defined, literally, as something confined to the boy's school, where the threat of queerness and (male) sexuality can be lumped together and put away. In actuality, people attending an all girls' school do engage in their romantic and sexual feelings, but, within Marimite, the soeur system is used to actively shunt those feelings of romance and sexuality to "safe" targets to preserve the students' purity.
I do think of Maria-sama ga Miteru as a series that sees the romance within the soeur system as real and romantic but aggressively suppresses the characters' sexuality into subtext. Queer readings often feel like they're happening despite what's on the page. I can't see Konno as a writer who's secretly dying to include lesbian relationships on the page—like, I think this is clearly a strategic decision, not a censorial one. The real question is what Maria-sama ga Miteru gains from this strategy, and the answer is pretty straightforward. Stress without danger, turbulence without destruction, passion without ruin. The fact that this series spends nine volumes covering Yumi's second and third semesters as a first year student and then twenty-four volumes (aka the next ten years of the author's writing??????) covering her entire second year points to an obvious wish to forestall the inevitable future where these soeur relationships are dissolved and must be forged anew into… what? What place do these relationships have in a world with sexuality? Friendships with, uh, no heterosexual explanation…? And so we row on, beating backwards against the waves towards Class S once more.
I know I sound pretty hard on Marimite here, but I think it's important to highlight the basic problem of the fantasy it offers. It's impossible for Maria-sama ga Miteru to fulfill its promise in either direction, towards queerness or away from it, without compromising on the tone and promises it does want to fulfill or without betraying its themes and audience expectations. If the fantasy it offers is a world where you can have love without ruin, then it's not too surprising that all sexuality is suppressed, homo- and, to an extent, heterosexuality alike. Even without the risk of violence or death by pregnancy/childbirth, the symbolism of partnership is often the severance of old ties and the creation of new ones, the symbolic and real risk of connecting two or more selves into a new unit or existence. That risk of death and destruction in our sexual and social lives gives sexuality its power in our lives and in the narratives we make around it.
The world of Maria-sama ga Miteru, on the other hand, is a lineage of older and younger sisters with no parents involved—in other words, an impossibility. The unbroken chain of past to present and future can only exist within the garden it creates, a world where a happy and temperate high school experience, uneasily defined but fulfilling romantic friendships included, can be transported easily from 1940 to 2026. It's a compromise, but, as I've said before, it's a compromise I can work with and enjoy for what it is. The strange, balanced suspension of Marimite feels like something it has in common with a lot of shounen and shoujo series set in high school. It feels as much an age-appropriate genre norm as it is a way of capturing that stretch of our childhoods or adolescence when romance is waiting at the door, but you haven't realized it's there yet. Maybe that's why the relationships in Class S manga vibrate with so much potential: the danger of romantic and sexual feeling is just out of the characters' sight but eagerly awaited by the viewer and their imagination.
Anyway. Soon, I should be done reading all of the light novels and can finally finish Night Beyond the Tricornered Window and all other series piling up, neglected, just off-screen... omfg. I'm doomed
I've been rereading the Maria-sama ga Miteru light novels due to my poisoning, and I recently hit the difficult stretch of Yumi's second year where we're really stretching the limits of what the soeur relationship is. Yumi and Sachiko's relationship hits a rough patch; there are comparisons to adultery, cheating, abandonment, and so on, before they have a loving embrace, forgive one another, acknowledge their love for each other, and return to status quo.
This span of time is also the spot where Konno uncomfortably brings up queerness in an all boy's school environment. There's an arc where the neighboring boys' school needs the student council of Lilian's help and we're introduced to a student who's likely a trans woman in terms so transphobic that lmao I'd recommend just skipping that whole arc/novel if you don't want to get mad. This is compounded by the constant motif of Sachiko's gay (but also a selfish jerk, so points there, I guess) cousin, Kashiwagi, being a potential sexual threat to straight men, a straightforwardly homophobic trope presented as a punchline. It's obvious Konno's trying to make queerness something outside of Lilian—defined, literally, as something confined to the boy's school, where the threat of queerness and (male) sexuality can be lumped together and put away. In actuality, people attending an all girls' school do engage in their romantic and sexual feelings, but, within Marimite, the soeur system is used to actively shunt those feelings of romance and sexuality to "safe" targets to preserve the students' purity.
I do think of Maria-sama ga Miteru as a series that sees the romance within the soeur system as real and romantic but aggressively suppresses the characters' sexuality into subtext. Queer readings often feel like they're happening despite what's on the page. I can't see Konno as a writer who's secretly dying to include lesbian relationships on the page—like, I think this is clearly a strategic decision, not a censorial one. The real question is what Maria-sama ga Miteru gains from this strategy, and the answer is pretty straightforward. Stress without danger, turbulence without destruction, passion without ruin. The fact that this series spends nine volumes covering Yumi's second and third semesters as a first year student and then twenty-four volumes (aka the next ten years of the author's writing??????) covering her entire second year points to an obvious wish to forestall the inevitable future where these soeur relationships are dissolved and must be forged anew into… what? What place do these relationships have in a world with sexuality? Friendships with, uh, no heterosexual explanation…? And so we row on, beating backwards against the waves towards Class S once more.
I know I sound pretty hard on Marimite here, but I think it's important to highlight the basic problem of the fantasy it offers. It's impossible for Maria-sama ga Miteru to fulfill its promise in either direction, towards queerness or away from it, without compromising on the tone and promises it does want to fulfill or without betraying its themes and audience expectations. If the fantasy it offers is a world where you can have love without ruin, then it's not too surprising that all sexuality is suppressed, homo- and, to an extent, heterosexuality alike. Even without the risk of violence or death by pregnancy/childbirth, the symbolism of partnership is often the severance of old ties and the creation of new ones, the symbolic and real risk of connecting two or more selves into a new unit or existence. That risk of death and destruction in our sexual and social lives gives sexuality its power in our lives and in the narratives we make around it.
The world of Maria-sama ga Miteru, on the other hand, is a lineage of older and younger sisters with no parents involved—in other words, an impossibility. The unbroken chain of past to present and future can only exist within the garden it creates, a world where a happy and temperate high school experience, uneasily defined but fulfilling romantic friendships included, can be transported easily from 1940 to 2026. It's a compromise, but, as I've said before, it's a compromise I can work with and enjoy for what it is. The strange, balanced suspension of Marimite feels like something it has in common with a lot of shounen and shoujo series set in high school. It feels as much an age-appropriate genre norm as it is a way of capturing that stretch of our childhoods or adolescence when romance is waiting at the door, but you haven't realized it's there yet. Maybe that's why the relationships in Class S manga vibrate with so much potential: the danger of romantic and sexual feeling is just out of the characters' sight but eagerly awaited by the viewer and their imagination.
Anyway. Soon, I should be done reading all of the light novels and can finally finish Night Beyond the Tricornered Window and all other series piling up, neglected, just off-screen... omfg. I'm doomed