review-sama ga miteru part 2 (class s [short] edition)

2026-02-28T08:57:26Z

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.
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Review-sama ga Miteru

2026-02-21T06:54:06Z

Mary Watches Over Us/Maria-sama ga Miteru, 1998-2012 (light novel), 2004-2009 (anime), there are somehow even more spin-offs but I'm not listing them here - I tried finding streams of the anime, only to find that, in the years since I've been absent from anime/manga, RightStuf folded, the DVD/Blu-rays were sold at firesale prices, and all the rights have expired?! I wound up picking up pirating a bunch of the anime episodes and rereading the translated volumes of the light novel and will probably pick up the Blu-rays on eBay later, too.

It's hard to state just how influential Mara-sama ga Miteru (also called Marimite by fans) is in the world of yuri anime and manga. The most enduring impact is the reintroduction of Class S to the contemporary anime scene, popularizing a new strain of yuri with the otaku crowd, and laying the groundwork for the subsequent growth of explicitly queer yuri series in the years that followed. To this day, I can't help but see pigtailed protagonists and long-haired, classic beauty love interests who scold and reprimand their love interests and think, "I know what you are… I know what you've seen…"

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recognito

review-sama ga miteru part 2 (class s [short] edition)

Review-sama ga Miteru