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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