Summer 2019 First Impressions – O Maidens in Your Savage Season

The girls in a high school literature club do a little icebreaker to get to know each other: answering the question, “What’s one thing you want to do before you die,” One of the girls blurts out, “Sex.” Little do they know, the whirlwind unleashed by that word pushes each of these girls, with different backgrounds and personalities, onto their own clumsy, funny, painful, and emotional paths toward adulthood. – ANN

Streaming: Hidive

Episodes: 12

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: Kazusa and the other members of the literature club start to realize that the world of novels is saturated with adult concepts of sex and sexual metaphors. When news drops of a new novel from one of the club’s favorite authors, focusing on a character who creates a “bucket list,” the girls discuss what sorts of things they want to do before they die. Bluntly, one of the girls says that she’d want to have sex, and this sends the others into a tizzy. While the other girls in their class seem comfortable enough talking about sex day in and day out, Kazusa and company aren’t comfortable with the concept at all.

Kazusa starts to feel like she can’t escape the subject of sex; she and her best friend start to mis-hear sexual words in everyday conversation, and the way some other girls talk about her childhood friend Izumi causes her to react in ways she never expected. When she goes over to deliver a hot meal to Izumi (since his parents are out of town), she walks into the last situation she would have wanted to – she catches him with his pants down, pornography playing on his laptop. Kazusa runs away and wishes that sex weren’t such an overwhelming topic. It’s confusing, a little scary, and completely foreign, and she doesn’t know if she’ll ever be comfortable with it.

Impressions: A few months ago, a friend of mine contacted me on Twitter and suggested this manga to me. The next time I was at the bookstore, I saw it on the shelf and took a look at the summary on the back. “Uh-oh,” I thought, “a teenage coming-of-age sex comedy?” In case we aren’t all on the same page with that comment, I find that anime and manga has a pretty poor track record handling anything to do with actual human sexuality. While sex comedies abound and fanservice paints its broad, blunt strokes over what we as fans find attractive and titillating, when it comes to truthfully encapsulating the depth and breadth of human sexual feeling and experience I can think of very few properties that are actually up to the challenge. My apprehensions started to melt once I noticed the manga’s author – Mari Okada. Okada is pretty famous nowadays, both as a prolific assembler of anime adaptations, as well as a writer and director. Having read her autobiography, I can say with a lot of confidence that her life experience has made her skillful in capturing and portraying messy, uncomfortable, and awkward emotions. If I had to trust one person to write a story about teenage girls and their budding sexuality, it would be her.

Right from the get-go, this episode is cringe-worthy in the way that only complete familiarity can be. I wouldn’t say that I was a late-bloomer, but for a long time even as I worked my way through adolescence, sex and sexuality was more the punch-line to an uncomfortable joke than a threshold I aspired to cross. The five girls of the literature club are all, to some degree, the outsider that I was as I watched my classmates start to date one-another. Aside from Sugawara, whose bucket list confession is as blunt as her personality, and Hongo, whose after-school activities involve writing erotica, the other characters all react with a familiar amount of trepidation and disgust.

Even though Kazusa is clearly the focal character, I was probably more interested in Sonezaki’s story arc and what it reveals about some of the ways we think about sexuality. She has some of the most severe reactions to the topic of sex, and in many scenes is visibly and audibly frustrated by the sex-focused conversations the more popular students in her class are having. She chides them for basically being sex-crazed pigs with no shame, but when they bite back with some truly cruel remarks about her appearance, she seems unprepared to take it. While I don’t think I’ve ever held some of Sonezaki’s exact opinions, her feelings and reactions are probably the most familiar to me out of all the characters. It’s pretty clear that she’s projecting some of her negative feelings onto others, and whether those feelings are born from hidden desires of her own, a complete disinterest in sex that she doesn’t yet have a handle on, or (likely) some insecurities she has about her feelings or appearance, her instantaneous frustration and hurt are incredibly palpable. The character building, even in such a short amount of time, Is really excellent.

In what’s likely to become the most iconic scene of the episode, Kazusa walks in on her friend Izumi with his hand down his pants, the sounds of rock music and pornography filling the air. Aside from the fact that apparently no one thinks to lock their bedroom doors in this universe (in all fairness, Izumi was home alone, but still), this is probably one of the few times I’ve witnessed a scene like this that was so obvious about what was being depicted and also not directly a porn-informed punch line. I can think of many anime where teenage boys’ rooms are littered with erotic magazines and half-used boxes of tissues, with the attitude being that these boys are sex-obsessed fiends. I think the genius of this scene is that it’s funny and awkward, we understand Kazusa’s reaction as she’s just been confronted with something she’s been unwilling to deal with on her own, and Izumi’s reaction eschews the typically overblown sex comedy embarrassed flailing for an embarrassed reaction that’s much more realistic. Kazusa’s prior reminiscing about their childhood friendship that has since deteriorated somewhat, juxtaposed against the literal evidence of Izumi’s excursions into this mysterious world of adulthood, does a lot to tell the story of their current relationship.

There are a few elements of this episode that give me pause, the big one being Hongo’s activities in adult chat rooms. While she appears to be in control of the situation, the fact is that predators use the internet to groom underage individuals and sometimes encourage them to do more than just chat. I can’t say whether or not the series would go that dark (it seems mostly light-hearted, if melodramatic – kind of like an Okada story) but it is something that came to my mind. I also suspect that this is ultimately a story of heterosexual sexuality, rather than one that might explore same-sex relationship or asexuality. This isn’t necessarily bad, but there are a lot of anime out there that revolve around straight romances and relatively few that represent people from the rest of the spectrum.

While I know this series won’t appeal to everyone (even those for whom these events might be familiar), I’m always pleased when anime or any other storytelling medium is able to bring me back to some of my own experiences in such a visceral way. While I’m not typically able to deal with much “cringe” content, I have a soft spot for stories that capture true-to-life feelings from my own experience, and this one hits that spot for me.

Pros: Captures some familiar experiences from puberty and adolescence.

Cons: Hongo’s activities in adult chat rooms are a bit dubious.

Content Warnings: Sexual metaphors, slut-shaming, mild depiction of masturbation/pornography.

Grade: B+