Occasionally, I watch an anime series that I feel utterly unqualified to review. Sometimes it’s something like Angel’s Egg, where I can clearly feel the concepts flying over my head and ruffling my hair – where I can tell what I’m seeing is art, but I lack the vocabulary to properly expand on the concept. In the case of O Maidens in Your Savage Season, it’s life experiences.
O Maidens in Your Savage Season adapts a manga by Mari Okada, which is an adolescent coming age story about a high school literature club coming to terms with sex, sexuality, and how they feel about those things – with the catch being the club is exclusively made up of girls. In other words, the series eschews the male perspective that is predominantly featured in these kinds of stories in anime and manga.
Even more impressively, the manga ran in a shonen magazine. While the shonen/shojo/seinen/josei magazine demographic breakdown has never stopped girls from reading a shonen manga or boys from reading shojo before – the anime feels a lot like a clear and deliberate attempt to, in short, build empathy – to get a demographic that is generally known for being obnoxious and self absorbed (teenage boys) to step outside of themselves.
I don’t know whether or not this is actually successful in the series home country. I hope it’s successful here. In any case, considering it’s a manga from a woman writer, the best thing for me to do with the review is to say that you should see it – and then signal boost some perspectives from other women critics:
- Anime Feminist (Caitlin Moore)
- Anime News Network (Rebecca Silverman)
- Geek Girl Authority (Jane Y. Auman)
O Maidens in Your Savage Season is currently available for streaming (sub only) on Hi Dive.