Trigger Warning: this comedy Anime deals with two forms of pedophilia, implied suicidal ideation, and how broken modern school systems are with handling sexual education for teens. That is not all the show is but not opening with such a disclaimer feels disingenuous. If talking about any of these topics makes you uncomfortable and you do not want to partake in a series like this, have a nice day. It will not offend me if you drop this review right now.
This review will also spoil major parts of the story due to the nature of O Maidens’ structure. I typically limit my inclusion of major plot points in my reviews to what’s relevant to the points I’m making but this is an exception due to some of the heavier subject matter.
If you’re still here, welcome to my review.
What is It About
Mari Okada wrote the manga and screenplay for this adaptation. If you don’t know that name, you may know the 2011 Anime drama by A1-Pictures Onohana: The Flower We Saw That Day. She is known for writing very raw, very heavy stories; this one is not as despair-inducing as her previous work but doesn’t shy away from giving way to despair when needed. The tone is primarily optimistic and hopeful throughout. The series follows a group of five teenage girls (known as the maidens of the Literature Club) as they navigate their raging hormones, their relationships with each other and those around them, and their places in society. It’s also a commentary about the pressures of growing up and being valued by adults.
How I Will Structure This Review
For this series, I’ll be handling this and the following sections a bit differently. I’ll first talk about what I generally liked and disliked about the work and then give each of the five main characters their own sections with a hopefully detailed rundown of my thoughts and feelings of their stories. Following that, I’ll talk about the ending.
What did I Like
This show has one of the most efficient and tightly written scripts I’ve seen. Every scene is dripping with character and no moment was wasted in showing who these girls are, how they feel, and what the intentions and beliefs of those around them are without having to rely on tired exposition. The general pace is brisk and almost animalistic for the vast majority of the runtime without ever being confusing or overwhelming. The maidens are going through changes and losing their minds at times, so of course things would feel out of control. When some of the darker moments were presented, the pace slowed down to give impact to the experience but never dragged. No line of dialogue seemed wasted and my time felt respected. The characters all had agency and fascinating things to say.
The visual presentation and character designs both were phenomenal. There was a light paper texture filter overlaid across the screen that never distracted. A vibrant, masterful usage of watercolors gave a whimsical, storybook feel. Multiple animation styles were used throughout and environments felt consistently of the story’s world. 3D CGI was used sparingly and, outside of one or two vehicle shots, was barely noticeable to me. I’m pretty certain doors and some background animations were done using 3D models but they were composited and hidden so well that it wasn’t until the rewatch that they stood out.
The vast majority of the cast are teenagers and school faculty with most family members and background characters appearing only when they directly served the plot or gave the scene life. No two characters appeared to be reused and all had distinct styles. They also came in a variety of different body types with most not feeling too archetypal or generic. Where archetypes did appear, they mostly served as a short hand to who the character was in relation to each maiden’s story. There was one particular instance early on that bothered me and will be brought up at least twice in this review. Most of them were harmless and inoffensive.
I’d like to briefly point out the comedy. Almost every sight gag had me laughing. Most of the humor relied less on what the characters said and more on how they said it and what they did with it. They also used lots of stop motion and exaggeration to gain extra mileage without needing to animate as much. I’ll further elaborate on these in the character sections below where relevant.
I saved the best for last, the audio presentation. The voicework in both the English dub (with one major exception) and original Japanese sounded great and fit the material well. I recognized a small handful of actors in the dub but most were new to me. I didn’t recognize any of the Japanese ones, though. As someone who prefers dubs over subs these days for convenience and overall quality being better than they were a decade ago, I am pretty lost on recognizing many popular Japanese voice talents.
The opening song, character monologues (somewhat changing on a per character basis in relation to the subject matter of each episode) and animation all were phenomenal. I didn’t feel like any major spoilers were displayed in a dangerous manner and the lyrics of the song chosen (“Otome-domo yo” by CHiCO with Honeyworks) gave a positive introduction to what the series would be about. The ending song (“Yume Cinderella” by Momo Asakura) was wonderful on its own but the lyrics didn’t quite fit as well for me. I also found myself zoning out a bit sometimes when it would come on in both of my watches. The vast majority of the scenes and animations were still frame illustrations or very basic in terms of movements which is something I will always enjoy. It’s done masterfully here. I never completely skipped the ED, though.
The rest of the soundtrack consisted heavily of strings and woodwinds, and I frequently found myself along with several pieces. About halfway through, there was an insert track with vocals that would find its way into scenes where characters started embracing their love but were hesitant to fully commit to it (if you’re not paying attention, you might miss this due to how subtle and quietly it creeps in). The darker scenes used bells, guitars and what possibly could be electronic synthesizers to give a sense of otherworldly dread and enhance the depths at which their participants dove in that moment (shows up most in Niina’s story). Both of these tracks eventually overwhelm the scene during the climax of several story lines and have wonderful, powerful lyrics.
What did I Dislike
This section will be much shorter than the prevous one. No Anime is perfect, and I did find some problems.
The first guy that follows Niina with the intent of having sex with her was a pretty offensive depiction of what nerds are typically shown as in media: bespectacled, overweight, and very ugly. Then there’s the casting choice for the English dubbed version of Saegusa, the director from Niina’s story. In the original Japanese, he had a powerful presence to his voice which made his actions feel more plausible and dangerous. In the dub, his voice was very nasally and somewhat high pitched giving him a feeling of being a younger man which, for me, made him feel more slimy than menacing. I can see where they were going but would have preferred someone like Chris Patton or Crispin Freeman.
The Maidens and the Men In Their Lives
This section will consist of my thoughts on the five main storylines involving each girl and the guy that’s in their lives. These relationships aren’t all romantic, and I’ll cover them from healthiest to most problematic (in my opinion, of course).
Rika Sonezaki x Shun Omage
Rika is the tallest and possibly oldest member of the maidens. Her hair was done up in a bun most of the time she was on screen in the early episodes, and she would use her glasses and height to look down on others that weren’t part of her Literature Club (she’s the current president). She initially came across as a “hall monitor” type but when performing her club duties, she frequently showed a bit of a soft side. Not much is brought up about her homelife or her upbringing in the adaptation, so I won’t make full unfounded assumptions about why she was the way she was at the beginning.
Her belief that romance, love and sex were all despicable things lead to her being bullied, alone and misunderstood by her peers. She would frequently complain to the school board about common events shown in school life Anime leading to dangerous outcomes but this started changing the moment Shun made her heart pound when he openly called her cute and said she looked like a popular model. No one had noticed her like that. She didn’t know how to process it.
Much like many anxious teenagers with their first crush, she spent a good portion of her time panicking and trying to talk herself out of accepting his words. Come the day of some athletic field meet or PE class. After hurting herself and cleaning up at the faucet, Shun found her and tried again. I love how she grabs the hose and just starts assaulting him with water. He got through that time.
After class, she found herself taking a hard look at her reflection. She made the choice to purchase a magazine that the model (Erika) was in and try out makeup and contacts. This choice would change the trajectory of her story for the better.
Shun didn’t let up for the next several episodes. At her request, he wrote a 50 page love letter that consisted of almost nothing but the word “Cute” misspelled many times and a declaration of love in such a heartfelt, wholesome way. The final page, he asked her to be his girlfriend and her tears of joy and willingness to accept his feelings was wonderful. She said yes and then started calling him an idiot for being too excitable over it.
For the next few episodes, she kept their relationship secret out of fear of what others would think of her. They aren’t shown to have any major drama and the story takes a bit of a backseat to those of the other maidens. In this time, she gained friends with people she had previously despised and started loosening up in her prudish nature.
In Episode 8, her declaration of love for him in front of the entire student body was such a powerful moment for her character. The rest of the series, I have very little to say about them as a couple. It was the cutest one of all of them and felt natural. There were some moments of drama here and there towards the end but I’d rather save the space and my time for the other maidens. This review is probably going to be very long. I don’t know what will happen long term with them but they can only go up from here.
Kazusa Onodera x Izumi Norimoto
Kazusa is our big browed, smaller stature brunette main protagonist. She is portrayed as being kind, thoughtful and the most prone to anxiety induced outbursts. Much of the conedy and exaggerated animations revolved around her. If you wanted to give her an archetype, you could say she is basically Bocchi from Bocchi the Rock but not a pure introvert. She is fairly social but bad with expressing her feelings at times, much to her detriment.
She and Izumi have known each other ever since he moved next door approximately 10 years prior to the series start. Their families are very close and both of these kids are “family”. Their age difference is never brought up directly but when he monologues about the time he realized she was a cute girl, I got the impression that she might be a bit older with how he referred to her as his “older and younger sister and precious friend”. As time passed, she distanced herself from him due to her female classmates bullying her. They do seem to spend some time together during family outings and when they hang out at each other’s houses but the confusion and tension are there.
The moment she realized he was a normal teenage boy was a complete accident. Her mother asked her to take him some leftovers due to his parents being away. She rang the bell to no response and used the hidden house key to enter and see if everything was ok. Upon entering, she noticed his light was on at the top of the stairs and music was coming from his room. The next scene is played for laughs but could also be viewed like something out of a horror film: she walked in on him masturbating to bus porn. They both stared at each other for a few moments, and he just kept going for long enough before pulling up his pants and acknowledging her presence. The moment she processed what just happened, the food scattered across the floor, her legs vegan moving on their own, and she ran across town screaming. Every sign she saw, it became a sexual euphemism. The episode ended with her standing on a bridge over train tracks. Cue the train going its merry way in between her outspread legs. “It fit,” she giddily proclaimed as she collapsed crying afterwards.
Izumi had been a transportation Otaku for as long as Kazusa could remember and seemed to be just a generally good guy. The bus porn Blu-ray (what he was watching when she walked in) was found hidden inside of a copyright-safe My Neighbor Totoro jewel case. Kazusa stole it in Episode 2, agonizing over the implications of him enjoying it. I never knew I needed that gag in my life. It’s not as funny as the blink-and-you-miss-it pool party gag midway through Episode 1, but I’ll leave for you to discover that one if you missed it the first watch.
There relationship plays out pretty straight. If you’ve seen other high school romance Anime, they don’t doa massive amount different. Much of the drama revolved around Izumi and Kazusa’s acceptance of both growing up and becoming more than what they were and a love triangle instigated by Niina as far back as episode 2 or 3. I’ll save most of that for her section.
In Episode 8, they both finally confess their feelings for each other in response to Rika’s declaration and officially become a couple for the rest of the run. Because of their history, it’s not as simple as liking one another. I felt this relationship was possibly the most realistic one of the five stories.
I think their relationship will be fine long term as long as they can keep open communication and work on their anxieties. I don’t think it’s as healthy as Rika’s due to the fact that the love triangle isn’t completely resolved at the end. He may have declared that he was sexually attracted to Niina but wants to do it when ready with Kazusa in the final episode, she never stated she fully gave up and that can possibly still be a point of contention in the future. I hope the best for them and can see things go both ways.
The Danger Zone
These next three relationships messed me up for different reasons after I finished my first watch. Two of the stories touch on traumas I’m still sorting through while one of them deals with the alien topic of coming to terms with being gay. I’m a survivor of child crimes and when they’re depicted in media, it’s not often done well. This is first and foremost a comedy but when it touches dark material, it does it in a way that feels very real and personal. Let’s go forward into the abyss.
Momoko Sudo x Satoshi Sugimoto
Momoko is the ginger of the group; she has reddish orange hair, wears pigtails, and almost always has a blush on her dimples. She has been best friends with Kazusa for an undisclosed amount of time. She’s pretty bubbly and comes across as an airhead but is also shown to be very perceptive of other’s feelings when they’re not speaking. She’s also very close to Niina. Her room is filled with a varietof stuffed nimals, keychains, and other cute things but nit much is shown of her family life.
She started off primarily as a support character for the other maidens but the moment a guy started showing interest in her, she began to explore her sexuality. Satoshi was a childhood classmate that moved away only to recently return and remember her for being all alone and always reading when they were younger. He asked her out and they began to start hanging out and talking a bit. On their first date, he started stepping over her boundaries and doing things that men are raised to do for their potential partners, but they made her feel exhausted and gross.
Her story mostly played out in the background as she became more and more frustrated with how much she had grown to hate him. This came to a head during the culture festival in episode 8 when she tells him in front of his friends how much she despises him. He later on requested a private meeting at a local station.
When they met up, her story took a bit of a dark turn. He called her out for not appreciating what he did for her all of this time and threatened to make her social life a hell. He grabbed her hand as she started walking away. She screamed at him to not touch her, and he ran away calling her crazy. This was the moment she truly realized that she was gay and didn’t like boys like that in any way. She had been contemplating it since pretty early on, but this was the first time she fully acknowledged it.
She immediately confessed her love of Niina over the phone and asked her to take her virginity and cleanse her body of the impurity of being violated by Satoshi. Niina couldn’t give an answer. She didn’t say she didn’t like her back that way but did use that as a catalyst for telling Izumi how she felt aboyt him. With Momoko’s dialogue afterward, I got the strong impression that she was contemplating suicide in that moment. She considered Niina and Kazusa her best friends and felt she just destroyed her relationship with the one she loved.
I am a mostly straight male (but may be leaning more towards being pansexual as I’ve grown older), so I have no experience with what Momoko was going through. When she came to terms with her sexuality, that happened in Episode 10. There were only two episodes left, and I felt that part of her story wasn’t explored well enough due to it. For the next episode, she goes through a bit of a dark period of almost existential crisis but then that sort of gets dropped as more pressing matters arise leading to the series finale. There’s a brief cameo of Street Fighter V Arcade Edition and she asks Kasuza whether or not she would have sex with Milo or her if the world were to end. Her anger at Kasuza’s answer was quiet, calm and reserved yet her action was to not let Kasuza hug her or call her best friend when that was almost a ritual between the two.
I think Momoko will eventually be fine long term but having a one sided crush on Niina will possibly destroy her. There’s not much literature that deals with what she’s going through and the other maidens most likely wouldn’t be able to understand her situation if she were to talk to them about her feelings. The isolation of being considered wrong in the media you consume and society you live in is something I can very much relate to. Post credits, it’s implied in the Anime that her and Niina may have started dating or at least spend more time alone without Kasuza but according to friends, the manga does take a different route. I don’t see her remaining one of the maidens once they graduate high school and could see her life going very dark places if she remains too close to Niina as both of them currently stand. I’ll explain why in Niina’s section below.
Hitoha Hongo x Tomoaki Yamagishi
If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been using the given names for most of the characters when I’ve spoke about them. Hongo will be an exception to this from here on out. She is my favorite character in the entire series and no one calls her Hitoha, presumably out of her demanding it.
She is a short, aggressively tomboyish, black haired little gremlin. She was the core comic relief character in the series. She dropped so much snarky, vile and deadpan sass in almost every scene she was in. Her exaggerated expressions and constantly angry looking design made her a force of nature. She was also where the show’s twisted humor shined the brightest.
She gets a direct verbal explanation for why she joined the Literature Club: she’s an aspiring writer with a scumbag editor. She attempted to publish her debut novel and didn’t have any interest at first in romance or sex but her editor began pressuring her to write more erotic novels so she would get published. The maidens, for an undefined amount of time at this point, had been exploring their sexuality through the reading of classic literature. Hongo had been exploring it through a chat room with an internet friend.
One day, in a fit of frustration with her editor’s unrealistic demands, she requested to have a one-night stand with her internet friend who later turned out to be none other than her young, handsome English teacher, Mr. Yamagishi (from this point on named Milo due to his internet chat screen name). Their meeting was comedy gold. He almost immediately assessed what was going on and ran away as fast as possible due to how much trouble he could legally get into for this (like any good adult should). Despite this scene being played for laughs (and being downright hysterical to me), the problems began here.
Around the same time, after numerous complaints were filed about the material the maidens were reading on a daily basis, the Principal and Vice Principal of the school barged in to one of their meetings and set a deadline for them to get a new advisor to be allowed to stay active. No teacher wanted to take responsibility of them due to a bad reputation from these reading sessions. On the day the club would be disbanded, Hongo barged in dragging a worn down and possibly violently beaten Milo to take on the role. It’s later found out that she blackmailed him on several levels related to their meetup and their online sex chats were currently continuing outside of class (under the implication that he was helping her with her sexual education for her novels).
Throughout the rest of this story, she escalated things, and despite his stance of not being into high school girls, he doesn’t exactly stop it but started instigating various different actions taken for what I can only presume was a twisted form of sexual gratification. The power dynamic between both of them kept shifting between adult and child with neither of them being in the right. This is where this story and the next one drastically differ since she was the main one in control for much of it, and he was partially a victim. Keep that in mind for when I get to Niina.
I won’t talk about every instance of escalation here; there’s two particular ones that broke me hard on this rewatch. When Milo told her how childish she was being after one of the club’s meetings, she angrily grabbed him, pushed him into his chair and jumped on top of him legs spread wide open demanding he “look at her as a woman.” The shock of it aroused him, and she briefly felt him inside of her and understandably freaked out and ran away crying.
This doesn’t change the implications of her actions, though. She had sexually assaulted him. As a man, he couldn’t report it without possibly losing his job and going to jail. Society still treats men as not being able to be a victim in these cases. He kept going with her shenanigans when stopping woukd have been a proper response.
I want to now talk about how far it goes and where this story ends up. Hongo demanded he takes her virginity under threat of publishing an exposee that could get him in legal trouble. After she requested this, it panned to his view and he how shaken up she was while doing this and tells her to meet him behind the park after 7 PM that night. He picked her up, and she leaves her sister’s blue laced panties in the trash (stolen from her while they were being worn several episodes prior in one of my favorite sight gags).
They’re on their way to a Love Hotel. She hatched a plan to ruin his life for not wanting her back. What started as an attempt to sway her editor’s favor ended up becoming a one-sided crush and eventual jealousy when she discovered how strongly he felt about a fellow teacher. When they hit their first red light, she would take his hand inside of her uncovered lower half and force him to want her.
No red light came about. Panic ensued as he oulled into a cheap hotel. He lounged on the couch and offered her a drink. She started noticing how run down the place was and decided to “take a bath” which was an excuse to rapidly look up how to take control of the situation and get him to go all the way with her. Her anxiety reached a climax.
We finally get to hear his thoughts. His intention since the beginning was to play chicken and force her to stop her mad dash. I still stand by my thoughts on him being pedophilic with some of his actions but his intention was understandable and more reasonable than expected. There’s still no defending their continued sex chats and some of his suggestions. He’s not a monster, though.
Exit the restroom having not taken a bath. She took charge of the situation crying and demanding to know why he doesn’t want her. Was she not pretty enough? Does her body not appeal to his desires? She took her skirt and shoved her bare bottom in his face much to his horror and began unzipping his pants. They both see each other in their most naked and vulnerable waysand the next moment was beautiful.
He told her how much of a coward he was and held her tightly as she cried. Nothing sexual happened between the two. No words were needed to express how much they both almost reached a point of no return. This is compelling realistic drama that I wish more Anime could pull off well.
When it was found out that both Rika and Shun had followed them to the hotel, both were expelled from school. Milo came forth and defended their actions; they were following him out of concern due to him being their adviser. Without saying who he was with, he let slip that [once she became of age] he could see her as a potential partner (which she heard on the other side of the door and internalized with possibly the cutest face she had shown up to this point).
Here’s the kicker: I’m rooting for her to graduate and them to get together. That realization shocked me. The journey through her tale of discovery and his twisted yet also not evil way of navigating it was such a ride that I’m never going to forget. I’m not defending the fact that he is a pedophile for his part in this but am defending how nuanced and wonderful this story was at the end of the day. On a side note, this story is a very twisted subversion of a common Shoujo romance trope: high school girl getting in a relationship with an older handsome man that society forbids on many levels.
Niina Sugawara x Hisashi Saegusa
I’m opening this section with a possibly controversial take: I have a hatred of Niina as a character because she represents a part of me that I can never come to love. She is one of the two main antagonists of the entire piece, and I don’t have much sympathy towards her. In my eyes, she is a monster of a human being created by trauma but when she is on screen, I cannot stop watching her and am intrigued.
Niina is a tall, frail, very pail young woman of exceptional beauty. She rarely speaks and often buries her feelings behind words of support and kindness for her friends. She is frequently a victim of unwanted attention and cat calls from men and has been shown to use others to rescue her from unwelcomed situations. It’s never talked about why she joined the maidens but after joining, she found a bit a peace and comfort in being herself in front of them.
The moment she is introduced, the club is discussing what they wanted to do before they died. Her response was chilling in both watches: “I want sex because I will die soon.” It’s never directly stated but heavily implied in many scenes that she was suicidal. She played off dying as a joke but it shook Momoko the most.
Her backstory is one of the most realistic and unapologetic portrayals of child grooming from a pedophile I have seen in any media. When she was a child, she was a young performer that caught the eye of Saegusa, a famous dance director with a sexual hunger for young girls. The series made this out as being as disgusting as it is and Izumi blatantly called him a pedophile and attempted to help some her through her pain.
Every scene that Saegusa appeared in, the darker music I brought up above in my “What I Like” section filled the space. Two of the most uncomfortable scenes for me were when she was a young child and asked him to have sex with her, in which he responded with “the moment I do that, you will no longer be beautiful to me,” and when she goes to his hotel room and propositions sex from him, which he gladly obliged to do(but faiked).
I was sympathetic towards her at first. She seemed truly kind and like she was actively trying to help her friends. This changed when she met and became fully infatuated with Izumi even though she knew Kazusa’s feelings towards him. She actively began to pursue him and force him into uncomfortable situations. He on multiple occasions admitted that he was in love with Kazusa but later on realized how much he wanted to sleep with Niina due to her beauty. She even offered her body to him to practice on so that when he and Kazusa finally got that far, he would know what to do.
The moment that Kazusa began obsessing over the idea that Niina wanted to take Izumi away, Niina developed a bit of a hidden hatred towards her. Kazusa was treating her like the other girls did when their boyfriends spent any time with her. I don’t believe in victim shaming but many of her actions in the second half of the series were ones I understood but could not forgive.
There was an early scene where Kazusa saved her from a creep that wouldn’t leave her alone. With future context, I don’t think she was a victim in that instance. I think she may have lured him in and then saw an opportunity to use her friend. There’s also a lie brought up immediately afterward. She told the story of a previous female actor in her troupe when she was a child and how they taught her how to ward off men. The way she said it was spoken to her, it’s heavily implied that it was Saegusa instead.
There’s also a later scene when she is at her emotional and mental breaking point. Late that night, she’s walking down what appeared to be either a bar or red light district street that she commented on frequently traveling down. This particular night, no one paid attention to or cat called her leaving her feeling ugly and violated by that. Her entire view of herself was destroyed by Saegusa and this was truly the moment I despised him.
After Kazusa and Izumi officially became a couple, Niina tricked him into riding a train with her and used that as leverage to throw her body at him. She said a man behind her was groping her in a text but that was a lie to get Izumi to touch her. When he called her out for it, she replied “It made you hard” and went on to say this was the advice she wanted to give him. He didn’t feel the need to tell Kazusa about this incident until the final episode and Niina brought it up.
“Why is Saegusa still active in the industry?”, you might be asking. He is a man of power and never did anything physically harmful to any of his victims. Emotional harm often gets overlooked because it can’t be proven in a court of law using most means of physical evidence (according to a lawyer I know). I’m not fully knowledgeable about Japanese society or their legal system but it’s very telling when people like this exist in real life and can continue to harm children in their culture.
Her actions being unforgivable doesn’t mean shes not irredeemable in my eyes. The moment she knocked Saegusa’s lights out before he had sex with her, she made her first step towards moving forward from her trauma. She realized that she was trapped in his “white nosehairs” like an animal and took it upon herself to fight back. Her ending wasn’t without problems but the moment Kasuza forgave her and told her she wanted to remain best friends with her after Niina asked permission to declare her love for Izumi, that was powerful. The scene afterward of Kazusa running while screaming, crying and drawn out in a similar style to Pantie & Stocking, that was peak comedy for their drama. Kazusa is a wonderful and strong protagonist for being able to confront Niina this way and stick to it in the final episode.
I think that with proper therapy and the emotional support of the other maidens, I feel she could become someone I could root for and learn to love. I don’t think any relationships she has from this point on would be healthy if she doesn’t get that help. Saegusa is still at large as shown in the post credits.
Now Let’s Get Controversial
Remember how I said that Niina was one of two main antagonists and the point about how broken sexual education is in modern school systems? The Principal and Vice Principal of the maiden’s High School are full embodiments of that and are the other main antagonists. They don’t show up often but when they do, they’re trying to remove everything erotic and non-platonic from their students’ lives in order to prepare them to be work culture ready adults. They are not good people from the perspective of the maiens but I can sympathize with their positions. Their jobs are to prepare children for the harsh realities of adulthood but they go about it ignoring the feelings of teenagers.
A side character, the beautiful gyaru Sonoe Jūjō (who started off as someone Rika despised but eventually found a close bond) ended up getting pregnant with her boyfriend and presumably left school after being expelled to become a good wife and mother. This is later on mirrored when Rika and Shun are expelled for following Hongo and Milo to a Love Hotel. Even if the two men of power were to revoke their decision towards the young couple, they used this incident as a way to fully ban all non-platonic relationships among their students. It’s implied that anyone that was caught in and out of school doing anything “unseemly” would be harshly punished.
Episode 11 completely flipped the board hard in some of the most extreme ways I’ve seen in this type of Anime, and I was all on board for it. In response to this new ruling, Hongo devised a plan with the other maidens to save their president and hopefully get this overruled: kidnap and hold hostage Milo, take over the school after hours and imply acts of terrorism, and make their demands to the adults that caused this mess. The email that she sent out and the response from the adults left me speechless. They came to hear the demands, called Rika and Shun in for negotiations, and then left to let everyone cool down since tomorrow was Saturday and most of the school would be shut down. They were irresponsible in this situation but also made what I believe was the right call. No matter what actions they would take, they would only escalate the situation. The maidens hadn’t planned their rebellion well and honestly had almost no bargaining chips.
In episode 12, they sort everything out as well as they possibly could with a game of “color” tag and end the night by making posters and flyers with their demands, wants and stance on the adults in their lives and plastering them everywhere on the exterior of their school building. You only see the aftermath and that was plenty. The two administrators both are shown with their glasses falling off their faces, eyes looking like elongated buttholes and other students taking photos and presumably joining in on it. The maidens were all passed out in their classroom covered in colors with their ties wrapped around various different parts of their bodies. They were initially portrayed as possibly being dead until Kazusa smiled. This ending was not what I expected but elevated everything else and fit well with what all came before. The post credit scene left plenty to be interpreted but this was a wonderful ending nonetheless.
My Final Thoughts
This review is over 6000 words long and the draft required approximately around 10 sessions over 3 days to fully sort out my thoughts and feelings. This Anime is wonderful and if you haven’t seen it (why did you read this review), go watch it and show it to your children when they’re old enough to be able to handle its material. On a side note, Air Gear was my favorite Anime series for almost 2 decades at the time of this writing. On this rewatch, I realized how much more I enjoyed this than that show. I don’t how I feel about that yet but would love to hear your thoughts.
I’m sorry that this took two weeks to come out. My first watch, I needed time to process my feelings. I hope you enjoyed this review. Vote, follow and reblog if you feel inclined. Thanks again for reading.
Important Info
- Adapted from a Manga written by Mari Okada and illustrated by Nao Emoto
- Studio: Lay-duce
- Genres: Shonen, Coming of Age, High School Romance, Romantic Anthology, Dark Comedy, Drama
- Episodes / Airing Season: 12 Episodes Summer 2019
- Recommended Watches: Love and Lies (primarily for the drama and premise); After the Rain (for the social commentary and a different kind of love; would recommend going in completely blind before researching it due to its subject matter being controversial and the marketing using that to sell it wrong)