All of my reviews contain spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning. Two years ago I said in a piece whose relevance will quickly become apparent that the best anime leaves you feeling like its changed your life. O Maidens In Your Savage Season is the latest from Mari Okada a divisive writer known for scripts that absolutely burst at the seams with emotional intensity and I can definitely imagine it changing someones. Its that kind of show. Ive seen Okadas work called melodramatic and I actually think thats a very apt descriptor. What she understands is that melodrama is not an inherent negative its a toollike any other toneand can be turned toward productive ends. Maidens before it is anything else is a wildly successful threading of the needle in that regard. Make no mistake it is melodramatic. Sometimes extremely so but never for no reason. Okada is very very good at making you feel for her characters. Maidens is that skill cranked up to 11. Through all the awkwardness and mistakes you really feel for these characters. 880https://www.geekgirlauthority.com/wpcontent/uploads/2019/07/maidensheader.png Okada is prolific enough that people first encounter her work in different waysI was introduced to it via Black Rock Shooterhttps://anilist.co/review/2325 which I remain convinced is one of the decades great underrated television anime. Maidens is not as aesthetically outthere as BRS its not an action series for one thing but they share that same tendency toward emotional rawness. But to emphasize just that aspect of Maidens would be a mistake. The show is sold as a romcom which is not strictly correct way too much happens for that to be the beginning and end of its genre classification but it is in addition to its bareknuckle emotional intensity extremely funny. 880https://www.geekgirlauthority.com/wpcontent/uploads/2019/07/maidens9.png Weve all had days like this The first half of the series in particular is filled with a lot of A dirty puns and B absolutely stellar pullface gags. In regards to the former HiDIVEs translation team deserves some credit here for managing to creatively rework the fountain of sex jokes that the shows first half throws down and still keep them funny. 880https://www.geekgirlauthority.com/wpcontent/uploads/2019/07/maidens10.png Theres also what quickly became Maidens first signature sceneprotagonist Kazusa streaming down the street in the first episode screaming at the top of her lungs in frustration at her inability to turn off her own dirty mind. That downright FLCLian scene is what ended up selling me hard on the series but theres a lot more to Maidens than just that. 880https://i.ur.com/TSnJG9g.png And days like this Like any good dramedy Maidens lives and dies by its characters. Our core cast consists of the five members of a high school literature club. Theres Kazusa our female lead and the everygirl of the cast. Theres Rika Sonezaki the prudish and secretly very maidenly head of the club. Hongo an aspiring author with a cybersex hobby. Niina a beautiful former child actress who the other girls find a bit aloof and mysterious and finally theres Momo whowell well get to Momo. Each of these girls have their own character arc and contrary to what might be expected of a standard singlecourlength 12 episode anime theyre actually woven together pretty well. The show does not really delineate these arcs episode by episode instead often cutting between them and divvying its episodes up into a number of different segments. Together these congeal and tie the girls individual arcs into a wider whole. This is how Maidens can be the story of five girls in a literature club and also a broad commentary on the trials and tribulations that teenage girls in general face. Theres a lot going on here suffice it to say. Its tempting to try to plot the arcs out one by one but the shows structure inherently frustrates that impulse. Take Kazusa by far the most straightforward member of the cast as an example. Kazusas arc revolves around her relationship with Izumi her next door neighbor and childhood friend. In what ended up being another of the shows signature scenes Kazusa ends up wandering into his room unannounced in the first episode and catches him masturbating. This sets off a domino effect that ends with her realizing she has feelings for him and she starts pursuing him romantically. Thats all well and good but thats only the first third or so of the series and its here where the straightforwardness ends. See to keep talking about this plotline we have to rope in Niina who initially gets into a misunderstanding where Kazusa thinks shes trying to steal Izumi from her. Niina subjected to a lifetime of people assuming shes trying to steal their man plays into Kazusas assumption and ends up actually falling for him too in the meantime. 880https://www.geekgirlauthority.com/wpcontent/uploads/2019/08/maidens1.png Thats just one of many ways that Maidens twists its characters plotlines together and this kind of interlocking is actually surprisingly rare in the medium. None of the character arcs present here would really work without the others with the possible exception of Sonezakis. Her arc where she among other things learns to get over her prudishness ends up falling for and then dating a boy in her class and reconciles with a gyaru she fought with in the first episode is probably the one least connected to the other girls though even its not entirely separate. Plus that gyaru gets pregnant in the shows penultimate episode returning only in the epiloguehappily living with her partner. Maidens doesnt even let minor side characters not be involved in its main themes. So whats the point of all this knotty complicated relationship stuff? Well in a way the knottiness actually is the point. Maidens is primarily a portrait of the infinitely multifaceted experience of being a teenage girl. The focus is demographically fairly narrow all five members of the core cast are roughly the same age are Japanese cisgender girls all go to the same high school in an urban area etc. etc. etc. but the experiences here resonate incredibly well. One of Okadas talents as a writer is using the specific as a signifier of the general. Melodrama transfigured into genuine pathos. For example: Niinas arc involves a lot of internalized misogyny shes dealt with an entire life of people assuming awful things about her and the way she copes with that is by willfully falling into a bad girl role and actively thwarting attempts to help her by putting on an air of maturity and of being above the situation. The specifics include her past as a childhood actress and a history with a pedophiliac director 880https://www.geekgirlauthority.com/wpcontent/uploads/2019/08/maidens7.png This asshole who is up there with Suishou from Granbelm as far as being among the most actively hateable characters of the Summer 2019 season. The generalitiesthat internalized misogyny pretending to be above the things that go hand in hand with your own ageare going to be broadly relatable to many people and its on that intuitive level that Maidens marks its first major success. You will end up seeing yourself in at least one of the core cast if not many of them. The other element to all of this is the direction. Maidens visual symbolism is so strong that its occasionally onthenose. Theres an absolute ton of train symbolism. Kazusas main squeeze Izumi is absolutely obsessed with the things and while his railfan characterization is endearing on a surface level picking that method of transportation in particular is not an accident. Using trains entering tunnels as a visual metaphor for sexual intercourse dates back to the censorshiphappy postwar era of Hollywood if not farther after all. Its here we have to shout out director Masahiro Ando too because while this is ultimately Okadas brainchild its Ando who makes all of this work in the moving world of anime. 880https://www.geekgirlauthority.com/wpcontent/uploads/2019/08/maidens3.png Both quiet oneoffs like Kazusa literally reflecting in a mirror while reflecting on her actions and longer setpiecesNiina walking hope as a barfly drunkenly sings in a nearby karaoke parlor the entire finale in all of its blunt color symbolismwork incredibly well and the show wouldnt be half as engaging without the strong visual element backing it up. That the animation comes from the stillyoung Studio Layduce who last year also threw their weight behind RELEASE THE SPYCE makes me hope they get more projects like this. Theyre damn good at it. Visual side note here: all of the cast are great but Hongo whose plotline where she illadvisedly plays a game of what This Week In Anime columnist Micchyhttps://www.animenewsnetwork.com/thisweekinanime/20190910/.150934 called a game of sex chicken with one of her teachers is the boldest risk the show takes thats a hard line to walk probably has the best expressions. Not bringing this up at all would feel like a crime. 880https://www.geekgirlauthority.com/wpcontent/uploads/2019/09/maidens6.png Theres one last thing we need to give Maidens credit for which is having a canonically queer character in a show thats not specifically about that. Momos arcto greatly simplify thingsinvolves her coming to the realization that shes attracted to Niina and consequently girls in general not boys. Maidens is not really Momos story but the show makes room for her regardless and that shes focused on at all really makes the series inclusive message hit that much harder. That shes a great character on top of that is just icing on the cake. 880https://www.geekgirlauthority.com/wpcontent/uploads/2019/08/maidens4768x432.png To put it plainly Maidens is the second anime in as many years to fall into a very specific very exciting archetype. Shows driven primarily by women as creative forces about the experiences of young women that effortlessly transcend the confines of the genres they initially appear to be. For last years A Place Further Than The Universe that was the school life genre which it discarded early on to blast into a fullon adventure series. For Maidens the transition is quieter. By the time you realize that its no longer playing by standard romantic drama rules its already got its hooks in you. Maidens takes a similar tack to Further in its relation to its parent genre. Theres nothing in Maidens that scans as antagonistic to romdrams but it sets itself well apart from them. The shows finale an explosion of colors both figurative and literal is one of the most spectacular to come out of anime in 2019 never mind the fact that it has the sheer gumption to end on whats essentially a title drop. The final plotline where our girls stand up for Sonezaki through dramatic action is what Maidens real core is. No matter what life throws at you young girls are strongest together emotionally honest with each other. To throw back to an old truism: theres no force in the universe stronger than a determined high school girl. 880https://i.ur.com/OoLAOGY.png As far as leftofthedial emotionallyresonant storytelling Maidens has not had a lot of competition this year. But the truth is even if Maidens had dropped in a much stronger year itd still be exceptional. Id say you dont get stories that hit this hard very often but as mentioned Maidens actually does have an obvious fairly recent bedfellow. Perhaps then this is the start of a trend. Id certainly love for it to be you can never have enough things like Maidens.There will always be a need for stories like this for as long as there is someone to hear the messages they put into the world. And if you liked this review why not check out some of my others here on Anilist?https://anilist.co/user/planetJane/reviews
95 /100
77 out of 91 users liked this review