The story centers on the coming of age of five high school girls who make up their high school’s literature club. All of them are some flavor of socially awkward dork, but unlike anime’s usual pure and chaste landscape, these girls are well aware of the presence sex has in their lives. In fact, they’re very quickly realizing that the idea of sex is becoming pretty much inescapable as they grow up, and they all set off to try and wrap their heads around what- if anything- they want to do with it. Nominal protagonist Kazusa tries to figure out what she wants out of her childhood friend Izumi, as both their hormones have them re-evaluating how they see each other. Club president Sonezaki is a prude who looks down on anyone who gets frisky, but her perceptions and prejudices are challenged by burgeoning feelings for a classmate. Sarcastic, introverted Hongo is trying to get erotic fiction published, and her desire to experience the subjects she writes about firsthand sends her down a very dangerous path. Bookish Momoko tries to play peacemaker as hormone-addled tensions inflame, but she’s in for an awakening of her own that she never saw coming. And finally, pretty girl Niina struggles to come to terms with a lifetime of misogyny, driven to painful extremes by the expectations forced upon her by a selfish, parasitic adult world.
It’s a lot to take in right from the outset, and if there’s one area where O Maidens stumbles, it’s in trying to juggle so much at once. And I get it, sex encompasses a whole hell of a lot of different considerations, all of which are worthy of exploration. But man, there is a lot in this show. Kasuza may be the most recognizably “protagonist-y” of the girls, but all five of them pretty much carry equal weight in the story, and all of their arcs get pretty intense. And that’s before we get to subplots involving learning more about the sexually active gyarus Sonezaki looks down upon, the everyday requirements of the literature club itself, and Izumi’s own arc of addressing his own gendered hang-ups about how he feels sex is “supposed” to work. It’s a big old overstuffed suitcase of a narrative, and while a lot of it works really well, it makes it all the more noticeable when something falls short. Some of the “antagonistic forces” the girls go up against feel stretched a little too thin to be credible, while a different antagonistic force in Hongo’s subplot feels like it should’ve been treated more seriously than it was. O Maidens pushes super-hard, super-fast, and if you haven’t settled into a comfy groove by the time the shit really starts hitting the fan, you’re gonna be completely blown off the tracks.
Thankfully, O Maidens has about the surest guiding hand it possibly could to help steady this runaway freight train. Because let’s be real, there’s not a single person better suited to capturing the messy, chaotic world of sex than a writer whose built her entire career off messy, chaotic stories: Mari Okada, who both penned the original manga and wrote this adaptation’s script. From Anohana to Kiznaiver and beyond, her work has always struck me as the result of a beating heart exploding across the page, splattering the paper with blood and tears and wrenching gasps that collide and ricochet like world’s most emotionally exhausting game of pool. Her work is defined by messiness, by digging right into the chest cavity of whatever project she takes on and seeing what giblets she can yank up and toss around her. And what subject matter is more messy, more raw, more in-your-face emotional, than one’s first taste of the forbidden fruit?
My point is, Mari Okada’s writing style is probably more suited to capturing the realities of sex culture than anyone else on the market. And lo and behold, despite how overstuffed O Maidens can be, she keeps this clown car rolling on strong all the way. This show is explosive. It’s explosively dramatic, with a narrative that careens into dark, dangerous territory and makes every nasty knife twist send shards of glass through your body. It’s explosively character-driven, with five leading ladies who are allowed to make difficult, sometimes infuriating choices and legitimately struggle with the consequences of their mistakes. It’s explosively funny, managing to leave me cackling uproariously multiple times an episode. I particularly want to drive that point home, because however dark this story gets, it’s still a comedy above all else, and an uproariously funny one at that. The awkwardness of sex is a common source of comedy, especially in anime, but few pieces of fiction truly embrace this awkwardness to such an honest extent the way O Maidens does. It’s not exploitative in exploring how these girls interact with sex, it just lets them collide and self-destruct and frantically fumble their way through unexplored territory, and it’s like re-living all the cringiest days of your teenage years. Chances are you were just as messy as these girls back in the day, and seeing that messiness heightened to such extremes is hella cathartic knowing you’re not along in your pain.
But more than anything else, it’s O Maidens’ attacks on sexual hypocrisy that never cease to delight. These may be Okada’s sharpest knives yet, as she tears down the lies and hypocrisies and cultural scripts that so often govern how sex is portrayed. It’s legitimately uncomfortable to watch at times, because the fucked-up situations these characters get into will be very recognizable to anyone who’s ever been in these girls’ shoes before. Niina’s arc involves a pedophilic teacher from her past who, while never causing her physical harm, still warped and corrupted her perception of herself. Hongo tries to force herself to grow up faster by diving head-first into sex, despite still being absolutely unprepared to handle it. The guys they all encounter can range from legitimately helpful to dangerous and coercive, and even the well-meaning Izumi finds it hard to wrap his head around the idea that girls can think about sex as well. This show is well aware of how fucked our ideas of sexuality can be; it even acknowledges in one particularly cutting throughline how girls can be made unwilling participants in sexism through the attitudes they internalize. At the same time, though, it’s also refreshing positive at showing the roads out of these dark holes, which keeps the drama from choking the entire affair. Sex is needlessly confusing and far too weighed down in bullshit baggage, but with enough perspective, you can it figure out well enough.
O Maidens in Your Savage Season is one hell of a show. It’s big and overstuffed, messy and transfixing, juggling far too much for its own good yet also doing everything it needs to do. It’s messy and scary and sometimes you want to just toss it aside from feeling too squicky, but it always manages to draw you back in. Mari Okada’s made another winner, and if you’ve been hankering for a sex comedy that actually treats sex with the stupid, overblown, unfocused, hilarious, unsettling, touching respect it deserves, then add this to your watchlist as soon as possible.
