o maidens in your savage season 1

“The Literature Club is relaxing and fun. The books we read there are different from the books I’ve read up until now. They take you straight into the world of mature adults, and in an instant, the scent of sex is there.”

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Mari Okuda’s first manga about a horny literature club, O Maidens in Your Savage Season (荒ぶる季節の乙女どもよ), has arrived in spectacular fashion. The show is an honest and humorous coming of age story around a group of girls in a literature club, and the club specializes in reading erotic passages from classic literature like, “I then parted her lushness and drank every last drop of the sweet juices pouring forth from her.” The five girls elevate and worship lewdness in novels the same as how stereotypical otaku elevate and worship their 2D waifus, and they look down upon the normie girls and their real life lewdness like how those otaku would look at 3D girls.

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The pacing and writing are excellent. There are callbacks, nothing is discarded, and the girls each feel messy and not clear-cut– basically humans rather than walking tropes. Right after reading the “sweet juices” line above, the group gets a bit too steamy and decides to relax a bit so one girl serves tea. It’s a new raspberry tea that she wanted to try out. Another girl smells it and takes a sip and goes, “Sweet juices.” The rest of the girls freeze up and put their teas down.

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But the highlight of the episode– and the clip that I’ve seen most often on Twitter– is the masturbation scene. Let me set it up. Early on, the main girl, Kazusa, misreads “deflower” as “splitting gourds,” and later on her mom asks her to bring some leftover split gourds to her best male childhood friend who happens to live next door. She overhears two girls plotting to take his virginity because he’s the hot soccer dude I guess. The boy also just so happens to like trains a lot, and in her mind, he’s some saint, puritanical boy who just loves trains and couldn’t possibly be seduced by vixens.

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She then goes into his room, which is full of train posters, without knocking, to deliver the leftovers, and he is gleefully masturbating to porn on his laptop. She tosses the gourds and runs out of the room. Imagine End of Evangelion, as Shinji is masturbating to Rei’s broken body, Asuka walks in, and we have Asuka’s viewpoint. So as Kazusa is running through the town (in one of the best animated sequences of the season), she starts seeing sex everywhere. Her end thought after seeing her friend masturbate was “How does that fit?” There is something about this show that is charming and personable and tackles sexuality in a way that feels normal for human fucking beings but abnormal for anime that I appreciate.

(I’m just glad that for once a boy in anime masturbates to online porn rather than magazines. Finally, anime has caught up to… 1999.)

(There is a sequence in Hi Score Girl kinda like this one but exact opposite. Harou is being a delinquent by playing Street Fighter in Shibuya, and Akira goes to look for him. While looking for him, she stumbles across a group of girls who also want Harou’s virginity because he is a Street Fighter god but Akira knows he is too dumb to notice any of them and walks off. She does later catch him hugging– another story for another time I guess.)

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Savage Season seems to be an omnibus format anime kinda like Rainbow Days and Why Is My Teacher Here? with each girl being interested in a guy. It is refreshing to have an anime with a relatively larger cast where shit isn’t explained but rather shown. We get glimpses of how each girl meets each guy. One underaged literary club member girl gets on an R18 erotic message board and sexting with random guys. Another member has as throng of guys ogling and following her. Another member hasn’t really thought of guys that way until one random guy tells her that she is cute. But one thing that they all have in common is that they are all curious about sex. It is something that should be natural to a teenaged girl, but it is also something not commonly portrayed (or portrayed badly) in anime.

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“I want sex. Sex is a completely unknown realm. With all these famous authors writing about it, I don’t think I want to die without knowing what it’s like. I don’t want an idea, I want actual penetration.”

Arya Stark’s internal monologue between episodes 1 and 2 of Game of Thrones season 8.

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This scene is exactly how I would picture Yuki Nagato having an erotic chat session. “Pork miso–”

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The president of the club does go full Madarame as she taunts one of the popular girls in the class with “Shopping for a new stallion to breed with?”

Since Sentai Filmworks actually made a good licensing decision, I’ll give them a back of the BD blurb: Savage Season is a great coming of age anime in an omnibus format that tackles a topic anime is notoriously awful at tackling with an after school club that is K-On! on the outside but Genshiken in the inside.

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Three MVPs…

1. O Maidens in Your Savage Season is a fantastic name for a series. It’s an actual title and not a back of the cover blurb like “If It’s for My Daughter, I’d Even Defeat a Demon Lord” or something that is just a dude’s name like “Dr. Stone“.

2. Izumi playing it cool after he gets caught pleasuring himself. He just calmly puts his pants back on and casually asks, “Hey, what’s for dinner?” The porn route would definitely be Kazusa responding, “Sausage” as she winks at him.

3. “Reading books all the time just makes you crazy.” This is exactly how I feel about the anime industry and isekai light novels.

One Response to “o maidens in your savage season 1”

  1. Wait, none of them are interested in other intimately? Anime… FAILED. /s

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