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| Dec 28 2008 |
first impressions: Mariaholic & Unlimited Poetic Justice Works |
It's categorized as Anime, yuri.
It's tagged over nine thousand things, including: 100th victory celebration • blissmo • Claiming Ground • Epic Win • lolikitsune • Mariaholic • pierce the heavens with my crotch grab • School Rumble • shaft • Strawberry Panic • that • wikipedia • yukan! blog. What a slut.
At least it only has 19 comments and 3,509 views.
←[99] SHAFT + School Rumble + Strawberry Panic. That’s the impression I got.
One half of the lead character binary is Kanako: lesbian, tall, tomboy, deretsun for Maria; only becoming insecure (tsun) once her homosexuality is put into question. Her character design and personality remind me of a cross between Yakumo and Tenma. Her external side is amiable, unconfident, pretty darn moe; her internal side is yuri. She contains both the lady-like grace of Yakumo and the horribly klutzy comical antics of Tenma. Her internal/external tendencies can reflect both Maria’s “split” personality and that pleasant Tenma/Yakumo proportion. Maria in fact breaks the fourth wall and calls her out for her lack of verbosity.
The other half of the duo is Maria, the trap. Without drawing needless parallels to Eri Sawachika, it seems established already that Maria is the seme and Kanako the uke. Maria’s façade is humorous enough now that the entire universe has been spoiled of the secret, though it’s the masculinity that is paradoxically accentuated by the feminine appearance, making him much more conniving and serpentine. In some ways he reminds me of Light – not overbearingly GAR but with enough boyishness to possess “best” (or worst?) of both gender.
What’s significant is that the viewer experiences the anime through Kanako – we see her internal monologues. By positioning the viewer “outside” of Maria, [s]he is effectively transformed into the incrementalist, the character that is revealed bit by bit. Reaction porn for some hopeful action porn? I think what this means in the long run is, unless SHAFT starts dealing out paradigm shifts and situating the viewer within Maria’s soliloquies, it will be expected of the viewer to find humor (1) in that incremental revealing of Maria’s secrets and (2) Kanako’s predictable reactions – all the super deformation is reserved for her. The anime, replete with Kanako-colored lenses, establishes a sort of Unlimited Poetic Justice Works: since all of Kanako’s yuri actions are laced with guilt, it’s only natural that we expect Maria to backlash with hypocritical masochism (HUH?).
Anyway, this show is really hilarious! Its comedy does not downplay at all the yuri, and even if you DO NOT WANT trap, you’re basically forced to temporarily forget about it because we’re observing Maria via Kanako. Kanako the flaming lesbian.
Final verdict: if you liked the characterizations in School Rumble, the yuri/catholic(?) themes in Strawberry Panic, and SHAFT’s crazyness, you will definitely enjoy Mariaholic. [note: I did not catch a lot of marimite in here - marimite isn't really even indirectly satired.]
BTW, 100th post, dedicated to lolikitsune, mai dear waifu.
« What I marathoned because I had too little intelligence #8: To Heart 2
Ephebophilia, here I split hairs »
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- 12/28/08 anitations - notes on Maria†Holic 01
- 12/31/08 THAT Animeblog - Over 9000 Meaningless Words
Post a Text Comment Text Comments (17)
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[note: I did not catch a lot of marimite in here - marimite isn't really even indirectly satired.]
Walking slowly is preferred here.
It should also be noted that what you call “significant” goes for Maria-sama ga Miteru and Strawberry Panic as well, which makes me believe that it’s standard. We have the same dichotomy between the refined person who’s familiar with the school (Maria/Sachiko/Shizuma) and the newb (Kanako/Yumi/Nagisa). The only real difference is that Maria is more male and less insane than her counterparts in the other two shows mentioned.
I’m not saying that penises and sanity necessarily go hand in hand or anything…
Replylolikitsune — 12/28/08 @ 2:05 pm | #Link
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oh screw that part *forgot*
yeah…yea….I guess Maria is an incidental troll on Sachiko or sumfin. Oops.
Yeah^, that is also something I didn’t pick up. How come the viewer is always positioned within the noob? I think we hear Yumi’s internal dialogue, not so sure about Nagisa’s…but that’s interesting. It’s kind of like the transfer is student is always divided into (1) retard or (2) devious keikakudoori-person
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Well, one reason we don’t hear much internal dialogue from Nagisa is that she’s slower than Aria’s pacing. Not a whole lot there to hear. But I do remember a little bit of her being dreamy, and we see everything relating to her from her POV. (There were some other storylines IIRC.)
Replylolikitsune — 12/28/08 @ 2:20 pm | #Link
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if you liked the characterizations in School Rumble, the yuri/catholic(?) themes in Strawberry Panic, and SHAFT’s crazyness, you will definitely enjoy Mariaholic
wow great combination (if not scary) o_O
Replyedogawaconan — 12/28/08 @ 6:03 pm | #Link
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Ok, will download nao! ^_^
Replyghostlightning — 12/28/08 @ 8:43 pm | #Link
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The interaction between the lead pair is brilliant. No, I’m not saying this because I’m a fan of yuri and traps (mostly).
And dammit, I wish I’d gotten to Twitter sooner.
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@TheBigN: WINNER TAKES
ALLLELANGIREDIT: ichiban / hayaku / kono twitter / check wo shita / mono gachi
Replylolikitsune — 12/29/08 @ 8:34 am | #Link
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What? Flaming Lesbians?
I have to go now…
ReplyBaka-Raptor — 12/29/08 @ 4:31 pm | #Link
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Can’t find the subs. I am withering with each passing day.
ReplyThe Sojourner — 12/31/08 @ 2:26 am | #Link
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You know, there is just a tiny-tiny-tiny problem here. You cannot compare _this_ crap to Strawberry Panic, and especially not to Maria-sama ga Miteru. Sure, SutoPani was trashy, and it was meant to be trashy. But I value it tremendously because it kept the yuri side of equation. There was not a single male character during the whole series (excluding the teddy-bear). And in the end it really bring much to the plate quality-wise. A so-called yuri heaven… or hell, if we take the original (marimite) to be heaven.
Here… all we have here is an idiocy. It could have been good anime under the “yuri” genre (and oh, really, there are not enough anime made in that genre period, this is why we are forced to watch _this_), that we would have enjoyed for generations to come. Sure, an all-girl school is such a classical setting. But it could be a quality series, nontheless. But they just _had_ to dumb it up for the audience. “Hey, the girl is not a girl, but a boy! And unlike in Otome-boku, let’s make him evil” Oh, my, such an ingenious plot! *insert sarcasm*
So, please make a correction. If you liked SutoPani for reasons only “OMG, she is going to jump her” or “OMG, boobs!” or anything of this sort, and you are male, and you belong to LFB category, then yes, you will like this anime. Unfortunatelly, the rest of us will have to wait another ten years for quality yuri, like Simoun…
ReplyIatheia — 1/3/09 @ 1:19 pm | #Link
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@Iatheia: an idiot who thinks of Simoun only as “quality yuri” is ten years too early to call Maria+Holic dumb for not being yuri. What’s wrong with mixing lesbians, traps, and hilarity? It’s not dumbing down, it’s making something different with comedy in mind.
Strawberry Panic was shit like most (actual) yuri shows (and here I’ll insert “unfortunately” because I really do feel for the genre as one of its fans). Maria+Holic promises to be more than that by being funny instead of trashy. Sure, it’s got lowbrow humor, but lowbrow humor is better than idiotic, unsympathetic characters being over-dramatic for no reason other than that the creators don’t know how real human beings interact with each other.
In short, go fuck yourself.
P.S. there could still be “real” yuri in Maria+Holic, and Maria’s masculinity would not be a detractor from that. And if there isn’t “real” yuri? Who the fuck cares! There’s plenty of yuri out there, and I’d take a good show in a different genre (different genres including yuri… parody) over crap pigeon-holed into the “yuri box” any day.
Replylolikitsune — 1/3/09 @ 2:17 pm | #Link
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In essence, Mariaholic upsets the typified notion of “yuri”. Is this yuri? Yes – insofar as we define it as homosexuality between two females. But, Mariya is a boy…
no she’s not ;)
Don’t confuse gender with sex.
Don’t confuse gender or sex with sexuality.Being a “girl” is not a stable idea. The “girl” is fictive. There are humans with vaginas, but those can be “men”.
In regards to overarching themes of gender, Mariaholic is very comparable to Panic. There is less of this Marimite, which displays girls in homoplatonic, sister-like love, IMO. Obviously this isn’t the case with Sei-Shiori, which was pretty trashy-romance-novel-esque, but the relationships between all the other girls come off as that of siblings. Pseudo-yuri.
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@lelangir: while you’re right on a general level… Maria’s gender is masculine. He doesn’t want to dress as a girl and the “girly” behavior is a pretense. So it’s kind of irrelevant…
Replylolikitsune — 1/3/09 @ 4:03 pm | #Link
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@lolikitsune: So you’re saying that just because he has a different intent than those that are inexplicably bound to and by their social ascriptions makes him somehow transcendent of gender? Absolutely not.
Consider the reverse: a female student goes into an all-boys school incognito. She appears as a male. What is she? Just because one gender “covers up” the other doesn’t mean there is a hierarchical relationship between the two. Gender is horizontal regardless of politics. Gender is self-delarative: Mariya is whatever he wants to be according to his discretion. But he cannot escape his penis.
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@lelangir: as far as I learned and experienced, gender is 50% a person’s idea of their identity and 50% The Other’s idea of their identity. Maria thinks of himself as a man(boy?). That’s 50% right there. The Other is either Kanako, [the rest of the school], or the viewer, which respectively see Maria as male, female, and female/male depending on the viewer’s fantasies and willingness to project them.
As for me, I always err on the side of respecting a person’s self-identity if I know it. To me, Maria is a man. This is not to say that to some he is not female–but at the end of the day, he’s a dude who thinks of himself as a dude and who’s essentially playing a female role.
He’s like a Shakespearean actor…
Replylolikitsune — 1/3/09 @ 6:14 pm | #Link
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@lolikitsune: Nice, yeah. However, I’d say that the 50/50 thing is really the 2nd level. The first is the political battle to determine what leverage each side has. If side A wins, it may be determined that the notion of gender is then 50/50. If side B wins, gender is constructed entirely by society and the individual is helpless to say otherwise.
Maria knows he’s a man….but whether he “thinks” of himself (sees himself via the Other) as a man is different perhaps.
I like the Shakespearean actor metaphor insofar as we take into account the fact that removing the Shakespearean actor from the historically dependent Shakespearean society/discourse disregards the play between person/structure – 50/50 ;)
and, if this keeps up, our ULTIMATE PLAN will be pretty bitching.
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@lelangir:
and, if this keeps up, our ULTIMATE PLAN will be pretty bitching.
You say good things sometimes *poses*
Replylolikitsune — 1/3/09 @ 7:11 pm | #Link
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