and, if this keeps up, our ULTIMATE PLAN will be pretty bitching.

You say good things sometimes *poses*

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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…