In my post about Strawberry Panic, I claimed that yuri classic Maria-sama ga Miteru has no swag. It felt unfair to let this grave insult go unchecked without proper investigation, so I read the first six volumes of the light novel to check my claims. What started as a swag evaluation quickly gave way into a rabbit hole of research and scrutiny into the history of yuri to better understand the context in which Maria-sama ga Miteru became a foundational work for the genre. Examining this history helps clarify why stories classified as yuri aren't always overtly lesbian and why fans continue to gravitate towards them.
Girls being girls
Maria-sama ga Miteru, or MariMite for short (not to be confused with Marmite), started as a short story in 1997 and then ran as a light novel from 1998 through 2012, stacking up to an impressive 37 volumes. It ont only kicked off a revival of the all girls Catholic school setting that directly led to the creation of series like Strawberry Panic and Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru but also continues to influence yuri as a whole over 25 years later. Having never received official English translations, the series mostly found its way to Western audiences in the 2000's through its less than stellar anime adaptation. Fortunately, translation group Baka-Tsuki has since translated 33 of the light novel's volumes so far. Baka-Tsuki's releases are how I've been reading the books, so I will use their terminology/translations for this post.
Maria-sama ga Miteru follows the life of Yumi Fukuzawa, a first year high school student at Lillian Girls' Academy. Lillian is a Catholic school providing primary education all the way up to an affiliated university. Lillian also encourages the formation of bonds between girls at Lillian through the "soeur system," in which older girls choose a younger student to take under their wing. Being a sœur, meaning sister, carries few actual responsibilities, leaving the students free to choose their "little sister" by their own discretion. Yumi is a sœur-less, run-of-the-mill girl who admires one of the school's student council members, Sachiko Ogasawara. Through a series of wacky coincidences, Yumi ends up as the target of Sachiko's affection and eventually ends up as her little sister and helper for the student council. Throughout the series, her sistership with Sachiko sees her develop from an uncertain girl with low self-esteem into a leader herself, eventually choosing her own little sister.
Yumi, Dumbass #1
This setup may strike fear in the heart of you, a lesbian, because it's an all too familiar story in anime: girls so close to each each other that they might as well make out, but they never consecrate their relationship into something serious. And, well, yes. MariMite isn't about girls dating. It's about girls forming intimate relationships with each other that border on the romantic but never crossing that line. There is no "will they won't they" tug of war here, because they won't. But I hope you'll stick with me, because this series is incredibly important to the formation of modern day yuri, an influence that continues to ripple through popular multimedia franchises like Love Live!, BanG Dream!, and even series without exclamation points.
Discussing MariMite requires some understanding of yuri's history. Cultural trade between Japan and the Western world in the late 1800s placed a new emphasis on education in Japan, resulting in the establishment of all-boys public schools providing secondary education to young men. The gender divide resulted in missionaries establishing so-called "mission schools" for girls (Hecker). These private institutions both provided formal education and instruction to grow into the time's vision of a proper woman, that is, one who makes a good housewife. Due to this segregation, girls were briefly separated from a patriarchal society during their adolescence. Girls were thus encouraged to form kouhai-senpai bonds as a means of social protection and nurturing (Maser 35).
Stories of these close relationships between girls, usually in a kouhai-senpai mentorship, were submitted to girls' magazines' advice columns and eventually propagated into a genre called "class S" (or just esu in Japanese), with the "S" being derived from "sister." While homosexuality itself was viewed as a mental illness, the S relationship was seen as a healthy and innocent expression of adolescence (Maser 35-36). Because of its origins, Class S is generally less concerned with sexual attraction than it is with a kind of emotional intimacy that could bloom between any two girls, regardless of orientation. After World War II, the establishment of mixed gender schools caused class S to become increasingly less relevant and along with it, socially acceptable expressions of intimate relationships between girls in mainstream young adult media (Friedman, Chapter 2). In the 70's, stories of girls' love reemerged in shoujo manga and the term "yuri" was officially coined. However, these stories weren't particularly common and almost always ended in the tragic demise of the lovers, giving the 70's and 80's a reputation as an "era of darkness" for yuri (Maser 63).
While the genre was gaining some traction in the 90's with Sailor Moon, Utena, various works from CLAMP, yuri was still mostly peripheral to mainstream media, propagating through doujin works. In order to break into the mainstream, a universally appealing story was necessary. What better way to appeal to a wide audience than to look to the past? Enter Maria-sama ga Miteru. The century is different, but the concepts are the same: a Catholic school serves as a safe haven from a male driven society, allowing girls to come into their own under a senior's societal tutelage. The sœur system directly copies the sisterly bonds of class S, installing an excuse for girls to form particularly close relationships with one another under the watchful eye of the Virgin Mary. The sœur system, much like its many class S influences, is not entirely analogous to a lesbian relationship. In fact, the one character in MariMite depicted as explicitly having a lesbian lover rejects the notion of making her partner her sœur, "[laughing] at the people who needed the sisterly symbol to ease their hearts." Sœurs hold strong feelings for one another, and some of these bonds feel quite romantic. But the three year revolving door of high school that sees the same girls once chosen by their seniors later picking their own little sisters prevents these relationships from ever really feeling the same as that of two lovers.
A return to class S attracted not just lesbians and existing yuri fans, but women who experienced or yearned for the girls' school experience, and male audiences too[1]. By offering something for everyone, MariMite gave yuri a level of exposure that generated demand for more, culminating in the launch of Yuri Shimai, the first all-yuri magazine, in 2003 (lesbian publications and pornographic anthologies containing yuri manga existed before this, but they weren't marketed as or wholly focused on "yuri") (Friedman, Chapter 8). The series was so popular that it's generally considered the catalyst for the 21st century yuri boom. Being the progenitor of modern day yuri means its influences are absolutely everywhere. Love Live!, being co-created by the author of Strawberry Panic, has a direct lineage from MariMite, but series like BanG Dream! and Girls und Panzer exhibit just as much influence, simply using more relevant cultural constructs like bands or clubs to facilitate relationships between girls rather than the now done-to-death sœur system.
Apparently even the Gay Piano Duet comes from class S stories.
I think this background is both necessary for understanding Maria-sama ga Miteru and yuri as a whole. Because MariMite is considered both a class S revival and a foundation for yuri today, class S is yuri. Thus, yuri is not synonymous with lesbianism. Yuri is a genre depicting any intimate relationships between girls, from close friendships all the way to sex or lifelong love. While this might be frustrating from a western perspective, this is because our cultural history is inherently different from Japan's. Popular English language works about queer people are very often intentionally political in nature, in order to fight for the advancement of rights or recognition. Especially until recently, yuri works have rarely been intentionally political (that is, the direct point of the story is not to argue or advocate) (Takashima). Rica Takashima says, in writing about America, "In a society that highly values diversity, stories that relegate their characters' lesbian relationships to the realm of subtext may be viewed as exclusionary and discriminatory," whereas "Manga and anime subcultures, including yuri, exist in their own spheres, evolving independently from the rest of Japanese society. Within the sphere of yuri, fans have a propensity for reading between the lines, picking up on subtle cues, and using their own imaginations to weave rich tapestries of meaning from small threads."
Class S inspired yuri isn't anti-lesbian (evident in many such series having canonical or strongly implied lesbian characters). The actual text of a work is simply the jumping off point to allow fans to engage in a greater conversation about their own interpretations of the relationships of the characters, often taking form in fan works in addition to literal discussions. Common criticisms I hear of lighter works often included under the yuri umbrella, such as Love Live! or BanG Dream!, is that they're queerbaiting the audience or that they "aren't yuri." While I understand and emphasize with the frustrations of queerbaiting in anime, I don't believe these works can be considered as such. What can be interpreted as "bait" or cheap fanservice is there to encourage these conversations. With such a rich fan culture surrounding these series, I don't think it's fair to label them as manipulative for the sake of profits. Fans of the genre understand that they are part of the dialogue, and that they are capable of extending it as they see fit. You can perhaps fairly label these constructs as outdated in a Japan that is moving closer to acceptance of queer people, given that they're extending the century old thread of class S. But I don't think this form of yuri is going anywhere soon, given its extreme popularity.
To return to my original inquiry of "is Maria-sama ga Miteru swagless," I would say: mostly. Class S and Catholic schools aren't particularly swaggy, nor are girls trying to become prim and proper ladies. Elegance is at odds with swag. But I wouldn't have read over 1,000 pages of this series if it had nothing going for it. This is good, considered it's MariMite March. I'd hate to keep writing about a series that sucks ass. In future posts, I'd like to explore some of the themes of Maria-sama ga Miteru and how they still offer value to queer readers despite the shortage of overtly queer relationships.
[1] Despite being published in a shoujo demographic magazine (Cobalt), apparently reader polls indicated well over half of the readership was male. Namuwiki claims one such poll showed 80% of readers were men, but I'm having trouble finding the source information. But the popularity of yuri among men has always been quite visible, from 80s pornography to series like Love Live today, making the 80% claim pretty believable. Series launched from the popularity of MariMite, like Strawberry Panic, often appeared in magazines aimed at men, even employing framing devices to make the stories feel more accessible to them.
Sources:
- Friedman, Erica - "By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga" (accessed via ebook)
- Friedman, Erica - "Maria-sama ga Miteru: 20 years of Watching Mary Watching Us" (Link)
- Hecker, Frank - "Class S in Context" (Link)
- Maser, Verena - "Beautiful and Innocent: Female Same-Sex Intimacy in the Japanese Yuri Genre," Chapters 2 and 4. (Link via Wayback Machine)
- Takashima, Rica - "Japan: Fertile Ground for the Cultivation of Yuri" (Link)