O Maidens in Your Savage Season

O Maidens in Your Savage Season

O Maidens in Your Savage Season anime series cover art
O Maidens in Your Savage Season

Overview

O Maidens in Your Savage Season (Araburu Kisetsu no Otome-domo yo. / 荒ぶる季節の乙女どもよ。) was one of the runners up for Summer 2019 anime of the season. And let me tell you, I did not expect that to be the case after watching the first episode.

It’s a romantic drama series — with some comedy mixed in, I guess — about high school girls as they begin to explore sexuality. But here’s the thing, I wouldn’t exactly say that this is the most relatable anime out there, especially for teenagers who are the same age as these girls.

Well, maybe how these girls feel is relatable, but I would strongly recommend against following their actions. I’ll discuss why that is towards the end of this review along with some spoilers, but until then this is a spoiler free review.

So, the girls we follow in this series are the five members of the literature club — yes, a real club unlike what we see in most anime. However, despite the literature club very much being about literature, it, and the members within it, have a bad reputation around the school.

The novels they read tend to include sexually charged themes and acts. That alone probably wouldn’t be an issue, but the girls tend to read passages aloud for everyone walking past their club room to hear.

But it’s these very passages which set the girls off on their new journey. Despite always reading about romance, relationships, and sex, none of the girls have experience with any of it. How can they really understand the authors if they can’t relate to what they wrote?

Characters

As I mentioned, there are five members of the literature club who are all girls. These are our main characters, the so-called maidens of the title. But, there are also two male characters who I want to discuss as well. One of them is a teacher and the other is a classmate of the girls.

There are other male characters in the series, but those two are the only ones who are continually present throughout the series and have the biggest impact on it.

Maidens

Kazusa Onodera is out protagonist, and if you’ve seen A Place Further Than the Universe, you’ll recognize her as basically being the same person as Kimari. She’s not all that confident in herself, she looks like she cuts her own hair, and she only has a few, close friends.

Momoko Sudou is Kazusa’s best friend. She’s a nice girl who seems like she could be friends with anyone she wanted. The only problem is that, like Kazusa, she’s not exactly the most outgoing person. It even takes her a while to feel comfortable with the other literature club members.

Kazusa Onodera and Momoko Sudou from the anime series O Maidens in Your Savage Season
Kazusa and Momoko

Niina Sugawara is the third girl in the same grade as Kazusa and Momoko. I think they’re all supposed to be second-years, but perhaps they’re first-years. She’s the “cool beauty” who all the boys love. And as such, she seems unapproachable to everyone around her.

Hitoha Hongou is one of two upperclassmen in the literature club. She’s the only one of the girls who herself is a writer, and she uses the club as a way to improve upon her craft. She’ll do anything it takes in order to write a novel good enough to get published.

Rika Sonezaki is the final member of the literature club as well as its president. She’s a stickler for the rules and believes anyone who would so much as say the word sex must be incurably corrupt. Of all the girls, I found her character development to be the most fun to watch.

Non-Maidens

The teacher who eventually becomes the adviser to the literature club is Tomoaki Yamagishi. He’s a Japanese literature teacher, so really it only makes sense for him to be the one to oversee the club. However, he doesn’t become the club adviser by choice.

I’d say more about Tomoaki, but that would get into spoiler territory, so let’s just move on to Izumi Norimoto, the classmate of Kazusa, Momoko, and Niina. Izumi is one of the more interesting characters in the series.

While we have five characters through whom we can see the female side of things, Izumi is the only male character we see going through the introduction to sexuality as well. Tomoaki is already way past that point of his life, so he doesn’t count, and the other male characters are less important.

Oh, and Izumi has a completely healthy obsession with trains.

Everyone is Literally Terrible

Alright, so now we get to the spoilers for this series. If you don’t want to be spoiled you’ve officially been warned.

Aside from Rika and her eventual boyfriend, all of the other characters are terrible people. They won’t seem like it at first, but by the end of the series they’ve all shown their true colors. And this is one of the things I didn’t really like about the series.

The problem isn’t that the characters are terrible people though. The problem is that they’re all terrible people in equally terrible ways.

Niina Sugawara and Izumi Norimoto on the train from the anime series O Maidens in Your Savage Season
Niina and Izumi on the train

Starting with the boys, Tomoaki is a teacher who leads a student, Hitoha, on and constantly pretends like he’s going to have sex with her. At least he didn’t actually do it (I was rooting for Hitoha though), but he’s still not a good guy.

Izumi would have been a good person, except at the end of the series he tells all the other characters that he’s actually sexually attracted to Niina, not his girlfriend, Kazusa. And Momoko’s one-time boyfriend was actually abusive and only using her.

The Maidens are Terrible Too

Rika was pretty bad at the start of the series with how she was judging everyone else around her, but like I said, by the end she’s the only decent one left. The other four members of the literature club aren’t as pure as she is.

Niina is probably the worst offender. She gets mad at other girls for always thinking she’s going to steal their boyfriends away from them due to her good looks. However, that’s actually exactly what she tries to do to Kazusa, one of her best friends. She’s so obsessed with finding out what sex is like she doesn’t really care who she has to hurt to do it.

Hitoha wasn’t much better. She too is completely obsessed with finding out what sex is like, but for a different reason. She thinks she needs to know what it’s like in order to write better romance novels, and Tomoaki is who she’s set her sights on — against his will.

Kazusa was strangely also a terrible person in the end despite being the protagonist. Multiple times she attempts to guilt or pressure Izumi into sex against his will. You know, classic things like saying that he must not really like her if he won’t have sex with her right then.

And finally we have Momoko, who honestly annoyed me the most. After dating some jerk for like a week she decides that she’s actually into girls, not boys. That’s all fine and good, but then for some reason she gets mad at all the other girls for not also being lesbian.

She feels personally attacked by the fact that her friends aren’t sexually attracted to her despite knowing they’re into boys, not girls. I don’t understand it.

Conclusion

I ended up giving O Maidens in Your Savage Season a 7/10. It was definitely good, and no, I didn’t lower my score because the characters were terrible people. I did, however, find some of the terribleness to be a bit unbelievable such as with Momoko.

But I will say that I originally had this series at an 8 until the last two or three episodes. The ending of the series felt extremely rushed. I think it had something to do with trying to fit eight volumes of content into only 12 episodes, but I could be wrong.

And, as one final note on the series, while it didn’t have my favorite OP of the season, it definitely had my favorite OP song. “Otome-domo yo. (⼄⼥どもよ。)” by CHiCO with HoneyWorks is a great song and you should all give it a listen if you haven’t heard it before. Or, even if you have.

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