Helen: Tanya is feeling pretty pissed: she’s just been kicked out of the adventuring party she helped found because the party leader has decided it would be a good thing to “give her other opportunities” to meet someone, get married, and settle down.
Or some crap like that.
Tanya has lived in the shadow of sexism her whole life but even this move throws her, especially when she’s the MVP of the party! So she does what many angry young women would do — leave town to fire off explosion after explosion spell in the wasteland and, oops, accidentally undo the seal on a sorceress who has been imprisoned nearby for 300 years. Fortunately for Tanya, Laplace acts nothing like the legends Tanya has always heard and Laplace is also completely down to help Tanya get her revenge on her former party!
My mom volunteers as a docent at a local, modern art museum and one thing she likes to say is “not all art is for everyone” and I think about that phrase a lot. In this context she doesn’t mean that some people should be excluded from making or enjoying art, but rather that not everyone will respond to any given piece in the same way and that it’s fine to look at a work of art (especially one of the super experimental pieces her museum favors) and say “yup, this just isn’t for me.”
I think Sexiled might be this way. Not that it’s a super-modern work of literature but that for some male readers, seeing the extreme amounts of sexism that Tanya, Laplace, and the other female characters deal with in every aspect of life might be rather off-putting while nonbinary and female readers like myself will barely bat an eye at it. “Sure it’s a bit over the top” but is it, really?
Tanya lives in a fantasy world where magic is common and adventurer is a type of job people can hold. There’s no mention if one gender or another possesses more magic, the way that say XY folks are more likely to be colorblind than XX folks, and there don’t seem to be any rules against being an adventurer if you don’t have magic anyway. However, as Tanya has grown up seeing, women are very rarely take forward/tank roles in adventuring parties; Tanya being an attack mage at the rear of her party is rare enough, and women are encouraged to be healers but also expected to stop adventuring in their 20s so they can have kids.
In some ways this doesn’t sound that different from many other fantasy series, the ones with two or three times as many male characters as female (unless it’s a wink-wink-nudge-nudge harem situation), where the healer is never a male character, and where any older characters (like un/helpful officials or veteran adventurers) are almost always male. Individually, almost none of these fantasy series have enough issues to warrant more than a low level of grumbling but looking at it as a broader trend, it’s no wonder that Tanya is fed up living in a world like that and goes to blow off steam by literally blowing up mountains.
As it turns out, a lot of the societal sexism Tanya faces was engineered by one, angry man who was mad that he had bad social skills (well, he wouldn’t have said it like that) and then spent the next three hundred years influencing society so that female mages became less common, healers were expected to retire young, and requiring that female “armor” consist of almost no clothing at all. Laplace gets exceptionally mad about that last detail, since it’s been “explained” with pseudo-science, and in the way it took only one man to kickstart all of this sexism, it only takes one woman for Tanya to really start seeing the world differently. Yes Tanya has always believed that things were systematically unfair but she’s believed it quietly, privately, and it takes hearing it from someone who didn’t grow up in her society, someone who can say “no, things can be different and I know because I was there” to give her the confidence to fully act on her revenge. Tanya and Laplace make a great couple in many ways — they’re honest with each other, balance each other out when one or the other is being too serious (or too silly), and they just respect each other, although they also extend all of that to the other members of their party throughout these two adventures.
Even with these serious undertones, Sexiled never stops being just a fun series to read. It’s easy to cheer on Tanya and her party members in the tournament she enters (as a way to extract revenge on her former party leader) when the other competitors openly flaunt their misogyny with battle plans like “I expect most of the entrants will be men, so I’ll hire two, scantily clad healers to distract them!” I should note that however all four of the main characters across these two books are interested in women to at least some degree. J-Novel Club lists “yuri” as the first tag on the series’ page, but they’re also professionals who won’t let themselves get distracted by simple bikinis (and, if nothing else, Laplace has a budding career as a fashion designer with all of the alterations she’s been making to the underwhelming armor options there).
Author Ameko Kaeruda says that she was inspired to write this work after the revelation that Tokyo Medical University had been tampering with female applicant test scores and she directly incorporates some of the same attitudes into the hidebound men who hold power in Tanya’s world. As Tanya struggles against this ingrained sexism, and at the revelation that she’s already a hero to many young men and women for what she’s been able to achieve despite that, she finds that her “revenge” has much bigger implications than she ever could have expected.
Sexiled is simply a satisfying read of both Tanya and Laplace crusading against the systems that feared what they could become and ultimately becoming even greater than that. It has the perfect mixture of serious and silly moments, with both Tanya and Laplace, as well as their other party members, getting a tremendous amount of character depth for just two volumes. I wish I could dive back into these two books fresh and enjoy them for the first time all over again. There’s not enough material here for a TV series but I would love to see a movie or OVA adaptation of the story. I just want to enjoy it over and over again!
Helen’s rating: 4 out of 5
Rai: Before I begin my review, I have a funny story regarding Sexiled. Last year at AnimeNYC, I was waiting in line with my friend for the Fragtime anime premiere. I asked her if she had been to an LGBT panel held by Erica Friedman, a well-known voice in the yuri community. And by sheer coincidence, Erica was in front of us in line, overheard us, and began talking to us! Our conversation drifted towards our recommended manga and light novels, and Erica vouched for a new light novel called Sexiled. She said, despite its questionable name, it was a must-read.
And oh boy, she was right. Even before her recommendation, I was interested in this series. But only after reading it do I truly understand why she was so impressed by it. Witty, fun, full of likeable characters, and teeming with feminism, Sexiled made me fall in love with it within the first chapter or two. But makes it so great?
The story follows Tanya Artemiciov, a very talented, very powerful female mage who was more or less the backbone of an all-male adventuring party. That is, until she got kicked out. Why? Simply because she was a woman. In Tanya’s world – one where magic, dungeons, and adventures are the norm – mainstream society is blatantly sexist. Imagine the 1940s but worse. There are rarely any female adventurers or mages (except for Healers), and women are expected to get married, have children, wear skimpy clothing, and keep their mouth shut.
But Tanya did not stay quiet or sit still. When she was fired from her party, solely on the basis of her sex, she was pissed. So pissed off that she began setting off explosion spells…and in doing so, she accidentally released Laplace, the Great Sorceress from legends, who was sealed away centuries ago. Hence, where you get the full name My Sexist Party Leader Kicked Me Out, So I Teamed Up With a Mythical Sorceress.
Laplace was capable of wielding incredibly powerful magic and was disappointed with the way society had regressed during her confinement. Together, Tanya and Laplace team up to take revenge on Tanya’s old party and fight the sexism in society. This results in sparring contests, epic battles, entrance exams, magic duels, civil disputes, 300-year-old grudges and much more as they try to dismantle the current system.
Oh my god, what a ride. You can say I’m biased since I’m a girl (or because I love badass women), but Sexiled really hit the nail on the head for me. I don’t think our society is quite as bad as the one Tanya and Laplace had to deal with, but I can relate to it nonetheless. As someone who is genderfluid, I have never understood or fully complied with strict gender roles. Seeing two strong women (with more additions to their party later on) defy these roles made me want to yell “Heck yeah!”
I think most people agree that women deserve equal treatment and equal human rights, but you don’t need to be a hardcore feminist to enjoy this book. While empowering women is an ongoing (awesome) theme, there is plenty of other things to enjoy in this series like the characters, humor, and writing.
Tanya is a force to be reckoned with. Not only is she very powerful in terms of magic, her personality is very in-your-face. She doesn’t take anyone’s BS, she tells things like it is, and she lets you know when she is mad. Which is pretty much all the time since she sees the injustices that women face every day. I’m very shy and keep to myself, so I always respect characters that are outspoken in a positive way. Plus, Tanya is hilarious. Her comebacks and sailor mouth while enraged had me constantly chuckling.
Laplace is funny too. She’s unpredictable, peppy, and always has something snarky to say. As a formidable sorceress, she is full of herself but in a teasing, comical way. Her alias – since she couldn’t reveal her real name to the public – is Stone Cold Stunner. I couldn’t read that phrase without laughing.
There are some other characters in the story that played important roles, but Tanya and Laplace take the cake. Besides the characters, the writing itself is funny too. There are so many examples I could mention but I’ll go with this one: in the second volume, there was a creepy man who ends all of his sentences with tildes (~). He’d say things like “Anyway~!” And so the narrator referred to him as Tilde Man. I love little nuances like that. It shows the writer and/or localizers put a lot of effort into every word.
Speaking of the localization, Molly Lee (Translator) and Hannah N. Carter (Editor) did a fantastic job. There is a lot of modern American slang incorporated throughout the dialogue and story, but it didn’t feel forced. It simply worked. The characters expressed themselves in a relatable way and even threw in some meme speak; it added to my overall enjoyment. I do wonder why Laplace spoke French sometimes, however. It seemed a little odd to me, but I’m not sure whether or not it was in the original Japanese version.
There is so much more I could talk about, like the fast-paced action scenes or more of Tanya’s motivational moments, but to keep this review from being too long, I need skip to something that has a special place in my heart: yuri. There is plenty of yuri-baiting going on between Tanya and Laplace. While it’s never confirmed if they actually become a couple, the two women obviously have strong feelings for each other, and there are some intimate G-rated moments between them, like kissing. I prefer canon lesbian relationships over implied ones but the baiting was enough to make this yuri fan girl squee. Sadly, we may never know if they actually get together. Sorry, I had to get that off of my chest.
I feel like I could literally gush about this series forever. There are some minor flaws I’d like to point out, though. The first volume was near perfect, but I felt the second one wasn’t quite as strong (I still loved it). The ending felt rushed and wasn’t as satisfying as I would have hoped. There were also some plot holes and things that didn’t seem to add up. Oh, and the writing was repetitive at times – in both volumes.
But overall, I still enjoyed Sexiled immensely. Like I was told many months ago, this light novel series is a must-read. Whether you are a girl who wants to feel inspired, a gender-nonconforming person who likes to question binary roles, a guy who wants to better understand why women are so angry at the status quo, or someone who just wants a good, quick read, GO PICK UP THIS LIGHT NOVEL SERIES.
Rai’s rating: 5 out of 5