With the school festival being a success, and the “urban legend” that the Literature Club was asked to spread being even more of one, quite a few shake-ups have happened in the girls’ lives since. Rika and Shun are openly dating now as are Kazusa and Izumi, but romance isn’t going so well for the other three club members, and some of them are taking more extreme measures than others.
I had been under the impression that the anime adaptation of O Savage Maidens covered most, but not all, of the manga and yet here we are, one volume until the end, and we still haven’t hit any new material yet. This isn’t a bad thing but it is surprising since 8 volumes for a one cour anime show sounds like it should be pretty tight pacing and yet the manga doesn’t feel any slower; it really does feel like the same experience as watching the anime but in print instead of on a screen.
Following the school festival, Rika has begun accepting the fact that she’s not “different from all the other girls” and actually has more in common with the normie girls she previously scorned, something that may be disappointing for some readers but additional empathy is always something people (and characters) should strive for. She and Shun seem to be largely on the same page while Kazusa and Izumi are having the classic relationship problem of trying to communicate with each other what they want out of this relationship (which is sex, probably at least for Kazusa, which Izumi can’t even begin to imagine since he still remembers her running out of his room yelling when she found him jacking off to train groper porn).
Momo’s life wasn’t quite as shaken up by the festival but as these two volumes progress she begins to voice her feelings that, actually, she seems to like girls, and she likes Nina in that way. For Momo it’s another classic situation, the “oh, but I thought everyone felt this way, so I thought that made me straight” queer feeling and her realization comes when she asks Kazusa a question that a lot of the characters have been wondering during the series: if the world was going to end unless you had sex with X, would you do it? But this time Momo asked if it was between her and Milo-sensei (the Literature Club advisor) and she’s bowled over that Kazusa says she’d have to choose Milo-sensei “because he’s the guy” even though “I like you so much more, Mo-chin,” showing a separation that’s present for Kazusa between her female friends and sexual interests which isn’t the case for Momo. I remember when the show started airing that there was some grumbling on social media about how all of the girls seemed to be straight and I’m glad that this didn’t end up being the case. The story comes across as a bit more thoughtful by remembering to include queerness and I do hope that Momo has a happy ending just like Rika and Kazusa seem to be on the path to.
Although poor Momo, she actually comes out to Nina, right after Nina is moping after once again being turned down by Izumi and wallowing over how she’s not even being randomly hit on so clearly she’s not attractive anymore, and Nina just isn’t interested in Momo (honestly from the way it’s worded I wonder if Nina has ever even heard of gay people). Even hearing this confession doesn’t snap Nina out of her funk so she continues on, seeking validation, or possibly a “reason” for self-loathing, at her former teacher’s place. Nina and Hongo remain the two thorniest girls of the Literature Club and I remain torn on them. One the one hand, I can genuinely believe that these teenage girls are dealing with a lot of jumbled feelings about wanting and wanting to be wanted, leading them to seeking validation/fulfillment from older men in their lives, but at the same time the way these events play out feels less “authentic” and more “dry literary fiction about middle age English professors being seduced by ingenues” which clashes with the tone of the rest of the series.
I don’t want to say that these relationships can’t or shouldn’t be written about, it is all a work of fiction after all, but there’s something about the way this series treats the events in both Nina and Hongo’s stories like inevitabilities; like that of course Milo-sensei would try to dissuade Hongo by taking her to a love hotel (hoping she’d chicken out), that this is an entirely logical progression of events, nay the ONLY progression of events that could’ve happened, and that just doesn’t work for me. It’s as if there was a tension in the creators about how to make these storylines work, or that they somehow didn’t realize they were being written into a corner until it was too late.
But the resolution to those tensions will have to wait for one more volume, as the Literature Club undertakes their most ambitious idea yet in response to the school completely banning dating and related activities for their students, both on school grounds and in their private lives (you have to wonder if the school administration has ever met teenagers….). It’s time for these maidens to get savage!