An exploration of what it really means to grow up.
What They Say:
It started when the Literature Club’s president, Rika, began reading some especially lurid prose out loud to the other girls, but the major turning point was when the term “bucket list” was discussed and Niina stated that having sex was at the top of hers.
From there… well, they were a group of young women swimming in the sea of hormones of a modern high school. How could they NOT find their brains preoccupied with sex? Especially with Kazusa dealing with her feelings for a childhood friend, Hitoha secretly writing adult novels without any experience, and Momoko experiencing revelations about her own orientation. A whole new chapter is about to begin in the lives of five young women as they venture past the printed page and into the real world!
The Review:
Audio:
The audio presentation for this release brings us the original Japanese language track alongside the English language dub, both of which are in stereo and encoded using the DTS-HD MA lossless codec. The series is very much a dialogue driven piece with a few very small moments here and there where it goes a bit bigger but not by much. That leaves the mix in a simpler place as it doesn’t have much to work with as even things like placement and moving characters across the screen isn’t all that much here as a lot of what we get is sitting around talking. Some of the more creative pieces get a little extra attention such as the recordings and the like, but it’s fairly straightforward material that doesn’t stand out all that much in general. Dialogue is clean and clear throughout and we didn’t have any problems with dropouts or distortions.
Video:
Originally airing in 2019, the transfer for this TV series is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.78:1 in 1080p using the AVC codec. The twelve episodes are spread across two discs in a nine/three format. Animated by Lay-Duce, the show is one that works its color palette well and handles its busier scenes smoothly. There’s a decent amount of detail to it both in character designs and the settings so that it feels more lived-in and easier to engage with. There are areas where it goes simpler with more dialogue for a bit to help offset things but with some well-designed backgrounds it helps to smooth that out. The encoding captures all of this very well as colors are solid and strong without being overly vibrant and the busier animation sequences hold up with a clean look that has no breakup or noise in it. The backgrounds have a good bit of detail to them as well and those maintain a solid feeling throughout. There’s a lot going on throughout the show and it’s a pretty good encoding overall.
Packaging:
The packaging for this release comes in a standard sized Blu-ray case that holds the two discs of the series. The front cover works with the familiar key visual for the series where we get a really nice illustrated version of them that has a fall season design about it with the colors that really works well, giving it a very dreamlike look and feeling. THe logo is kept to the upper right with its nicely designed style but it blends into the background so as to let the character artwork stand out the most as they all read their books and react in different ways. It’s not a standard color palette cover by any stretch and it stands out well for me for that alone. The back cover does the same with the color combinations, moved around a bit, with more dreamlike artwork mixed into it for a few of the characters in their uniforms. The summary is pretty dense here to the right and it has a couple of small shots along the top and bottom from the show. The extras are clearly listed and we get a fun tagline done in bright pink with white text. The production credits are standard and we get a solid technical grid that’s only a little difficult to read with the thin white font on black. No show related inserts are included nor is there a reversible cover.
Extras:
The only extra included here is the clean version of the ending sequence.
Based on the manga Araburu Kisetsu no Otome-domo yo by Mari Okada and Nao Emoto, O Maidens in Your Savage Season is a twelve-episode TV series that aired during the summer 2019 season. Okada and Emoto’s manga began in 2016 and ran for eight volumes before wrapping up just in the middle of the anime itself with its run. Kodansha Comics has been bringing that out in English so fans can get that complete view of the original alongside this thoroughly engaging anime adaptation. Directed by Masahiro Ando and Takurō Tsukada, Mari Okada wrote the scripts for it herself with Lay-duce handling the animation production. This allows for a stronger than usual interpretation of the source, though some may say too close in bringing it into a different medium, but Okada has such a resume when it comes to adaptations across the board that it’s an ideal fit here.
The premise for the series is one that gives us a standard coming of age kind of story set in high school but with a more realistic element to it for a lot of it. How much is from Okadi’s own childhood I don’t know, but with it focusing on a group of five young women in a literature club and their very different experiences you can imagine her drawing on that easily. Our central character is Kazusa, she’s a your traditional young woman here where she’s got a crush on her childhood friend that she’s kept secret for a long time. With it almost worse that he’s her next-door neighbor, any amount of interest she might show toward him bring the knives out by the other more popular girls at school as Izumi is pretty much the catch of catches. Decently smart, charming, a good athlete as he plays baseball. The all-around package. With Kazusa forced in a way to keep her distance from him at school, she’s ended up idolizing him more and more as time went on, especially as their paths diverged during middle school with his popularity.
So much so that she has this kind of pure vision of him that she can’t align with the more prurient interests of her friends in the literature club. Early on in the series, Kazusa’s mother has her bring a meal over to Izumi because his parents are away for a few days. She’s always just made her way in and does so here, but with it so quiet it feels different. When she goes into his room to give him the meal, she’s positively shocked to see him at his desk, pants down, masturbating to a video on his laptop. It’s a priceless moment of embarrassment and discovery but both reveal so much about themselves. While he calmly just pulls his pants up and composes himself before he says anything to her, she freaks out the minute he opens his mouth and runs off. The illusion shattered. Innocence lost. Her Izumi is not the nice little boy she once thought he was. And thus she has to begin to reconcile that with her own growing feelings toward him.
The club itself is amusing and not a place where she gets a lot of support, at least initially since she keeps much of this to herself. The president is Rika, a tall young woman who keeps herself really minimal in a way but could easily be a model simply because of her height. She’s amusingly prudish in a lot of ways but with the literature club reading pretty much erotica more often than not, it ends up really heightening her own interests. She’s a delight in how restrained she is a lot of the time but she’s also the one, most surprisingly, that’s able to engage with others in what you’d call the most normal of ways. She’s a fun contrast to fellow club member Hitoya, the shortest of the group with a devilish look to her eye under the almost unkempt hair. She’s a novelist herself and writes a lot of erotic and chases boys with an intense look. But that only happens because she gets the best/worst advice on her erotic works. When told she writes like an old virgin, she decides experience is necessary. Which is certainly true for writing authentic erotica.
The club does have some help for Kazusa in it in that Nina is her best friend in and out of the club, so she’s not alone. Nina’s a pretty standard character in a lot of ways because she has some classic charms to her with her light hair and almost that kind of anemic aspect where she just looks weak. Her story is the most complicated of them and I wish could have its own spinoff to explore more because she had a hard childhood with harassment, hence not being into boys all that much, but ends really becoming interested in Izumi because he is the classic nice guy and treats her properly, which is a rarity in her mind. What also complicates things with Nina is the last member of the group, Momoko, who is another of Kazusa’s friends. We see her in the same light as the rest in dealing with the erotica and some of the cringe-y elements of it, but her path shifts as she takes more of an interest in Nina as it goes on and that puts her into a problematic tailspin because she knows that Nina is all about Izumi. And that it’s causing problems with Kazusa.
The show works a lot of standard school material overall but as it follows the five young women and the couple of young men that populates it, you can easily view the women as various aspects of Okada herself growing up, dealing with the feelings of depression about oneself, the curiosity of the opposite sex, the disappointment of someone not living up to your ideals, the harassment you face both when younger and older by others that are more popular within the grade. Each of these girls have a really good story that unfolds in bits and pieces across it as we see them grapple with things, mostly kind of maturely, in order to figure out who they are. There are many silly sequences, such as the erotic readings or when Kazusa discovers Izumi for example, and the size of the group allows for a lot of different configurations to exist. But what really sold me on it was that each character felt like they were fully realized with their own arc. You could have done five separate books and then this one afterward and see how it all came together. That, in turn, made each of their stories far more engaging because they aren’t there just to support a main character.
In Summary:
Though things wrap up a little too tight and cleanly by the end, I find that it holds true for most series – anime or not – that it’s the journey and not the destination that matters. Watching these characters reveal who they are, come to understand themselves at least a little, and engage with each other about one of the hardest parts of being a teenager in growing up into sexuality is very well done. It’s an incredibly hard period of life and Okada writes it from a great perspective with several different angles that will let a lot of viewers come away from it with different impressions and hopes. There’s a lot to like here and each character brings something welcome to the table to engage with and it’s very well done. It’s a great looking show with a neat style to it that comes through as well and fits the larger themes and ideas. Sentai’s release is a touch barebones but I don’t recall the Japanese releases offering much on-disc either. What counts is a great looking show and a dub where the cast got to really grapple with a lot more interesting things than most shows they work on. It’s a solid release that I hope finds its way into a lot of hands.
Features:
Japanese DTS-HD MA 2.0 Language, English DTS-HD MA 2.0 Language, English Subtitles, Clean Closing Animation
Content Grade: B
Audio Grade: B+
Video Grade: B+
Packaging Grade: B
Menu Grade: B
Extras Grade: B-
Released By: Sentai Filmworks
Release Date: July 28th, 2020
MSRP: $69.98
Running Time: 300 Minutes
Video Encoding: 1080p AVC
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 Widescreen
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Sony PlayStation3 Blu-ray player via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.