Dear Brother... and Homosociality
12 Days of Aniblogging 2020, Day 4
I’ve been watching through Oniisama e…, known in English as Dear Brother, at a delightfully glacial pace. Never more than one episode a day, and generally I only get around to 2 or 3 episodes a week. It’s something worth savoring.
Dear Brother has a deeply elegant and timeless feel to it. It’s an adaptation of a manga written in the 70’s by Riyoko Ikeda of Rose of Versailles fame. In the director’s chair is Osamu Dezaki, who I’d describe in a nutshell as ‘the guy they brought in halfway through the Rose of Versailles anime to make it super artsy’. The artwork is gorgeous and like nothing else that was coming out in the 90’s, and Dezuki makes the most of the overall lackluster animation quality by saving it for bursts of action and otherwise relying on interesting shots and dramatic watercolor freezeframes.
oh you know, regular teen girl stuff
But the real draw here is female homosociality. This is a show all about the messy web of friendships, rivalries, animus, and truly uncategorizable relationships that emerge between young women. That’s broad enough to describe whole genres, but what sets Dear Brother apart is its setting, subject matter, and commitment to the melodrama. This elite girl’s academy has a deep class layer to it, with students from prestigious families and wealth locked in a cold war with the new blood. The real arbiter of power here, instead of a student council, is the school’s elite sorority. By unexpectedly admitting our commoner main character Nanako into their ranks, they effectively place a target on her back.
In Seiran Academy, emotions run wild. Typical teenager feelings of jealousy and inadequacy are amplified into rage, hatred, depression, and a deep sense of longing. It’s melodramatic in the way that the best teen dramas are – strong emotions hiding just below everyone’s surface that occasionally boil into absolute and terrifying events. It’s pensive, it’s slow, it’s bittersweet at its happiest, and it’s great!
Did I mention that it’s gay as well? Outside of the sorority leader, the crown jewels of the academy are not one, but two butches - Kaoru-no-Kimi and Rei Asaka. Kaoru-no-Kimi is essentially Andre from The Rose of Versailles but a girl, right down to the dark curly hair and strong sense of justice. Predictably, half of the girls in the academy have a crush on her. But Rei Asaka… Rei Asaka is something else. Terrifyingly nicknamed Saint-Juste after the French Revolution’s angel of death, Rei is gangly, unsociable, drug-addicted and worst of all, drop-dead hot. She’s got the perfect toxic allure to her that makes her impossible to escape.
It’s worth mentioning that ‘Andre, but a girl’’ is my type
Rei is also something of a primordial archetype in yuri melodrama at this point, being one of the first truly influential brooding lesbians. You can see traces of her in Juri Arisugawa, for example. But the media most worth pointing out here is the mecha visual novel Heaven Will Be Mine, in which Veteran Pilot Luna-Terra is the most obvious Saint-Juste expy imaginable.
Shoutout to the ladies over at Worst Girls Games for basing all of their characters off a combination of yuri melodrama archetypes and slutty Utena side characters
While their appearances are the most obvious point of comparison, Saint-Juste and Luna-Terra have the same terrible personality too. Their approach to bearing unknowable pain is identical, as is their coping/dating mechanism of appearing brooding and intimidating, trying and failing to hide that they’re actually the biggest bottoms imaginable. Everyone is madly in love with them.
At the time of writing, I’ve only made it 15 episodes through Dear Brother. I can only imagine that the twists and turns and moments of escalation are only going to get more severe in the show’s second half. I’m excited for all of it. If you like girls being exactingly cruel to each other in a not-entirely-heterosexual way and can savor a slower show, then I strongly recommend checking this one out.
gummygunk
germansingergirl
romaincrisis
dededos
annaxmalina
janainaart
areudirty
origamiaround
