That One Jellyfish

How 19-year-old Sana Hiroki transformed himself into an 80s yaoi icon

Maraich is special to the Patalliro! series even before author Maya Mineo realized it. He confessed to planning to kill him off after a few chapters but saw the character had a life of its own and therefore he felt compelled to let him live. I wonder if this happened before or after Maraich was assigned to be 18 years of age, because Maya Mineo fell in love with his wife at first sight when he was 27, which is Bancoran’s age, and his wife 18. In the manga Maya-sensei also jokingly stated that Bancoran’s cheating was in no way a reflection of his own behaviors. And the fact that Maya-sensei’s now-mangaka daughter saw Patalliro as a sibling growing up kind of indirectly shows how Bancoran and Maraich’s relationship is in certain ways a representation of Maya-sensei’s own marriage. 

Maya-sensei is delightfully weird, as you would expect from the man who created Patalliro! in the first place. So a lot of the decisions he has made about his story and characters don’t fit into boxes. He said he wasn’t good at drawing women so he made all his characters gay even though the pretty boys he draws are all indistinguishable from women. 

And even though Maraich was one of the most important characters of the story, he never bound himself or anyone else to any set ways of portraying the character. Maraich was famously voiced by female voice actor Fujita Toshiko, and Maya-sensei had characterized Maraich as “a girl with a boy’s body”, despite the fact that Maraich throughout the series has used “boku”, which is the male first-person pronoun and on several occasions made it clear that he is a male and has no problem staying that way. So the whole thing is a very fluid situation and Maya-sensei is almost always just free-ranging.