Sasameki Koto didn’t seem to attract much attention when it aired in the winter, although it ended up on my watchlist by virtue of being a new yuri show. It departs quite a bit from the “walking slowly is preferred here” image of Marimite and the subtlety of Aoi Hana, going so far as to set its characters in a coed school and making one of them allegedly not a lesbian. It’s hard to say where it would fit on BakaRaptor’s real lesbian/super lesbian scale, but it’s certainly more grounded in reality than many of its kind.
Ironically, my enjoyment of Sasameki Koto has almost nothing to do with its yuri tropes and clichés. Instead, an interesting phenomenon occurred with regards to Sumika’s character: she began to feel less like the heroine and more like the male self-insert. I went into the show expecting a full serving of voyeuristic bliss derived from the idealized romances portrayed in shoujo-ai, but it wasn’t long before my experience changed from third-person to first-person.
(note that I’m referring to the definition of self-insert used within anime fandom – a generally bland character intended for the viewer to project themselves into – rather than the literary definition.)
When I took this screencap several months ago, I got the feeling that I would need it. It looks like I was right.
Sumika, the heroine of the show, is indeed a man at heart. I’m not familiar with the source material so I can’t comment on the target audience, but Sasameki Koto strikes me as a typical male-targeted shoujo-ai, even if only for Ushio and the trap. Whether or not this is true, the series has a heavy leaning toward lighthearted comedy with a tinge of fanservice, rather than the dense, often bittersweet atmosphere of the more dramatic yuri shows. It weaves a cruel, cruel web of feelings, but it’s so detached from the yuri tradition that it seems more like a good harem series without the male lead.
That was when it occurred to me: isn’t Sumika the male lead of Sasameki Koto? Not to say that she’s not effeminate or that it’s wrong to think of her as a girl, but she seems to play the role of the male in the story. I mean this in a more general way than the seme/uke roles – Sumi’s entire battle to win Ushio’s heart, from her feeble attempts at spending more time with her during the pool episode to her own internal thought processes, fit the role of the male lead perfectly. The best part about it is that she’s a girl, so she can exhibit emotions without breaking the Harem Lead creed. In fact, she doesn’t even need a harem!
Looking at the character archetypes, Sumi works as the perfect self-insert on several levels. For one, there’s the fact that she’s self-conscious about her looks, mentioning several times that she’s not effeminate and that she’s not the kind of girl that Ushio would go for. Her insecurities should strike a chord with many of the viewers, otaku or not – even in shoujo, you’re more likely to see insecure protagonists than insecure bishounen. On top of that, she struggles through her romance in a very boyish way, fighting to win Ushio’s heart without wanting to step too far and risk losing their friendship. She’s easy to identify with in a lot of ways. Compared to the rest of the show’s female characters and most shounen romance male characters, Sumi probably has the most in common with the viewer.
In execution, too, the series seems to intentionally use Sumi as a self-insert. The later episodes have her explicitly trying to earn Ushio’s attention in typical boy-chases-girl fashion, but the fanservice and unrealistically convenient dialogue that normally accompanies such stories is replaced by her bittersweet commentary, sometimes in self-depreciating jest, that reminds us that she really is in love. There are far too many anime characters in romance shows who spend 13 episodes chasing the object of their affection, yet never act as though they really are in love. In this manner, Sumi is the good kind of self-insert: deep enough to be believable, yet ordinary enough to be relateable.
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I enjoyed Sasameki Koto as a boy-chases-girl show, not as a girl-chases-girl one. Most romance anime with male protagonists end up being more about the girls and their deliciously heart-healing pandering rather than the boy and his romantic interests. Even the best harem leads and shounen romance protagonists rarely vocalize their feelings. In other words, so-called boy-chases-girl shows end up pandering to one gender or the other, either through flawless female characters and a dull male lead or through a shy shoujo protagonist and a typical “bad boy” bishounen. In either case, they sidestep the original intent of the premise. Likewise, nearly all male-targeted girl-chases-girl anime end up like Strawberry Panic (to varying degrees), and the female-targeted ones probably remain as vague as Marimite.
This is why Sasameki Koto works: with or without the lesbians, it provides an endearingly simple yet relateable love story without the trappings of tradition, fan pandering, and confining gender roles. It’s odd that this so-called phenomenon only occurred as a result of my viewing the female protagonist as a male self-insert, but the show deserves credit for doing something that is disappointingly rare in anime. I can only hope that more creators realize that self-inserts need not always be spoon-fed their desires in a pure, idealistic paradise.
~ ETERNAL
つづく
