Senpai is an Otokonoko

Episode 12

I should not be the one writing this episode review. That's all that keeps running through my head as I sit here, trying to put words on metaphorical paper, but I also know that I have to try. I can't fill Nick's shoes, but I will do my best, wishing all the while that I didn't have to.

That's probably not dissimilar to what Makoto's mother is thinking for much of this episode. As it turns out, there's not really any one reason why she's buying so hard into the gender binary, although if pressed, she'd likely say that it's because she was so disgusted by her father's cross-dressing when she was a young woman. But the issue was almost certainly nothing that simple. We saw that she had a disgust of cross-dressing men long before she saw her father among them, and that seems to be more rooted in simple vanity: she's cute, therefore she deserves cute things. They aren't, so they don't, and by attempting to use things that were never meant for them, they're essentially stealing from her. And that her own father would meddle in her domain is just a bridge too far. She acts out not out of fear, but disgust, and that's due entirely to her own beliefs about who “deserves” what.

Her rejection of Makoto's love of so-called “girly” things comes from that anger. In her mind, her father somehow betrayed her, and she's unable to recognize that it was never actually about her. Her dad was just doing what he wanted, and presumably with his wife's knowledge. Makoto, in preferring cute colors and looks, isn't rejecting what his mother believes. He's simply being true to himself. The only person making a big deal out of it, the only person taking it personally, is her – and that's the real tampering in someone else's domain.

Does it all resolve a bit too cleanly? I think so, yes. But what's important is that she's forcing herself to try to meet Makoto halfway. Her child is reaching out to her in a way she never did to her own father, and the greatest sign that she's done some growing up herself is the way she resists her knee-jerk reaction. She doesn't cut off all of her hair this time. She doesn't tell Makoto that she never wants to see him again. Instead, she tries. The art does a remarkable job showing this in her scared, hunched posture when they enter the mall. It contrasts beautifully with Makoto's confident stance, the way he holds his head high even when a child points out that he's tall. And when she realizes that pink is just a color, I think that the real first step has been taken.

As you may have heard by now, this series is getting a film sequel, and that does make the lack of firm resolution go down easier. Saki's plotline feels like it just sort of dropped off, with us none the wiser about what caused her mother to leave and abandon her daughter, and without Saki having fully come to terms with her own lack of romantic and/or sexual attraction to others. But I think it's still fine to end with Saki running to her friends. Ryuji and Makoto fully accept her for who she is, even if she herself hasn't figured it out yet. Saki has the space to grow that Makoto found, and there's something beautiful about that.

At the end of his last review, Nick said that he wasn't entirely sure that the finale would live up to his trust in it. It isn't perfect, I'll grant you, but I think that it does its best to maintain our trust in the franchise. As Jane Austen said in Mansfield Park, it allows “every body, not greatly at fault themselves, to live in tolerable comfort.” Although she didn't mean it that way, the old-fashioned spelling of “everybody,” with the two parts separate, is important here. Makoto, Ryuji, and Saki are all moving to a place of comfort with who they are and the bodies they inhabit. I'm glad we got to take this journey with them, and I wish that Nick had been here to finish it with us.

Rating:

Senpai is an Otokonoko is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.