Hey boy. Does your girl:
- Change her gender presentation mid-volleyball match?
- Demonstrate the kind of expertise in dire circumstances from a martial arts superhero story?
- Deliberately change her gender presentation to become a perfect girl as represented in Shoujou Manga?
- Take her rivals for your affection out on day dates where she gives her gifts and wins her prizes?
- Flirt with your mom?
Then she’s not your girl. She’s Shikimori from Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie and I’ve just been stewing about how unhinged that series is.
Spoilers ahead!
When I wrote about Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie, it is an article that I think, very reasonably got away from me. I liked the series, despite being animated candy floss, with all the structural integrity and challenging depth that implies. It was a fun show, it was very sweet, and it passed the time pleasantly. When it wanted to be what it was – a merchandisable set of animated gifs that could induce someone like me to buy some anime tat like a statue or something – it was really good, and it didn’t try to be more than that.
Yet at the same time, reflecting back on it, after an article in which I tried, very seriously, to only describe the way the anime was in an even way, I feel like I just walked out of a challenging writing assignment, got home after all the editorial review and publishing was done, and only then realise I somehow neglected to write that the entire anime was actually written by an elephant. An overview of the series that digs into the story structure and its invocations all serves to flirt on past just describing things in the series that happened.
I can’t say that Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie is a queer media series. All the signifiers and cultural indicators you’d use, the words people would use to describe it, they’re pointedly absent. At the same time, there’s nothing you’d see as disabusing those notions, and that means everything about the queerness of this series has to be seen entirely contextually. And when you do that, there are three things in Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie that take the assumption of neutral, default heterosexuality and ask, simply put: Really?
First of all, Shikimori flirts with girls to get what she wants. It’s a minor thing but it’s really interesting – it’s not even dwelled on. In the anime, the most notable example of it is that when she is trying to get into the same group as Izumi for a lottery, she flirts with the girl who won that lottery ticket, who is overwhelmed by it, and gives her the ticket.
This isn’t a big deal but it’s done so immediately and so easily that it kind of shocks the senses. Like you don’t make a bit-part gag out of a girl being overwhelmed by how hot Shikimori is unless that’s a thing that seems very normal and sensible for everyone around them. Like how well can this work? Oh it works really well. Why did she think to do that? Oh because she knew it would work really well.
The next event is the story of Kamiya. Izumi, Shikimori’s gormless wet mouse of a boyfriend, reveals that he spent time with a girl called Kamiya, and hung out with her and hadn’t done so recently. In part, he hasn’t been hanging around her because he’s been instead focusing on spending time with his girlfriend whom he likes so much. But then he winds up getting back into Kamiya’s orbit, briefly, and she reveals boiling feelings that have finally come to a head, by pinning him to a bookshelf and then demanding he answer —
What’s Shikimori like as a girlfriend?
Now I think that’s a pretty funny approach when you’ve got someone pinned to something, but y’know what, Izumi is a weenus, maybe that’s the best way Kamiya can learn about this. Maybe she’s focusing on why Shikimori and not her, when she was also interested (and never made a move). And this sets us up a love triangle! It’s an obviously weird love triangle with a foregone conclusion because this anime isn’t titled Shikimori’s Boyfriend Can Make A Choice. When the story spirals out though, the conclusion it’s shooting towards isn’t Shikimori doing a badass ‘step off binch’ gesture and instead, the pink-haired girl hugs her and thanks her for her feelings, thanks her for feeling like that and apologises for not helping her with her emotional needs.
Which is…
Uh
Odd?
Okay so that’s… an oddly intimate way to approach that, right? Well, Kamiya’s story beat is over, this character has been introduced, has done her thing, and now we see how Shikimori would handle that kind of intrusion on her own intimacy. Good work, probably means that Kamiya as a character is done, right, we don’t need to see her again because she wasn’t close with the group to star with and her romantic interest in Izumi is going nowhere.
Wait why is she in the next episode?
The next episode is literally Shikimori taking Kamiya on a date. They go out to the mall together, they have fun, they hang out, Shikimori does the princely thing and wins her a prize from a game she likes, they discuss who’s the seme and who’s the uke — yeah I said that — and then they do what girls always do which is find another pair of girls to play basketball with. They have a pick-up game with another pair of needlessly cool looking characters.
Izumi is not part of the episode. He’s not even mentioned by my memory. This is Shikimori taking the girl who wanted to date her boyfriend out, and treating her in… a way. If you saw this agnostically, it’s prety clearly they’re going on a date, but because you know this is media that isn’t pointedly trying to be queer media, the assumption is ‘surely that’s not the case.’
None of this is to say that Shikimori’s a series full of queer energy and what not. When I wrote about it at first I described the way that the series takes the form of queer media while also avoiding anything of that queerness. That is, without the default asserted demand of heterosexuality, this is a poly show about a bisexual girl. The only reason it’s obviously not is because we do live in a world where that default is assumed and as a result, media about cool and interesting relationships just… obviously aren’t, and can dance up to the line of that space.