Maria-sama ga Miteru 4th Season Review

Wait, no kissing?

Even though the logical portion of my brain told me that Yumi and Touko would never get together in a romantic fashion, I still couldn’t help but hoping against hope that they’d kiss each other at the end of last episode of 4th. I mean, come on, they held hands! They embraced! They fell asleep leaning against each other! But, especially, the holding hands thing – it was so cute and potentially romantic, and Touko acts completely like she has a raging crush on Yumi. Uwa~

Er-hem, anyway…

I loved MariMite 4th. I am, admittedly, a gigantic MariMite fan in general, so this comes as no shock. Nevertheless, I thought it was the best season that there’s been so far (including the OVA’s).

Touko became my favorite character this season; she acted so entirely differently than the rest of the girls in general that from the get-go I found her interesting as a character. This season only heightened her as a character, as she was fleshed out quite a bit, and I really enjoyed watching her develop and grow. I think it also helps that Touko’s problem seemed to have larger ramifications than the conflicts of the girls in the previous seasons (with the exception of Sei) – no offense to Yumi and Sachiko, but their whole drama-fest kind of pales in comparison to a girl finding out she was adopted and that her real parents are dead.

One could argue that my placing of this season as ‘the best’ could have more to do with my chronology of watching the other seasons, but I disagree – this was a top-notch show by itself. Also, I think the first season ranks second best (Haru’s at the bottom because the Yumi-Sachiko drama was a little overblown for my tastes).

As I mentioned previously, I also have really enjoyed the maturation of the characters overall. The older characters have fully transitioned to being young adults, and the younger ones are well on their way. I might count the Sachiko-Kashiwagi scene of episode eleven as my favorite scene from this season.

I know some people were a little disappointed that we didn’t get to see Yumi make Touko her petit souer, and I’m a little disappointed too, but I think it still works well. We needed to get all that Touko exposition, and, in a way, I suppose the rosary passing would’ve been a little anti-climactic after Touko’s revelation to Yumi and the train ride home.

I was a bit disappointed that we, in the end, didn’t really see much of the Yellow Rose family this time around. I feel like in previous seasons they’ve kind of gotten the short end of the stick in general, honestly, and I had really been looking forward to seeing Yoshino get to know Nana. But if that’s my only complaint, I’d say that they did a good job with this.

While I doubt there’s any possibility of a fifth TV series (the inclusion of the little monologue about Lillian Academy before the OP has me fairly convinced), I am hoping for a set of OVA’s, as there are four light novels that weren’t covered by 4th. And then… that’s it. The final volume of MariMite came out earlier this year, so we’ll have to bid these young ladies adieu ;_;

So, to sum up: I loved this season. I loved watching our lovely ladies mature and get further developed. I loved the animation, which I thought was very, very good, particularly in the second-half (please note that I mean good for a show such as this; it obviously isn’t going to compare to something like the Soul Eater OP in terms of fluidity). If you enjoyed the previous seasons, there’s no reason you won’t love this one.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go full-out loser and look for some YumixTouko doujins.

I wish Touko was my petit souer~