15Author's Notes / Story Behind the Story
[As a quick aside, I will probably be trying my hand at an original yuri-esque work soon. It will be under a different pen name, so feel free to PM me or email me (endofabraxas at gmail DOT com) if you want me to let you know when I do.]
This is not an actual chapter (since the story is now finished). This is the part where I pompously talk about the story that you just read, if you're into that. It's some commentary on the themes, on the Maria-sama ga Miteru novels, and on what inspired this weird little tale. That kind of thing. I'll try to keep it as brief as I can, but when it comes to Marimite, there's a lot to talk about.
Metamorphosis is a story about Sei, mostly. There are other characters having similar growth experiences, but they are ultimately interwoven with Sei's story, and Sei is the catalyst for many of the other characters.
Originally, this was meant as a one-shot. At first, I just thought it would be funny if Sei flirted with Alice, not realizing who she was messing with. Before long, though, I realized that something like that would be hard for Sei to just brush off, considering her history….
Why Sei and Alice? What the Heck?
The first thing that I want to address is the most obvious: Why Sei/Alice, of all the possible pairings?
Weeelll, a few reasons:
1) I hadn't seen any other Sei/Alice stories (probably for good reason; at first blush, it's just a weird, random pairing that has no canon background), and I thought it would be cool to give it a try. Actually I haven't seen any Alice/Anyone stories, though I may have just missed them.
2) It would be interesting to see Sei in a situation where she, for once, was the speechless one who had no idea what to do. Uncertainty is the first step towards growth in a character, and Marimite is all about character development and growth. It was an opportunity for Sei to question herself, and exploring her psyche is interesting to me because she's one of the deeper personalities in the series.
3) Alice was kind of an underused character in the series, whom I found interesting for a number of reasons. Usually the point of any story is (inner and outer) conflict, and often people who are highly unusual—for example, trans people—tend to be at the center of a lot of conflict and resistance from society. Alice and Sei have this in common (not just because Sei is more or less openly gay, but because she bucks many other social norms), and I could see them bonding over it. In some ways, they could also both challenge each other in a way other characters could not.
Originally, the story was going to develop along very different lines. My focus was going to be about Sei questioning her sexuality after being attracted to Alice, but when I really thought about it and began to write Chapter 2, it became clear to me that this was simply out of character for Sei.
The way I see it, Sei's the type of person who would not really care too much if she was attracted to a trans girl, at least not enough to have any kind of deep identity crisis. Even though she questioned her sexuality during her affair with Shiori in the novels (and even appeared to come to the conclusion over time that she was probably homosexual), that was more out of self-discovery and trying to make sense of unfamiliar feelings than out of a need to attach herself to a label.
For the most part, Sei appears to simply accept her sexuality as part of life and doesn't tie her identity much into it. This is probably partly due to her culture and partly due to her character. So after thinking about it for awhile, I realized that the biggest issue when it came to her sexuality was not that she was gay, but rather that she was still not completely over the trauma of losing Shiori.
In the series, she's happy and moves on with her life for the most part, but it's also clear that she's still a bit scarred by the experience and that it affects her romantic life. (It could just be me, but she seems to tread way too lightly with Katou Kei, a character whom she's obviously attracted to in the novels.) I started wondering about the kind of demons that would be triggered if Sei started to fall in love with someone like Alice very hard and very quickly like she had with Shiori.
To make matters worse (or better conflict-wise), Alice would have her own set of baggage that Sei would have to tip-toe around. For example, many people do not accept Alice the way she is, but Sei does, which would immediately put Sei at odds with people like Alice's parents.
Alice does not have the courage to be who she is fully at the start of the story, though, which is a huge rift between her and Sei. There is also the body dysphoria that usually comes with being trans, which was addressed briefly in the 7th chapter, and became a barrier to intimacy between them, which Sei struggled to not take personally.
So, long story short, I thought that Sei and Alice could really push each other over the edge of the things that were holding them both back. They each had a strong potential for hurting the other in a unique way. They could push each other's buttons.
Sei, Shiori, Shimako...and Alice
Sei's journey with Alice intentionally mirrors the journey she had with Shiori and Shimako, albeit loosely.
She meets all three of these girls and feels an attraction to them basically instantly. She goes through a short period of resistance, and then breaks down and throws her feelings on them (which was especially the case with Shiori). And in the case of Alice and Shimako, they both accept Sei's proposal very soon after first meeting her, during the spring, under the cherry blossoms.
These relationships are way too quick to be sensible, and are instead rather intuitive, which is how Sei lives her life. She's rarely the kind of person who takes a slow, simmering approach, and this theme shows up again and again in her connections to other people.
Often, we tend to repeat painful experiences—like a karmic cyle—until we learn what we have to learn and resolve them. Usually, this means facing some kind of fear.
I wanted Sei to eventually reach a point where she would have to face her fear of rejection and abandonment, one where she could not use disinterest and aloofness as a shield. She faced a fear with Shimako—one that had to do with bringing the women she loved down from some untouchable pedestal, I think (Sei had a killer Madonna-Whore Complex for awhile)—but that still left a few more demons for her to examine in herself.
Sei resists Alice almost from the very beginning because something tells her to be afraid. Probably, this was because she sensed intuitively that she would want to marry this person, even if she could not articulate it in her mind until towards the end of the story.
(Yep, the whole marriage part of the arc was planned fairly early on. I heavily alluded to it a few times, if you caught it. And because I'm so heavy-handed and like to beat you over the head with irony, I couldn't resist having Sei propose to Alice at an omiai that wasn't even hers, hahaha.)
Sei and Yumi
It could just be that I'm a fan of Sei/Yumi, so I have a huge bias here, but to me Sei/Yumi is one of the most realistic pairings in the Marimite series, in terms of the potential to develop into an actual adult relationship, so I really wanted to explore it. Sei and Yumi's connection during the series is the most overtly physical one out of all of the members of the Yamayurikai, and there's no explicit reason for them to be so close because they're not soeurs. Yumi isn't even as physical with Sachiko as she is with Sei. (In the novels, Sei is even more touchy-feely with Yumi than in the anime and frequently manhandles her.)
This made me wonder what sex would be like between them once they were at an age where that could reasonably happen. I didn't want it to devolve into fapping material here, but I did want to bring what they had to its "logical" (in my biased mind) extreme. I thought it would also be interesting to see Sei use this experience as a tool to guide Yumi out of her comfort zone, rather than to comfort her after her falling out with Sachiko. (Sei waits until Yumi has resolved her conflict with Sachiko before she sleeps with her, and she also gives Yumi no choice but to be the one to ask for it.)
It was one of the harder parts to write, though, to be honest.
Which Way Does Sachiko Swing?
As an aside, I'm like 90% sure that the Sachiko of the canon series is 99% straight. She certainly has a borderline romantic relationship with Yumi, and if she were to go gay for anyone, it would be for her, but none of her relationships with women seem the least bit sexual (even the one she has with Yumi).
Still, for this story, she needed to be at least a little bit bi, so she was. Her indiscretions just seemed to make more sense if they were homosexual in nature, since these are easier to get away with because they fly under the radar (and Sachiko could also more easily flex her status over another woman than over a man). I suppose this doesn't make her necessarily not straight, but it probably does.
I also left it open who this distant cousin was whom Sachiko slept with. One person comes immediately to mind (you know who), but I didn't want to go there, so I didn't. (That would be a whole other story.) That person is also conspicuously absent from this story, and I'm not sure why, either.
Polygamy and the Ambiguity of Labels
As referenced several times in the story, I decided to depict Sei as non-monogamous and quite shameless about it. There are a few labels for this behavior in the Western world, but again Sei is doing this out of instinct more than any kind of self-aware decision. There's not a lot of evidence about her stance on this in the canon, but I could see her going either way.
The reason I wrote it this way is because it mirrors the soeur relationships in Marimite, which I wanted to explore a bit. If you think about it, they are by nature polygamous. You usually have one "older sister" and one "younger sister," and they may both compete for your attention.
While the soeur relationship does have boundaries to it that echo that of a marriage (you are allowed only a limited amount of partners), it is also a bit looser. In the series, occasional "cheating" happened fairly openly. Even Yumi philandered with Sei sometimes, and Sachiko was entirely aware of it.
This had been the pattern of Sei and Yumi's relationship for years—a deep friendship without the confines of a social system (almost the opposite of what Yumi has with Sachiko), along with a slightly sexual edge—so I saw no reason why that part would need to change.
In the end, it simply matured into an adult relationship that also had no expectations and did not adhere to social norms. They do passively accept other people's labels for them, but in practice they do not obey the boxes. (Sei does this as well in her proposed marriage to Alice. She makes it clear to the point of absurdity that Alice will be unable to play the safe "husband" role, and that the marriage would likely make Alice lose face, even if she would gain a lot of freedom in return.)
I actually got a lot of feedback about this non-monogamous aspect in particular while writing the story. Some people just did not like it at all and wanted Sei to choose one person or the other (usually Yumi).
Pain and Unconditional Love
One of the things that Sei resisted as a youngster was the unconditional love of the people around her (like her best friend Youko), which she viewed as intrusive. During the Marimite series, part of Sei's journey is to get over this, and she becomes much more open post-Shiori.
Unconditional love is kind of a paradox. It can actually be very painful to a person who isn't prepared to receive it; it can be a burden. Many times, people resist love that comes without judgment or conditions (or are suspicious of it) because they don't love themselves enough to feel worthy of it. Other times, they might be hurt because someone they love in a "special," closed-off way accepts and loves many other people indiscriminately. (Or they love Maria-sama more, in the case of Shiori.) I thought this would be interesting to explore.
In the story, Sei alludes to this in her first conversation with Alice, in which she vaguely mentions how she rejected Youko because she wasn't prepared at the time to be loved for who she was. Sachiko also makes reference to this in the chapel, when she accuses Sei of being too unconditional with how she loves people, telling her that it was causing Yumi pain.
It Takes a Yuri Village
Another theme that I couldn't help but mercilessly beat into the poor reader (for some reason; I don't know why) is the fact that human relationships do not take place in a vacuum. In fact, that's the single most prominent theme in the story. (It's also a common theme in Marimite itself, in my interpretation.)
Almost all of the relationships in the story are interwoven and rely on each other. Sei's relationship to Yumi helped her give Sachiko advice about how to fix Sachiko and Yumi's broken connection. Sachiko goes out of her way to help Sei find Alice again, and she also—oddly enough—helps to nudge Yumi into a relationship with Sei once she is able to accept that there are certain things that she can't give to Yumi.
In a similar way, Yumi's compassion for Kawakami is what eventually indirectly allows Sei access to Alice's house one last time, even after Sei had managed to offend everyone around her (including Kawakami).
In other words, "we're all connected." This is a theme that flies in the face of Sei's deepest relationship problems. The single biggest issue in her relationship with Shiori was not that it was homosexual or that it went against social norms—it was that Sei cut herself off from everyone around her. If she had not done that, they might have actually had a chance.
In this story, I wanted to see her get over that finally, and reach for the other extreme—one of complete vulnerability and openness.
...
Anyway, so yeah. If you made it this far, thanks for reading my ramblings!
