There’s one character who breaks the pleasant, feminine feel of the series but he does so almost intentionally. A member of the Hanadera student council, he introduces himself as a man whose hobby is weightlifting whose favorite foods are MEAT and PROTEIN all while flexing his pecs at the girls. It’s almost as if he accidentally stepped into the wrong show, but it just adds greater character variety to the series.

Namely that apparently, in japan, it is not uncommon to have very, very, very close relations between underage females that to any sort of outsider would appear romantic, and is indeed thought as a kind of “experimental” or more fittingly “adjusting” phase that is not unexpected but has nothing to say about the actual sexual orientation of the characters, which is absolutely expected to go back to heteresexual in the end.
It is considered immature to dwell on these relations.

As such, it is very necessary for this relationship not to be consummated sexually in nearly all works, since otherwise it would crash with the demographic, which is actually, underage straight girls, not young male adults, as could be expected.
(Which is targeted by more explicit, right to the point hentai stuff, mostly because the majority of males is apparently uninterested in romance stories)
Young male adults are definitely peripheral demographics, just how they are in case of magical girl nonsense, but not the target.

However, maybe it’s all just humbug, since I took most of my information from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_S_(genre) and http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RomanticTwoGirlFriendship …
Eitherway, even if this doesnt apply to MariMite, it’s still more of a classic case of hinted-at homoeroticism, simply because such a thing is actually still not A-OK in nearly all of today’s cultures.
Even Anime doesnt have a lot of homosexual relationships that are consummated outside of the specific genre that centers on them… …in which case it is nearly always used as a variant of the “Impossible Love” or “Unethical Love”, simply one step higher since most of the old conventions – love between members of different classes or warring factions or different race – are stale, not shocking, not as hard to overcome or not exotic enough.

Yes, Anime has tons and tons of Bishounen. But barely anyone is actually gay, are they?
A pity.
But Japan is, after all, probably more repressed in that area than western culture.

PS: As always, there are of course some works which are an exception.

Chabon cites “The Game,”

Oh shit, did Chabon just make us all lose the game?

…Oh shit, did I just troll my own blog?

And now, pertinence: a whimsical kind of scholarship, yes, but I wonder if it can’t be written with some kind of rigor. But don’t ask me how one would go about doing that.

I hereby proclaim scholarly writing, or any kind of textual analysis, fanfiction.

I really, really suspect this to be the case, or at least I suspect they’re far closer than any professor would deign to admit, but I don’t quite know how to articulate it yet. Nor have I been able to actually bring myself to experiment with fanfiction as an analytic technique (the bad Final Fantasy fics I wrote years ago don’t count…).