Actually relevant to my topic for once...
Did this latest episode of Maria-Sama ga Miteru drop early, or is it just me? Anyway, keeping with my tradition (uh, that’s what I’m calling it, shut up), I’m coming up with a third post in my ongoing series attached (not always about, but at least attached) to the fourth series. Watching this third episode, wherein everyone wants to be one of the Roses, eventually, and will sweat two years of gofering for Manic Yoshino or ph33r-genki Yumi to do so. My concern in this post is that of power, which, it could be argued, is always everyone’s concern, all the time.
Who has power in Lillian Gakuen? Last time, I alluded to the people who created the structure of the school, and we could assume they have power — if we ever saw them. Have we even seen a teacher in the last few seasons? There are obvious answers. The Yamayurikai, as the student council, has power, duh. But how? In general no one ever seems to remember that they’re the student council — they’re more like the local celebrities than anything else. Which means they’re not wielding administrative power (even though they can); they use their fame, essentially, as a kind of power.
Yes, even Yumi is doing this. She doesn’t get it, and that’s part of what the show is about — she’s incredibly popular and doesn’t notice. But who else would be able to get away with a tea party as a method of choosing a future student council member? That is not an administrative method, I promise. It is exactly the kind of thing John Lennon might have done, though, had he needed a little sister to wash the dishes (he would have had to get out of the bed to make the poster, though). Basically, the Yamayurikai is not the student council, but crazy celebrities, and everyone does what they want partly to please them, and partly, as super-popular people, they’re slotting into the studentia’s ideas of Good People, which means the studentia will, more often than not, genuinely think their schemes are Good Ideas.
Sachiko, obviously, uses this power more often than most. The new season has shown her leading everyone around by the nose. She does it to Yumi, like when she informed Yumi that yes, learning all new lines will be easy, and enjoyable. She did it to Kanako, though there was a little chicanery involved there, too. She’s done it to Touko, and inadvertently to Plain Yogurt (sorry, I mean Noriko). At times, like with Noriko, she doesn’t even mean to do it. That’s how idol-influence works.
I have to wonder, looking at the way the entire school reacts this way, if it was planned. Could the people who structured the school have predicted the student council would be extremely popular? Is that my culture showing through? That is, are they, at least often enough, actually popular in Japanese schools, or media depicting same? Because in my experience those people may be popular, but for other reasons, not because they’re part of the decision-making caste (until you get to college, of course, where it seems like you have to be in a Greek group to make it into office). Marimite hasn’t once, in what I remember, done a story about any duties the Yamayurikai has to the school at large, save their efforts to make the cultural festivals good times for all. Were they even more than incidentally involved in running the sports festival?
Maybe this “power from popularity” thing is meant to be particular to a school for girls? If so, it seems a bit sexist. Hanadera certainly doesn’t seem to work that way — Yuuki gets pushed around within the council, and I can’t imagine his life is any better outside it, though I don’t think he’s being bullied in any way. I’m sure we’d see an episode about that if it were true.
Having (hopefully) established that the power within the school comes primarily from popularity — why else is the Journalism club such a group to be feared? — where does the power go? That is, what is it used for?
Not a whole lot, on the surface of things. Most of the time we see the Roses, their little sisters, and so on, all sitting around drinking tea, or washing up afterwards. Every so often one has an idea for something that isn’t tea-drinking (even when, in the current story’s case, it is still tea-drinking). We usually don’t see a lot of the maneuvering we could assume happens — we got just a bit when Mami was there, taking notes for the announcement, and long ago they had to use the journalists to spread the word about their card-date-hunt thing, but mostly the fine webs of influence we must assume exist, as they do in any group of people, aren’t shown directly. I posit, though, that the power is, in a sense, being held in reserve. Every once in a while one of the Roses will ride out and right a wrong (I may still be giddy after my matching up of Toradora! and Arthurian myth, sorry about that), and they need power with which to do so. They don’t traffick in their own power very often, so it’s not dispersed, or in simpler terms, they never get to be old news. Both because the school is so isolated, and because the Yamayurikai keep to themselves so much they’re essentially wizards on a mountaintop, whenever they show up outside of mundane, “we have class together” contexts, everyone gets excited, priming them so the power will work properly. Like real life celebrities who cause such stirs, part of the Yamayurikai’s power comes from their mystique, their removal from everyday things, and they use the power in a way that reflects this origin, coming down from the mountain, if you will, to fix something that’s come off script, then retreating again until they are needed.
Ooh! Maybe the journalism club was created by these unseen forces as a way to counteract the potential abuse of power by the roses!
Shit! I must hide it is not safe here…
I *do* keep talking about the creators of the school, don’t I? I don’t actually think there’s a strange agenda anywhere in the school’s construction, but I keep talking about the way it works, and it just seems natural to mention it… Hm.
I remember that the student body actually votes for the Roses/yamayurikai/seitokai, which makes it all the more hegemonic?
It would seem to, yes. Especially as voting is a popularity contest of sorts, and the Roses’ younger sisters seem to almost-automatically get some popularity among the studentia.