Warning: This article discusses teenage sexuality in fiction and its portrayal in comics. Please mind your mental health and read at your own discretion.
When I was 13 I was heavily into picking out random manga at the bookstore—manga which sometimes contained content I wasn’t ready for despite supposedly being in the target age group. At one point I saw a book with a cute teal-haired anime girl with huge eyes. The art style was unlike anything I’d ever seen before, but the back of the book talked about the main character’s libido needing to be kept in check (ack!) so I quietly put the book back down and searched for something less suggestive.
Ten years later, I rediscovered the first volume at a used bookshop, and totally fell in love with DearS.
Here’s what I remember.
The initial opening is very similar to Chobits which has a plethora of (probably unintended) implications throughout its story. But unlike its more famous competitor, DearS rejects those issues by quickly introducing a gag character: Ms. Mitsuka, an insane pedophilic teacher who should have lost her job within the first week. Comparable in tone to Family Guy’s Herbert the Pervert, this character quietly-but-squarely establishes that the only condoned relationships in this comic are between high schoolers in the same age bracket.
You see, DearS, despite its cheesecake marketing and ecchi comedy label, is a comic about consent, and between the chaotic jokes and suggestive misunderstandings that the beautiful aliens frequently find themselves subject to, something serious and very dark quietly slips itself into the narrative, festering until it ultimately overtakes the plot.
Main character Takeya is 17 at the beginning of the comic, approaching the cusp of being at the age of consent, and not really sure what to do with all the sudden emphasis on sex that his peers are so excited about. He is hotheaded and yells a lot, but is also a genuinely good guy with a strong sense of justice. Takeya is markedly different than the “everyman” character that typically fills the role in why choose comedy comics and I found myself rooting for him rather quickly.
Meanwhile, alien girl Ren (also in her senior year) reeeeeeeally wants to get freaky with Takeya. After an accidental bonding ritual, Takeya quickly discovers that the DearS are a slave race, and Ren views Takeya as her fated master. And there’s one way that these artificial beings have been programmed to serve very thoroughly…
This is where DearS sets itself apart.
Unlike most other manga, especially manga geared towards teenage boys, one of the core messages of DearS is Just because he’s male doesn’t mean he wants it, along with Consent can be revoked at any time. As the comic progresses through the months (subtly implying that Takeya and Ren are 18 by the time things are getting serious, please take the hint, other mangaka) Takeya gradually grows closer to fulfilling Ren’s wish to make love. But he refuses—at first because he thinks having any kind of relationship with an alien would be wrong, later on because he feels like he’s just not ready for it yet. Only by the end of the comic (definitely 18 now, hint hint) does he finally feel like he’ll be ready soon.
Consent and why breaking that trust is bad is a persistent theme in the entire comic from beginning to end. From Ms. Mitsuka’s pursuit to the forceful actions of the higher-up DearS, if someone ignores a “no,” they’re immediately an enemy, or at least a laughingstock. Much of manga, and even romance media or genre fiction in general, abandons this crucial rule in favor of “but it looks cooler if it’s forced.” (Bleh.) I think that’s part of the reason why the BDSM themed characters don’t bother me as much in this particular series; we’re dealing with Safe, Sane, Consensual throughout, and it’s rule number 1 of any healthy segment of the kink community.
I love writing spice myself, but I don’t typically like spice content, even tame spice content, in my YA fiction. It’s something that’s rubbed me the wrong way ever since I hit my early twenties. This comic was a rare exception to my rule. DearS is ultimately about growing up and navigating the tricky world of sexuality and relationships that abruptly opens up to you at a certain age, and it approached it in such a way that, when I read it back in 2015, I felt was appropriately geared for a 16-20 year old audience. That is to say… I felt like I should have read it a few years sooner!
(There’s also some other serious recurring themes in this story. As you might suspect, they all involve ethics. But they’re spoilers!)
The two biggest problems I had with DearS at the time had nothing to do with the comic itself. The first problem was the splash images for marketing. They were much more objectifying than the comic itself and often included “money shots” and groping between characters who didn’t even like each other. I think this had something to do with the magazine executives trying to get readership and it was a total disservice to the characters and story. Senran Kagura this ain’t… show those aliens some respect!
The second problem is the anime itself. Crunchyroll has it up for streaming, and you should only watch it if you want a very watered down version of the first two books. A lot of people’s problems with the anime (IE “Why is Ren so submissive?”) were uncomfortable in the manga on purpose and are elaborated on (and sometimes resolved) later in the manga. I do own a copy of the DVD and I did have fun back in the day hearing the characters talk and move, but it’s a poor representation of the series.
(Pictured below is the DVD cover, which shows both problems in one fell swoop!)
To this day I don’t know a series like DearS that starts out as mostly fluff and comedy before taking a nosedive into themes about ethics and morality.
But… I’m scared to reread it. I’m certain I missed a lot of subtext reading it at 23 that I’d find obvious now, and like many other people I’d rather not spoil my memories of it. Hell, I didn’t notice the problems with Chobits for the first few months after I read it, and that one has some serious issues.
Nevertheless, my memories of DearS were a huge inspiration to write Fated Maids and the Royal Slug, which also features themes of consent in a setting usually reserved for pure cheesecake. I’ve yet to find another manga that fills the hole that DearS left behind—hell, can’t even find prose that fits the bill!—so I guess I’ll just have to write one myself, eventually.
If, somehow, DearS actually is exactly the way I remember it… then I’d still recommend this one. Highly.