WHAT IS SAE-ISM?
Sae-ism is a wholesome, family-friendly manga about a healthy and supportive heterosexual relationship. I am normal about it. I don't think about it too much. I enjoyed it a normal, healthy amount. I didn't like it too much. I have normal opinions about it. I have a normal relationship with it.
No, seriously. Sae-ism is a toxic yuri manga written by Tohru Uchimizu, and I like it a lllloooott. It's very obscure and there's actually a very big chance I am its biggest fan. There isn't much written about it in the whole internet, and this shrine is here to FIX THAT. It tells the story of a girl, Misao Kuniki, who gets costantly bullied at school until the popular and talented Sae Maki chooses her as her friend. All is well, but then Sae starts getting more and more possessive and controlling, until Misao seeks help to get away from her...
WHY DO I LIKE IT?
Good question. I am aware that Sae-ism is, in fact, a shitty manga (talking about the first 10 volumes here, the others are a different can of worms, I'll get to them later). It is ridiculously edgy, over-the-top to the point of being nonsensical at times, and that is precisely why I love it. Because it's edgy, angsty, grungy, nasty, intense, thrilling and dramatic. Holy shit, Sae-ism, my soulmate. No matter how many batshit interpretations and theories I slap on top of it (see the Thoughts section), at its heart it's angsty bloody drama, all edge and no point like a pizza cutter - and unapologetically so. It has MANY shortcomings, but I love it in a way that's basically unconditional. There are moments when it gets so dramatic and over-the-top that it ends up being laughable, but in a good way. Yes in a good way. Just a hearty laugh, somehow. It's all just seamless and perfect. It's perfect to me, I don't know how else to explain it. This has everything I want. Often I have dreams in which I watch/read/listen to stuff that I like very much, and then when I wake up I'm super disappointed that it doesn't exist in real life. It's like this manga came straight from one of those dreams, except it's real, someone made it, and I can keep reading it.
I love it so much that I don't feel the need to read anything else from the genre after this. When I read the genre - which is supposed to be a guilty pleasure anyways - I'm looking for intense stuff. This fits the bill in just the specific right way. For example, I've read Kitanai Kimi ga Ichiban Kawaii, in which... stuff happens (if you know you know), and I didn't care much for it. But this one takes the cake. NOT because it's got more extreme stuff (that would be worrying), but because it's far more edgy and grandiose about what it does, and I genuinely think it's beautiful.
One important thing that I want to mention is that the Sae-ism I've made this shrine for, the Sae-ism I love, the TRUE and HONEST Sae-ism is, to me, from volume 1 to 10. Since volume 11, it's fallen off HARD in every conceivable way... I'll complain about it at length in the Thoughts section, but like, I thought it was important to point this out from the start.
Tl;dr: yandere yuri
MY HISTORY WITH IT
It was April 23rd 2024... I was on neocities and ONE OF YOU FUCKERS!!!!! (dont worry im not gonna rat you out bestie) was writing about toxic yuri. And I said oh, thats something I might like, I have nothing to do, let's check it out. So I started searching things like "toxic yuri manga recommendations" and saw Sae-ism in a few lists. Searched it up, liked the plot, read it, immediately fell head over heels in love with it, yadda yadda yadda and thats my villain origin story. Pretty simple right.
After binging the first part in a few hours I came across a huge problem. Only the first part of the manga, comprising the volumes from 1 to 4, was translated to English. The rest of the manga - volumes from 5 to 14 and ongoing - is untranslated, and nobody seems to want to pick it up either. Now, the fourth volume technically provides a conclusion (as rushed as it may be - but I'll talk about it in the "volumes" section) to the story - in fact it seems that Tohru just randomly picked the manga back up and wrote part two after three years - but I was in love and could I be contented, knowing there were whole other volumes waiting out there? So I ended up paying 9 dollars for an automatic translation service on Gumroad. I'm not gonna say the name, but it worked quite well!! There are still errors of course - for example it fucked up pronouns and character names 80% of the time - but, for being machine-translated, it's pretty good and most of the time it's a pretty seamless read. I mean, it better be, I paid 9 dollars.
After finishing volume 14 I pissed blood* and now all I can do is stalk Tohru Uchimizu on twitter and surreptitiously screenshot panels from the minuscule scrimply miserable little chapters that come out once a month. Tohru is feeding me CRUMBS and I am STARVING. But I will gladly suffer for love. Slayyyyy
Check out the other sections in the navbar if you want to continue hearing my unhinged rants (Are you sure tho)
*I actually did (though probably not because of Sae-ism)
