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Short and simple story about a fantasy realm that seems to lie in an anachronistic time-bending universe teetering between ancient Romans and vaguely medieval, so simple, in fact, which makes seeing people vehemently defend the labeling of this as a "yuri" even more bizarre. I don't actually care about it being labeled yuri/GL on this site as I assume that was what it was originally marketed as, but the comment going really hard on trying to portray this as anything it isn't is simply odd, and might I say, transphobic.

Erminia, at every possible turn, proclaims himself to be a man, and this is not ... only brought up in the case of who "the princess should marry"; at nigh every turn Erminia reaffirms over and over again that he is a man/wishes to be one, and believes he has the heart or soul of a man placed in the body of a woman in some sort of "cruel joke" from the deities or a catastrophic mistake. Do masculine lesbians exist now, and could they have existed in the past, without modern words to describe themselves? Yes, certainly, but for goodness sake; stop trying to find loopholes to twist characters out of being transgender when this is legitimately the most straight forward example for a transgender man in older manga, alongside Claudine! from Riyoko Ikeda. The fact that the patriarchy affects transgender men does not make them any less transgender, no matter how much you wish for it. Playing the "sexist, homophobe" card against trans people seeing a character say, straightforwardly, "I believe the deity Janus, the two-faced, put my soul into the wrong body" and the hints throughout the series that Erminia was destined to be the ruler as both "man and woman" in one as opposed to rulers side-by-side of man and woman ("manly soul", "womanly vessel") and interpreting them as transgender, then you are a bigot. If your analysis of a series like Oniisama E, or any other yuri manga of that same time period which tended to end with the women getting boyfriends and moving on from their lost loves includes disregarding that in favor of a lesbian reading (which, I believe, is completely fair), then why isn't this offered the same: disregard for the ending's dismissal of the character's prior feelings/wishes? Or is it simply that you believe a lesbian story has more a right to exist when stories of trans men are so few and far between comparitively? Anyways.

Contempt aside, it was a sweet story-- the ending seemed incredibly rushed in some aspects, I wish more things had had the time to be explored for the characters themselves aside from Erminia, and even then I do believe Erminia was in need of a bit of polish as well. Sudden tragedy striking and the series ending there was just how the manga writers in the days of yore liked to do it, so I can't at all say it was very surprising or had much a twist with this ending, but I personally felt as if it needed another chapter or two to further flesh out this world, the characters, and to perfect the ending. A quick and enjoyable read, but nothing that would stay in the minds of anyone for especially long. :-)