Sexiled: My Sexist Party Leader Kicked Me Out, So I Teamed Up With a Mythical Sorceress!
Kaeruda Ameko
Miya Kazutomo (illustrator)
Molly Lee (translator)
174 pages
published in 2019
About halfway through Sexiled: My Sexist Party Leader Kicked Me Out, So I Teamed Up With a Mythical Sorceress!, our heroine has uncovered a conspiracy at the magical school she graduated top of the class from, a conspiracy to falsely lower the score of female applicants on the entrance exams to keep the number of women admitted artificially low. When I read that, I knew this must have been a reference to the scandal of several Japanese medical schools having been caught in 2018 doing exactly that. In her afterword, Kaeruda Ameko admitted that it was indeed this story that led her to write Sexiled. A female power/revenge fantasy, as opposed to the numerous male power fantasies that litter the genre.
Like most light novels, reading the full title is enough to get a sense of what Sexiled: My Sexist Party Leader Kicked Me Out, So I Teamed Up With a Mythical Sorceress! is about. Tanya Artemiciov is a talented mage and adventurer, who one day over breakfast is fired from her party by its leader, Ryan. She’s after all not getting any younger, must be thinking about getting married and having babies, right? So it would make sense for her to stop being an adventurer and do something more suited to women, like becoming a Healer, right? Needless to say, Tanya disagrees, storms off to the Western Wastelands to blow off some steam and as she attacks the innocent landscape, her magical attacks accidentally wake up a mythical evil sorceress. Oops.
Fortunately the Grand Sorceress Laplace’s is much nicer than her reputation — though she has a bit more self regard than normal — and after some …negotiating she and Tanya team up to take part in the upcoming Tournament, to take revenge on Tanya’s old team. However, because they’re both ridiculously overpowered, they need a third person to bring their average level down enough to be able to participate. They find her in Nadine Amaryllis, a clerk at the Adventurers Guild, who so happens to be a level 3 Healer. Normally nobody would be interested in such a low level adventurer, but thanks ot her their party’s level is lowered just enough to be able to meet the tournament’s requirements.
Nadine agrees to join, on one condition: Tanya and Laplace have to make sure her charge Alisa gets into the Imperial mage academy. Alisa is an orphan who has the sole care of her younger siblings, who needs to become a mage to be able to get a good job to provide for them. Tanya and Laplace are naturally touched by this story like the big softies they are and agree to it. It’s when Alisa takes the entrance exam that another candidate — a boy of course — spills the beans and Tanya and co learn of the conspiracy to limit the number of women passed. Which they quickly rectify.
This side quest to get Alisa in the academy is at the core of what Sexiled is about. It harkens back to what inspired Kaeruda to write the story in the first place, it shows the female solidarity that flows throughout it as well as the male fragility and sexism that Tanya and co are fighting against. Tanya, Laplace and Nadine naturally look out for each other, have each other’s back. Liberated from the expectations that the male dominated Adventurers society place on them, they can blossom to their fullest potential. With Laplace as the exemplar of what a woman can achieve if not stifled by archaic gender expectations, Tanya gets the chance to break free herself, from things like this:
“This style’s been in fashion ever since we found out that women have to expose as much skin as possible in order to boost their mana sensitivity.” Aha. That explained why it seemed as though every female adventurer was so ridiculously scantily clad: they were being lied to. Truly lamentable.
Yep, all woman adventurers have to wear Guild approved clothing, which mostly is skimpy and “sexy” rather than functional, with the excuse given as above, that it’s necessary. Here Sexiled neatly skewers fantasy convention, neither the first nor the last time it does so. All those stupid little ways in which fantasy can demean female characters are taken apart and rejected.
What Sexiled offers instead is solidarity. Laplace naturally sympathises with Tanya’s plights and helps her, while the both of them go out of their way to help Nadine and Alisa in turn, even though they could’ve found another low level adventurer for their party instead. And than there’s Katherine Foxxi.
Katherine is the Healer Ryan replaced Tanya with, the epitome of the Cool Girl, fawning over men and bitchy about any woman but herself. She hang’s on Ryan’s arms and constantly flatters him, but as Tanya notices, she doesn’t seem to mean any of it. The opposite of Tanya, who earnestly worked hard to become a great mage, Katherine is perfectly happy stoking the ego of men like Ryan to get what she wants, aiming to use him to look good in the tournament and get herself a better man. Yet once the tournament begins and Tanya’s party fights her, it turns out that she is actually a talented Mage in her own right, that had they met under other circumstances they could’ve been friends. And in the end, after Tanya and co’s inevitable win, that’s what they become, as Katherine wises up and changes her ways.
Sexiled was a quick read; you could finish this in an hour. Apart from its feminist message, it’s very much what you’d expect from a fantasy light novel, with a straight forward plot and a RPG based world, complete with Adventure Guilds and character classes and all that good stuff. As per usual, there’s a bit more exposition than you’d expect in a ‘proper’ novel, some mild confusion in point of view every now and again, but in all it’s very moreish. Luckily the next volume comes out in December 2019. Translation wise there’s the occasional hiccup where a sentence doesn’t quite make sense in English, but on the whole Molly Lee has done a good job, in as far as I can judge.
The last thing that needs mentioning are the illustrations. They’re cute, sexy when needed, but no broken spines and I like the character designs. They whet the appetite for a manga or anime adaptation.
All in all this was a glorious romp and I’m looking forward to the next volume.
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