First, a tiny bit of introduction, then the griping ^_^

I got into _UF_ in high school, long ago when the internet was flat, '93/'94 or so. I still have a shell function in my bash aliases file, to call up www.eyrie.net/nxe in lynx, even though I bailed on 3:3 for several years before I went back and finished it.

I indentured myself to the army instead of finishing off college, and am back in Iraq for a second deployment right now.

_The Iron Age_ drew me back in about three weeks ago, and led me to start reading _Symphony of the Sword_. Once I started _SotS_ it sucked down all my non-working awake time until a couple days ago, when I finished it, and this is adapted from my whinging on livejournal ^_^

As I read, a couple things stood out:

In _SotS_ I didn't see a single gay couple. Juri notes the f/f couple when she's first out with Kaitlyn, and that's about it for on-screen relationships that don't involve named characters.

There are no gay boys, no f/m/m groups, and no explanation why, despite verbose prose and a very detailed background. Five to ten percent of the population just _vanished_ without even an a claim by one of the characters that `they're boring, so I ignore them' or somesuch.

In contrast, there are _three_ f/f/m triads, and, historically in _UF_, we have Asrial's harem as well, even though we don't see most of them in _SotS_ . . .

This falls on top of what irritated me all out of proportion to it's actual significance: All three of the triads formed during _SotS_ were an established f/f pairing which brought in a male. Amanda/Rina/Devlin works in large part because we, as the audience, met them all about the same time, and two of them are aliens, so . . .

Utena and Corwin had a _long_ time put into developing their relationship, and folding Anthy into it, so, while it _annoys_ me to see anyone else in with Utena and Anthy, it'd annoy me if Corwin was female, too, so . . .

Kaitlyn and Juri and Miki . . . umm. In their own story, with their own build up, without the other two triads already in this story . . . But they're not. Storywise, it's real sudden, but at least they seem happy with themselves and each other.

Rather more annoying is the way Anthy and Utena seem to have fallen straight into Lesbian Bed Death. They are married on the same day Anthy is rescued from Cephiro, sent off for only a three day honeymoon, and then we have no more on screen physical affection between them than they share with any of the other females.

I mean, it's not like I'm going to stop reading, but it's _annoying_.