To be honest, I don’t know if I’ll fully commit to writing episode reviews Yuri is My Job!. I keep putting CGDCT shows up for consideration so part of me feels like putting that on pause. That said, I did enjoy the first episode of this show so I’m at a bit of a crossroad right now. Well, let’s tackle one episode for now.
Yuri is My Job! begins follows Hime Shiraki (Yui Ogura), a model student who puts on a charming and an endearing persona to achieve her dream of marrying rich. By chance, she accidentally injures Mai Koshiba (Yukari Tamura), a young café manager who forces Hime into serving as a waitress at her café as compensation. The gimmick of the café is that all the waitresses roleplay as students of a fictional all-girls boarding school, Liebe Girls Academy. Also working at the café are Sumika Chibana (Makoto Koichi) and Mitsuki Yano (Sumire Uesaka), both of whom act as the upperclassmen of the academy.
The premise of the café is a bit far-fetched to me. Like, do the girls really need to stay in-character when they serve the customers? How would that work with the whole school plot? Do the girls commit to one continuous act for the day or do they repeat performances to accommodate for the different droves of customers? I feel the latter would make more sense but the show appears to imply the former instead, which I imagine would get exhausting as the day goes by. Then again, I guess it’d create FOMO and that could be great for business. Most peculiarly, there doesn’t appear to be a script of some kind. I guess improvisation is the name of the game here. Even so, you’d think there’d be a reference book of some kind so that the crew can keep track of continuity. I suppose this is all stuff that I’ll have to look the other way on. Whether or not I can is a whole other matter.
Things do get interesting when Hime blurts out that she sees Mitsuki as an older sister figure, due to the kindness the later shows her during her first day of work. That kind of relationship is apparently unprecedented in the Liebe canon so the customers are now expecting the staff to follow up on it. Mai suggests giving the customers what they want and provides necklaces for Hime and Mitsuki to use to represent their “pact”. Mitsuki is vehemently opposed to the idea, even shedding her professionalism and getting confrontational with Hime. Hime on the other hand goes through with the plan and invertedly forces Mitsuki to play along.
While Mitsuki is almost comical in the 180 she pulls against Hime, it’s hard not to feel sympathetic to her. She’s been working at the café for some time now and has presumably contributed tirelessly to its narrative. Suddenly, there’s this new girl and not only is she unfamiliar with the material, she also creates and ropes Mitsuki into a shakeup that the latter doesn’t approve of and has no point of return. I can see why this girl would get salty.
As for Hime, she’s a bit oblivious to the bigger picture so I’m willing to give her a slight pass on her pushiness. Even so, there’s no denying that what she does at the end of the episode is selfish. Part of her general façade is being the center of attention and that seeps into her new job as she subconsciously uses her pact with Mitsuki to put all the attention on her. The question to now ask is if Hime will eventually realize this part about herself and if she will change. Should she change, will that also remove the bad blood that’s currently between her and Mitsuki? It’ll be interesting to see where she goes from here.
Yuri is My Job! is on Crunchyroll
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