Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
I’ve been trying to be slightly less longwinded in my writing as of late, so let me just lay the cards on the table here. You Are Ms. Servant, an odd little sort-of romcom from Felix Film, is primarily concerned with two equally-important questions. Question 1: Isn’t the anime pop cultural archetype of the maid-as-assassin, who exists only to kill on behalf of her master, as typified by examples as diverse as Izayoi Sakuya from Touhou and Roberta Cisneros from Black Lagoon, kind of fucked up? Question 2: Do you want a soft dommy mommy gf? Because whoever wrote this certainly does.
It’s probably best to think of You Are Ms. Servant as a pretty typical anime of this present moment for the medium. Visually, it’s all over the place, some shots are absolutely gorgeous, others are just barely passable. Overall, one gets the sense that, even accounting for the fact that this first episode looks pretty good on the whole, the production could fall to pieces at any moment and one wouldn’t be that surprised. There’s also a mashup of visual signifiers here that feels less original than it would have even a few years ago. Frequent cuts in the chibi style emphasize comedic moments, as does the technique of simply rattling a character back and forth very rapidly when they express surprise. At the same time, there’s a pretty heavy use of what we might call denpa imagery throughout this debut episode; shots of railroad tracks as trains breeze by, static-tinged memories, etc. It’s a weird mix, one that leaves the show feeling fairly incoherent tonally. A fact that is, in of itself, hardly notable at this point in this genre’s history.
The setup here is, as it often is in these shows, very simple. Yokoya Hitoyoshi [Kumagai Toshiki] is an ordinary high school boy who struggles with keeping his home clean and whose parents are presently conveniently out of town. Yuki [Ueda Reina], whose name we don’t actually learn in this first episode but which I am plucking from Anilist’s character sheet for convenience, is a “maid” seeking work, who has for reasons only vaguely explained in passing, decided to come to Hitoyoshi for her prospective employment. Obviously, this makes no sense and is the realm of pure fantasy. This is fine on its own, of course, and I’d even argue that the fact that Yuki goes to Hitoyoshi shaves some of the inherent ickiness off of the basic concept here. More the problem is that Yuki is cast firmly in the Yor Forger mold, she’s preternaturally talented at murder, but absolutely hopeless at anything else, in a way that is clearly supposed to be humorous but mostly hits a somewhat sour note. It’s hard to get the thought “we’re doing this again?” out of one’s head throughout a lot of the comedic material. This is a trope that’s been quickly run into the ground over the past few years, and Ms. Servant is not going to be the one to make it funny again.
If You Are Ms. Servant can claim any great innovation, it’s in attempting to return the character archetype to its roots. Yuki is a goofball a lot of the time, baffled by the idea that anyone would enjoy food instead of just thinking of it as pure sustenance and flummoxed by even the simplest of household chores, but there are moments that reveal some real darkness within her. Memories of being raised as a child assassin, Noir-style, intrude on the otherwise simple world of the series. One gets the sense that Yuki’s past is something she’s actively running from, and that her turning up on Hitoyoshi’s doorstep is no coincidence.
Hitoyoshi has his own demons, too. His parents’ absence would be unremarkable in most anime with this setup, but we learn toward the conclusion of this episode that he’s prone to having nightmares wherein he cries out for his mother. The implication here seems to be that Hitoyoshi is a child of divorce. So, it is perhaps inevitable that the varying needs of this narrative, in this format, conspire to give the final moments of this episode a, we’ll say, very particular feeling. This is where Question 2 starts coming up.
Technically, at least in this first episode, it is never outright said that these two are attracted to each other, but come on.
So that, it seems, is You Are Ms. Servant, an age gap romance informed by its characters respective troubled upbringings, standing on an unsteady foundation of hacky comedy, reaching for denpa signifiers in search of meaning. Will the series ever actually do anything with the obvious wellspring of disquiet here? It’s hard to predict these things ahead of time, but the example of some past similar anime doesn’t incline me to get my hopes up. Still, its blend of disparate elements is at least distinct. I want the series to dig into the pasts of its main characters more, and I want that direct namedrop of the term “found family” in the closing narration to actually mean something. Time will tell if it does.
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