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.
Picture this; two-faced, self-absorbed little girl who goes out of her way to make people think she’s a total angel gets strong-armed into working at a yuri-themed café as compensation for minorly injuring one of their actual employees. This premise sounds like something straight out of a yuri series itself, because that’s exactly what Yuri is My Job! is (note the title), but it’s an unusually meta and self-aware one. Yuri, in as much as it has a mainstream, tends toward more domestic stories these days except on its absolute outside edges (eg. Otherside Picnic), so something like this that’s a little different from the norm is an interesting way to shake things up. In a sideways sort of way, its premise also makes it an anime about acting—albeit in a distinctly different fashion than, say, its contemporary World Dai Star or anything like that—and in particular, about someone who is kind of bad at acting.
That’d be our protagonist, Hime [Yui Ogura], who is the one roped into working at this place, and it’s no ordinary eatery. The cafe workers, in addition to the minutiae of actually running a café, act out a sort of perpetually-ongoing play about their imaginary lives as students at an all-girls’ school called Liebe Girls’ Academy. The business of running the establishment and the narrative are tightly interweaved, with the café itself being flavored as a “salon” that the students work at. The particular style that Yuri is My Job! is reaching for here is called Class-S. I’m sure I don’t need to explain that one to my yuri soldiers, but for the rest of you, to greatly, greatly simplify; it’s stuff in the same broad vein as Maria Watches Over Us, a kind of romantic schoolgirl life series / drama, in varying mixtures depending on the series, usually featuring what are pretty explicitly wlw romantic relationships but with an air of plausible deniability about them. This style used to be very popular but has since largely been supplanted by other sorts of yuri. Nonetheless, it retains a fanbase, and certainly retains one within the world of Yuri is My Job! itself. Hence the theme.
The actual narrative and backstory of the fictional academy is fairly complex, and all of the girls play specific characters with defined relationships to each other. Hime, who spends much of her time in her own day to day life convincing people that she’s basically an angel, does not really understand this. During her first day, she tries to charm the cafe’s customers and her coworkers alike the same way she charms other people in her everyday life, and it doesn’t really work. In particular, she makes a genuinely pretty massive slip-up by calling another girl, Mitsuki [Sumire Uesaka], onee-sama. To Hime, and, I’m sure, much of the audience, this is a best-guess as to what the sort of character who’s involved in this setting might call an older girl she finds reliable. But she fails to account for either the rules of this whole ordeal or for the potential reactions of the customers, and this simple act of being a bit overly-familiar becomes a whole thing. Mitsuki gets quite annoyed with her, and the cafe’s manager has to consider adjustments to the cafe’s ongoing narrative to accommodate what the customers heard her say. (Will it surprise you to learn that the café has a fan website and that people gossip about the goings-on in the fictional school there? It shouldn’t.)
One might think I’d find Hime sympathetic here, but to be honest, her “façade” as she frequently calls it makes it a bit difficult to actually like her terribly much this early on. And, well, I’ve gone off enough times this season about how important it is to be able to “buy” someone as a talent when seeing them involved in an even fairly minor performing art. Hime tries to barrel through all of these dramatic motions with nothing but a relentlessly princessy sort of aura, and it just doesn’t work. It’s not Hime’s fault that she ends up having to work at this place, but she is making everyone else’s job harder. Mitsuki has every right to be annoyed! Things get even worse when the manager proposes possibly having Mitsuki and Hime’s characters become Schwestern—German for “sisters”, plural, and a term here used for a sort of heavily romantically-coded upperclassman/underclassman relationship—and exchange the traditional cross-shaped pins (called Kreuze) to demonstrate their devotion to each other. Mitsuki is pretty against the idea, given that Hime’s only just started working there and she doesn’t particularly like the new hire in the first place. But Hime, unfortunately, sees this as another opportunity to try to pour on the charisma, which leads to her second day at the cafe. One even more disastrous than the first.
Before we get to that, though. Let’s pull back for a second and consider what the show is doing with all this. Because all interactions within the cafe are inherently just performances, there is the temptation to ask; is Yuri is My Job! criticizing yuri audiences? Are we being accused of just wanting to watch girls pine for each other without dealing with any of the real ramifications of two women in love? If we are, the show’s not particularly picky about who it’s aiming that shot at. The cafe’s customer base seems to consist of about an even split of men and women (although the former are the only ones to vocally complain when Hime comes on too strong, an interesting thing to note).
To be honest, no, I don’t really think that’s what the series is trying to do. With the obvious caveat that I’m only going off of one episode here, I think the show’s position is more that this whole space that the café creates is, of course, a performed fantasy, and one that must end at a certain point each day. But, it also seems to take the view that this fantasy is important. It’s certainly important to Mitsuki, who becomes ever more frustrated with Hime over the course of her second day at the cafe specifically because she doesn’t seem to recognize this importance. Hime treats this as a job and an obligation. For Mitsuki, it is pretty obviously a passion.
Frankly, for anyone who—like yours truly—gets secondhand embarrassment easily, day two is a rough watch. Hime seems pretty used to her little charm routine getting most people to like or at least tolerate her, and when it doesn’t work during her café shifts she doesn’t really know what to do. She doesn’t even seem entirely aware that her pushiness is unwelcome as she glibly tries to steer the narrative toward her character and Mitsuki’s becoming romance-buddies. And she does not get it when both Mitsuki herself and the other café girls try to walk her away from that idea, despite their increasingly-obvious frustration. (I would describe watching this as akin to watching someone walk, unbothered, into a blazing inferno. Hime’s obliviousness and ego reach some truly stunning levels here.) Eventually, she actually succeeds in making this so, within the “lore” of the café. But at the cost of Mitsuki now absolutely hating her guts, which is, frankly, a pretty understandable reaction. The episode ends on her telling Hime as much, to Hime’s confusion.
If I pull back from the embarrassment, I get what’s going on here. Hime doesn’t really understand how the café works at the end of the day, and doesn’t understand that it’s such a big deal to Mitsuki. Presumably, her learning to do so—and learning to see the value in what the café does, as a maintained, creative narrative space—will form her arc over the course of the series, and we the audience will eventually be collectively in Hime’s corner. (If you like overconfident failgirls I imagine some of you already are.) Me though? Right now, I’m in Mitsuki’s corner, and I kind of hate Hime.
But, I must emphasize, that’s not actually a criticism. Being able to elicit emotions this strong is actually a very good thing for something like this, and what’s impressive is that Yuri is My Job! also proves itself to be surprisingly multifaceted here. I can’t wait to see what else it has in store. Even if I have to watch Hime march into that inferno a dozen more times to get there.
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