The Spring 2023 Anime Preview Guide

Yuri Is My Job!

Hime is a high school girl who deeply cares about her image as a sweet, helpful princess but on the inside only cares about herself. Against her will, Hime gets manipulated into working as a waitress at a place that's part café, part theater, where all the waitresses pretend to be students at a fictional German all-girls boarding school. Hime finds herself falling for another waitress at the café, who in front of the customers gives Hime love and devotion like she's never known. There's just one problem: Behind the scenes, Hime's crush hates her guts.

Yuri Is My Job! is based on Miman's Yuri Is My Job! (Watashi no Yuri wa Oshigoto Desu!) manga and streams on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

Just from the start, Yuri Is My Job! has a great conceit. While the landscape of Yuri/Girls' Love manga has changed since the years of Maria Watches Over Us and Strawberry Panic!, that aesthetic is still deeply ingrained in both the subgenre's history and its place in popular consciousness. While these days there's room for more grounded and relatable WLW stories, there's also a lot of affection for the vaulted halls and melodramatics of Class S tales of secluded Catholic schools absolutely lousy with lesbians. So the idea of characters playing out a constructed soap opera in front of their customers while subtly instigating a workplace dramedy between the lines of kayfabe is a pretty brilliant way to bridge those worlds.

The key to whether or not that works for you will hinge on our star, Hime. As a purposefully duplicitous character who hides a far more cynical personality behind a façade of eternal sweetness, she's the perfect protagonist for this setup. Especially since, as we see through this episode, her manufactured cuteness isn't quite the perfect fit for the cafe's audience, nor is she quite as slick as she thinks herself to be. There are also a few subtle hints that her façade is more defensive than mercenary and that she fears rejection more than she desires affection. It works for me and makes the whole thing a lot more interesting for potential conflict, but it also means our leading lady is kind of an asshole who is constantly saying one thing but thinking another.

Though that two-faced element sort of holds for everyone in the cast. Gyaru-delinquent double-threat Sumika comes off as brash and intimidating, but through the episode, we see she's the most collected and considerate of the cafe's staff. Manager Mai strong-arms Hime into joining the staff over an injury that I am 99% sure she's faking, considering she can use that bandaged-up hand just fine whenever Hime isn't looking. Then there's Mitsuki, who plays the loving and supportive senpai in front of customers but is the one person who immediately sees through Hime's mask and can't stand her for it. There's a sense that everyone here is more complicated than the version of themselves they present, either at work or in private.

It's too early to tell exactly where this theme of façades will go, but it's consistent enough that I feel safe calling it intentional. If you need someone guileless and innocent to root for, this might not be your bag, but for my part, it's an excellent setup for a story all about putting on a performative persona. As somebody who enjoys both the histrionics of the yuri stories this show homages and the more realistic portrayals of queerness of today, I'm just excited to see how Yuri Is My Job! might meld the two.