Reviews

There is no requirement for romance elements in media to be “wholesome,” nor that it needs to be something life-affirming. However, *Yuri is My Job!* is resoundingly successful at making it seem like the dynamics of a yuri relationship, even a playacted one for the bemusement of the patrons in the show’s café, is the most misery-inducing thing on the planet for virtually everyone involved. That’s not to say that affection, romantic or platonic, cannot bring sadness or complication, because it’s a given that that’s a possibility. Rather, the setting for this anime engages in an aggravating pageantry. As the characters act out the Liebe Academy “Girl Mission School on a Hilltop,” the café acts as a nexus between acting and reality. Real-world romance and romantic feeling, insinuation, and possessiveness manage to make their way into the café’s world, while the café’s world of audience-pleasing Class S theatre makes its way into the outside. In theory, the divide between the fiction and the reality alluringly muddles to the point where it becomes a question of how much is sincere versus what is just for show, and whether what we see are just friendships or something beyond, or neither. In practice, it creates in its wake a mutually-parasitic cycle, culminating in a joyless, melodramatic black hole.

I cannot be wholly cruel to this series, though – the notion of a self you perform that can be turned off at-will as soon as the patrons are out of sight offers an interesting spin (something any actor or actress knows quite well). The eye-rollingly refined behavior of the café’s characters is something that *Yuri is My Job!* wants you to realize early on is completely false as a part of making its eventual melodrama work. The illusory world of the café and the theatrics it provides would, initially, seem like a perfect fit for Shiraki Hime. A master of the façade, she has successfully bamboozled her own classmates into framing herself as the enviable girl, popular and chic.

It all disguises the rather unfortunate truth that she ultimately puts on her façade for the purposes of striking it rich, living the lavish lifestyle with a handsome millionaire and never worrying about any materialistic pleasures being out of her reach. It’s only when she injures the manager of the Liebe Academy that she is roped into its shoujo manga-esque world, and headfirst into its frustrating, duplicitous workers. Lies and betrayals underlie all the relationships within the show, both occupationally and in reality, leaving those relationships to fester even when the narrative implies that closeness will eventually come. It dipped its toes into the unlikability lake too deeply.

In turn, the few occasions in which the characters seem to have achieved a genuine connection or mutual understanding ring hollow. The café job as both a setting and as an actively-practiced profession create a narrative imbalance between its pageantry and the attempts to cultivate something earnest. The former dominates the latter. Because of this, there is little reason to believe that anyone will necessarily change for the better, or that the new threads will succeed. For as much as the Liebe Academy story can serve as a metaphorical ground for the characters to explore their feelings, the dramaturgical emphasis of the show itself is on maintaining the status quo, keeping the café and its environment effectively in stasis forever. As such, the main inclination left behind is that the same misunderstanding mistakes or miseries via lying or secrecy will keep occurring again and again.

Much effort is poured into doing essentially everything possible except for actually asking questions point-blank, making the scant times this does happen a small oasis in an arid desert. It’s this ability to be candid or upfront that proves impossible since nearly each character is, in some manner, selfish and clings to mindsets or perspectives concerning one another that they either acknowledge are painful or don’t see what the problem is. And since romantic and platonic affection is one of the main ingredient within, these mindsets tinge *Yuri is My Job!* with a mean-spiritedness in such a flavor that drains its melodrama of any alluring spice.

I began this review by stating that “There is no requirement for romance elements in media to be ‘wholesome,’ nor that it needs to be something life-affirming.” I sincerely believe this to be true. But it should, at the very least, be in service of something. *Yuri is My Job!* serves up an aggravating cast in a setting that traps them, an unpleasant experience even when it lets you know it’s in on the plastic veneer inside joke. In the midst of its metacognitive awareness, it forgot to have a worthwhile reason to be fun or dramatically engaging.