Bad Girl – Episode 1

Content Warning: light fan service

What’s it about? High school good girl Yuu is determined to figure out a way to catch her senpai Atori’s eye. How? By becoming the baddest girl in her entire school and acting like a full on delinquent! 

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Bad Girl is one of three yuri shows gracing the summer anime season, and like its companions, it is set in high school. While I’m a fan of yuri overall, I have to admit that this series wasn’t on my radar. I tend to prefer my yuri in novels or manga: I don’t often stick with anime because I always find myself ahead of the adaptations. However, in this case, I ended up with Bad Girl by pure luck, placing it firmly front and center for me.

Question is, will my generally broad taste for lilies be enough to make Bad Girl feel like it’s full of good girls, or am I gonna go into my bad boy phase? You already know how you’ll find out: gotta read to the end of my review!

Episode 1 is a series of segments inside of one episode, each detailing the life of Yuutani Yuu, a model first year student who wants to get the attention of her crush. How? By being the baddest of the baddies, the most ne’er do well of the delinquents! 

What ensues is a series of peeks into the charmingly mundane antics of multiple sapphic high schoolers living their lives while also trying to figure it all out. Yuu stumbles, fumbles, and nearly crashes out, but thankfully, she’s not alone in her trials to get her senpai to notice her!

I’m always down for a yuri anime, and my, oh my, is this definitely yuri from jump. There’s no doubt that this is a queer anime, and I kind of love that there’s no pussyfooting around that fact. Instead of “Oh me, oh my, it’s not okay to like a girl!” Yuu immediately goes all in on trying to get her crush—Mizutori Atori’s—attention by going from top-ranked student to…still incredibly skilled student but now with piercings and two-toned hair. It is charmingly cultural in its execution, but that’s not a bad thing: in fact, I really found myself relaxing into this premiere minute by minute.

Part of its charm is seeing Yuu continually try to change herself to get her crush’s attention, and while you should never change yourself to meet someone’s desires over being who you are, here, it’s a device used to show that Yuu is really, really, REALLY bad at being well…bad.

Her attempts are so on the nose that she actually ends up circling around to being hilariously herself. Her two-toned hair? Just extensions that can be taken out. Her piercings? Ear cuffs made from binder clips. Her tattoo? Extremely temporary. Everything she does reveals that at her core, Yuu is far from a bad girl, and is in fact really sweet. In any other show, this might all seem too much like a gag, but here, it balances out a well-intentioned first year student’s attempts to capture her crush’s attention.

My one complaint is something I’m seeing more and more: the really cleavage-heavy nude shots of teenagers in the opening. I don’t know if someone thinks they’re doing something artistic, but it’s just weird no matter what genres you’re working with—doubly so because these are kids. Thankfully it doesn’t translate into to the show itself.

Bad Girl is, at its heart, a comedy that has budding romance. Will it likely turn into full-on romance? Hopefully, but the journey is more important than the destination here. Heck, I’m not even sure the romance will be between Yuu and Atori at this point, but I’ll let you pontificate on that. What does matter is that Bad Girl is actually really fun watching, being openly queer, very flirty in a natural way, and as bubbly as a mimosa at brunch. 

What that equals for me is a show I’ll definitely be returning to, partially to make more use of my HiDive account, fully because I actually really liked it.