Yowayowa Sensei — Episode 1

Content Warning: Partial Underage Nudity, Nudity, Fan service, Teacher-student relationships

What’s it about? Busty teacher Yowayowa-sensei is known for cursing students. Only she’s no witch: she’s actually a really sweet woman named Hiyori Hiwamura who just happens to have a lot of misfortune—and a propensity for being unintentionally lewd.

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It’s never a good feeling when I search for an anime and the first thing out my mouth is a frightened cry of, “Oh nooooo!” but such is the case for Yowayowa Sensei who is putting sexy back in the wrong place—a.k.a. the classroom. But don’t worry, she’s still a good teacher right…?

Right?

Well, we get context for the splash image above at 00:01 when we meet Hiyori Hiwamura, who frequently looks like she belongs in a horror movie instead of the classroom. But don’t worry, she’s not actually a curse-giver: Hiyori is actually just incredibly shy, having only just started her tenure as a teacher fresh out of university. Only someone didn’t train Hiyori well, because five minutes in, she’s got her bra-covered breasts out in the open of her classroom and is discovered by Akihito Abikura, who she promptly lands on. 

That kicks off the main conceit of this show: Hiyori is too anxious to exist and breath properly and thus, Akihito must take control and help her rise to the occasion as a teacher of merit in her first year. 

This is what we call a flipped classroom. We do not like flipped classrooms.

But this anime is decidedly a flipped classroom with an adult woman so anxious about existing that she spends most of her time whimpering and moaning and barely able to teach English and baby, that’s what they call anime!

Or…is it? (You know it’s not and you know I have opinions.)

First things first, I’m sick and tired of adult women being reduced to legal babies—that is, I’m tired of actual adult women in anime having the speaking patterns of a three year old. Sure, Hiyori can be shy, but why does she sound like she’s constantly doing baby talk when she’s nervous, and why am I supposed to find that cute, charming, and sexy of all things? And I do mean the latter because Akihito, one of her students, frequently ends up in lewd situations and I think we’re supposed to find them…enticing?

It’s decidedly not enticing, and it’s not solely because the pupil has become teacher to a freakin’ adult: it’s because this anime is just trying so hard to play on the teacher-student dynamic but it’s so infantilizing that I could barely make it to the end of the premiere. Every joke feels like a slap in the face and I just honestly, can’t understand who the target audience is. Forget the fact that these lewd situations are with like, a fifteen year old (I mean don’t forget that, god please don’t, but put it aside for a larger point) but like…even if you’re into the fantasy of catching an authority figure’s eye, Hiyori herself is so incapable that it’s immediately a turn-off. She can barely make it through a sentence without hitting whistle note levels of high pitched speech, and it just undercuts what could have been an interesting adult for cheap sexual jokes.

And like, maybe someone will think I’m being too harsh on this series because I like something like Kakegurui or Keijo!!!!!!!! but you know what those have in common? The students aren’t constantly being inadvertently sexually assaulted by their adult teachers. Also, like…those series aren’t being labeled ROMANTIC COMEDIES like Yowayowa Sensei overtly is. They’re playing in a space but that space explores identity and sexuality without adults playing a part.

Here, it’s clear that something ain’t right and that Yowayowa Sensei, who’s probably twenty-two, is going to end up in a situation with her FIFETEEN YEAR OLD STUDENT and that’s just never going to be okay with me. If it’s bad when it’s the reverse—an older male and a young girl—then it’s bad here too, and in many ways, it’s worse because we’re supposed to laugh at everytime Hiyori almost eats it as she breasts boobily through life and forgets to wear underwear at her workplace.

If it’s not clear at this point, I can’t stand anime like this. I didn’t enjoy my viewing because every minute was filled with me just having permanent stank face from disgust. In a world where it’s becoming evident that so much of global girlhood was telegraphed by literal pedophiles who marketed the teenage girl body as lucrative and lascivious, it feels like a slap in the face to continue infantilizing women while also using them as vehicles of titillation when that titalation includes assaulting a minor. And that is the joke here: Hiyori is an adult and Akihito is a child, and we’re supposed to laugh (and drool) at her being haphazard, ill dressed, and constantly at risk of exposing herself to a student.

I’m never going to be the target audience for this kind of crap: it’s cheap laughs that serve sexism and sexual assault in the same breath, and honestly, I’d rather use my finite minutes on earth doing anything else.