The New Yuri-tastic Citrus Anime, and Breaking the Fourth Wall
Part of my job at J-List is to write descriptions for the many products we post to the site. Usually this process goes quickly and efficiently, but sometimes the manga I’m posting descriptions for is so interesting, I’m compelled to read the whole thing cover to cover right at my desk. That’s what happened when we first posted the manga for Citrus to the site: the amazing story pulled me in and kept me reading until I was behind in my other work.
And now we have a proper Citrus anime to enjoy! It’s the story of a cute gyaru named Yuzu who’s starting a new school after her mother gets remarried. Her mother’s new husband has a daughter, meaning that Yuzu suddenly has a new younger sister, which turns out to be the class representative from school, named Mei. But Mei isn’t your average strict-and-proper seito kaicho: she’s conflicted, full of hatred for her father, and unsure how to form relationships. When Yuzu asks her new sister why she was kissing a teacher behind the school, Mei surprises Yuzu with a deep kiss of her own. “A kiss? A kiss is nothing.” And so we begin what I believe will be the most yuri-licious dramatic anime since last year’s Scum’s Wish (which I evangelized pretty heavily here). The budget for the animation, seiyu and music for Citrus is high, and I think it’ll be a great ride. Hope you’ll be watching the Citrus anime!
One show from the past anime season I enjoyed was Anime-Gataris, sort of translatable as “Let’s gather around and talk about anime,” which is the story of Minoa, a high school girl who gets pulled into the unfamiliar world of anime, manga, light novels, cosplay and games. It was an unexpectedly enjoyable show in the tradition of other “otaku initiation” series like Genshiken, Welcome to the NHK and Otaku no Video. The last two episodes were great fun too: through the power of a magical cat named Neko-Senpai, Minoa becomes aware that the world she inhabits isn’t quite right. There are subtitles she keeps bumping into, and black bars on the side of the screen, and then all the characters’ character designs keep going back in time, to the 90s, the 80s, all the way back to the 60s. It was really meta and a lot of fun. If you watched the show but dropped it in the middle, give it a second try!
Thanks for making the 2018 anime calendar season our most successful ever. We’ve still got stock of some great calendars, though, and we want to help you help us move them out the door! So we’re knocking $10 off each of the calendars, though we only have a few of most left, so you should grab them while they’re in stock. Browse all our calendars now!
