Citrus

Yuzu Aihara was just an ordinary girl who was Clueless about love, and yet her life was literally the polaroid of perfection; With her fun, supportive mother’s recent marriage to a wealthy heir, she has everything, but she’d give it to you in a second if it meant she’d be able to get a read on her new step-sister. Technically her little sister, the beautiful Mei is super serious, with a cold, emotionless demeanor. Looks can deceive, however, as an unexpected interaction between them proves there’s more to Mei than meets the eye, and the new feelings that have awakened within Yuzu are causing her to wear her heart on her sleeve as she tries everything she can to get close to Mei, help her resolve her some deep seated issues, and maybe, jus maybe, before their strict grandfather can take Mei away, and not just for one day, Yuzu can reconcile the conflicting feelings in her heart. No matter how complicated things get, however, she still has to hold her head high and push through, because every day is still an ordinary day... And while she may be the black sheep of both her new high school and the family her mother married into, in her world, she’s an ordinary girl.

Citrus was animated by a studio called Passione, and I’ve never actually talked about them before, but that’s mainly because I haven’t seen very many of their titles... Which is itself mainly due to the fact that they haven’t produced many titles. I’ve seen Rail Wars, which I barely remember, and most of those memories are not positive. I’ve seen the Island of Giant Insects, which... I mean, I liked it, but that movie is a VERY guilty pleasure. Going through their incredibly short resume, dating back to about 2012, the most I can tell about Passione is that they are proud suppliers of low-grade and uncensored nudity(as well as the most recent adaptation of Higurashi that I still haven’t seen), so it kind of surprises me that Citrus is really neither of those things... Oh it has a smut factor, and we’ll get to that later, but the nudity is fairly tame(two or three bare butts) and the production values are anything but low-grade. Citrus is extremely well produced, directed by someone who had a clear vision and the passion to realize it, and more than enough resources to support them in their efforts.

I will admit, there is the occasional awkward running animation, which bizarrely always seems to occur either right before or right after a more serious or emotional scene, but aside from that, the animation and direction for this show are top notch. One thing I noticed in particular is that while Yuzu herself carries your stereotypical shoujo protagonist aesthetic... Flowery design, make-up, bright colors that make her stand out against her classmates... Almost nobody else in the series looks like that, emphasizing the fish-out-of-water aspect of her character. She feels less like an impossible Mary-Sue getting involved with everybody and solving their problems, and more like a normal outgoing girl who WANTS to be that protagonist, having to deal with rejection from the real world, lending her an authenticity that many of her contemporaries lack. Even Mei, who you could easily write off at first glance as just your stereotypical perfect Japanese beauty with pale skin and long black hair(a cliche I’m surprised more people haven’t noticed) still has details in her design that suggest a level of conflict, or just more of an awareness of her situation than she lets on. Even in her coldest moments, she comes off as more sad and resigned than her cold and confidant exterior would suggest.

Beyond them, pretty much the entire environment of the show lies within the realm of gritty realism. The rest of the student body, beyond Yuzu and Mei, all look like individual teens showing as much individuality as they can under the strict standards of a school with a uniform and a harsh dress code, rather than just copy-pasted generic clones. The cityscapes are elaborate and intricately detailed, there are some impressively realistic weather effects that most people probably won’t notice, and the same goes for any scene involving water. Characters faces portray just the right level of expressiveness, ranging from subtle to over the top, there are a plethora of scenes that take full advantage of the loneliness implied by empty space and the intimacy of darkness, I can only say so much to express how gorgeous this show is... Honestly, my only real issue with the visuals is that whenever a more sexual or suggestive scene comes up, the camera can get a little too voyeuristic, offering shots that feel a little too graphic for a show about teenagers... Again, there’s no real nudity in these scenes, but there is still a heavily exploitative vibe in the increased level of detail for these scenes.

The English dub was a Funimation effort, and if the idea of Funimation translating an anime about modern teenager girls is setting off some alarm bells in your head, don’t worry, Jamie Marchi had nothing to do with this, so the characters aren’t throwing around dated slang in every other sentence. I don’t have any prior experience with the ADR director Kristin McGuire, but Citrus does have one major positive in the hiring of John Burgmeier as the head writer, and I swear, he is one of my favorite people to work on a dub, everything he touches turns to gold. There is a modern flair to the dialogue, but not so blatant as to age poorly or call attention to itself, and what little they do use is mostly handled by Megan Shipman, who does a fantastic job as the outgoing Yuzu Aihara. Shipman is boatloads of fun to listen to when her character is being her bubbly extroverted self, but she’s equally compelling when she summons the strength to stand up for herself and others, and soliloquizing like an awkward trainwreck while dealing with her adolescent lesbian awakening. Amber Lee Connors doesn’t really have to show her range as Mei, who never really breaks out of her one stoic register, although she does add some nuance to the role. More importantly, the two actresses do have chemistry, and since the bulk of the dialogue belongs to them, they outshine all of their still very talented costars.

When you’re talking about Citrus, even with people who haven’t even seen the show, there are two glaring elephants in the room that are going to be immediately addressed. It’s these two qualities that have given the series a less than savory reputation, and while they’re both extremely common tropes in the anime medium, Citrus still provides a fairly unique example of both, so before I move onto my personal thoughts on the series as a whole, I am going to be addressing both of these qualities, hopefully with the respect and sincerity that they deserve.

First off, while Citrus will probably always be known primarily as a yuri anime, it also carries the far more consequential label of an incest anime, which, technically, yeah, it kind of is. I’m not going to waste any time denying that there’s some truth to that claim, but I would like to point out that Citrus isn’t quite like other incest shows. The anime medium has featured no shortage of incest stories throughout history, but almost all of them fit into certain categories that Citrus doesn’t. First off, incest in anime IS usually just between step-siblings, but they’re usually step-siblings who were raised together, and only recently learned that they’re not related by blood. This is fucking stupid, because even without blood connections, it’s incredibly rare for two people who were raised as siblings throughout their formative years to become attracted to each other later in life. Citrus, thankfully, doesn’t fall into that trap, as Yuzu and Mei aren’t brought together until high school, after their mutually exclusive parents got married... Well, I don’t know how they were able to court each other and have a wedding without their daughters ever meeting until afterward, that honestly feels like kind of a plothole to me, but whatever.

So Mei and Yuzu are sisters now, their parents are married, and I’ll admit, the idea of falling in love with someone under those circumstances does feel a trifle awkward... There’s no blood involved, there’s no family bond, and realistically they would only be forced to live together for three or four years, but that still doesn’t make the situation feel any less uncomfortable. It’s not unprecedented... It happened in the movie Clueless, as I oh so subtly hinted in my plot synopsis at the top... But I’d actually like to put this into context by talking about an anime that touched on a similar dilemma, Bunny Drop. Yes, you’re probably tired of hearing me talk about Bunny Drop, but it is surprisingly relevant to this, and I’ve never gone into spoiler details before, so it’s not like this isn’t new territory. But yeah, because I’m going into some spoilers, if you haven’t seen the adorable show or read the remarkably less adorable manga, here’s your warning, you might want to skip the next paragraph.

So if you weren’t already aware, Bunny Drop is the story of Daikichi, a twenty-something loner with no direction in life who goes to his great grandfather’s funeral to find out that the former family patriarch had fathered a bastard child, a little six year old girl named Rin. The family don’t know what to do with her, so Daikichi takes her in, and the whole story is about the two of them bonding as Daikichi navigates the trials and tribulations of parenthood. It’s also important to note that along the way, Rin acquires a little boyfriend, and Daikichi winds up getting close to the boy’s single mother, so you can kind of see where the connection to Citrus is. The anime ends on a pretty anticlimactic note, but you kind of get the sense that these two couples are going to get together in the end, right? Which sounds kind of awkward and gross, at least at first glance. Well, the manga goes a bit further. There’s a time skip of about ten years, and after some stuff goes down, Daikichi is rejected by the mother, Rin rejects the boy, and in a swerve that nobody saw coming, it turns out Rin is in love with Daikichi! She wants to marry him and bear his children to show them the joy he showed her, he says yes, and NOPE NOPE NOPE Motherfucker I know I complained about the step-clusterfuck, but I didn’t know it could get THIS bad!

Kinda puts things into perspective, right? For two parents to marry, and their unrelated near-adult children to date, yeah, it’s not an ideal situation, but as far as incest goes, you’d be further apart than a pair of cousins, and you know anime isn’t afraid of pairing together cousins. So yeah, it sounds like I’m going to give Citrus a pass on the whole incest thing, right? Well, I want to, I really fucking want to, but there’s one problem I have with all of this. Among all of the people who screech about Citrus being incest porn, the loudest voice in the room is ironically Citrus itself. This show will not shut the fuck up about Yuzu and Mei being sisters, and it gets really creepy after a while. I am convinced that Citrus WANTED to be sleazy incest smut, but it did such a good job justifying the main couple on a technical level that all it can do is force the conflict in a futile attempt to appeal to imouto fetishists. Even though the two girls would realistically only be living together for a couple of years, and are only siblings in name, Yuzu will not shut up about being a good big sister, or how ‘sisters shouldn’t do this...’ Even though her queer awakening is generally very well written, it isn’t normal yuri manga she reads, it’s incest yuri manga. Citrus, my dude, stop trying to look worse than you actually are.

As for the other elephant in the room, well, I’m going to have to throw up a trigger warning here, because Citrus contains some non-consensual sexual content. Sexual assault, to put it more blatantly. I’m not going to spend as much time on this one, because I can’t dispute it... It happens, and if that bothers you in any way, do not watch this show... But also because we’re talking about anime, and assault is just kind of a thing in this medium. You know all of those slice of life and harem scenes where girls grab and grope each other’s boobs for the sake of silly fanservice? Legally speaking, sexual assault. Forced kissing happens, well, I’d go as far as to say in MOST anime. One particularly egregious example is the fairly popular shoujo rom-com Say I Love You, where the male protagonist not only surprises his love interest with a kiss when she asks him to save her from a stalker(to be fair, he WAS trying to help her, but come on, there were other options) but in a scene from a later episode, he pins her against a wall when she tries to run away from him, and forcefully kisses her into submission, which in my opinion is just as bad as the worst Citrus has to offer.

What I can say about the non-con stuff in Citrus is, it’s there, and the level of detail the animators put into it does not make it any less uncomfortable, but at least it makes sense in character and it fits into the story. There are narrative reasons for it, particularly once you start to peel back the layers of Mei’s character, so I’m not going to sugar coat things and try to convince you to watch the series if this is something you can’t handle, but it’s also something I don’t think people who enjoy the show should have to apologize for. There’s worse out there, is all I’m saying. Okay, with all that behind me, what do I think of Citrus on its own merits? Honestly, I like it. The story seems to be broken into three arcs, each of which introduces a different rival that threatens to sabotage and even prematurely end Yuzu and Mei’s relationship, and while that might sound repetitive at first, it’s ultimately saved by the excellent pacing of the series, and the fact that each rival represents a specific challenge that Mei and Yuzu have to overcome at that specific time, which makes for a pretty engaging ongoing plot.

I will admit, I don’t like Mei very much... She’s a very well written character with some deep seated issues and probably no shortage of trauma that guide her actions, and this does mean she complements Yuzu perfectly, but I just don’t like her as a person. She does develop over the series thanks to Yuzu’s efforts, but I think the effect is way too subtle, and I know this is going to sound mean, but aside from her occasional intimate interactions with Yuzu, she doesn’t really do very much that isn’t boring. In contrast, I fucking love Yuzu. She’s bubbly, and outgoing, and every single quality about her that COULD be considered annoying is directed not at the audience, but at the dour, strict stick-up-the-ass school she’s attending. She’s essentially the teenage girl version of Robin Williams, being herself at all costs while battling the big bad establishment as it tries to strike down her MOST UNORTHODOX behavior. She makes mistakes while trying to help Mei, but they come from an honest and sincere(and maybe a little ditzy) place, and as long as she’s not fixating on the whole sisters thing, her inner conflict over her burgeoning sexuality is adorable as fuck. I have heard that the anime added a lot of exclusive scenes to flesh her out from the manga, and I have no complaints about that.

Citrus is available from Funimation. The original manga by Saburouta, as well as a sequel manga called Citrus+, are available stateside from Seven Seas.

Ultimately, the biggest strength of Citrus isn’t in its top notch production, direction and execution, but in its two leading characters. You might not fall in love with both Mei and Yuzu as characters, but they make for a super-strong couple, perfectly complementing each other both in terms of narrative dynamic and filling the holes in each other’s lives. They make a few mistakes, and they cross a few lines, but they are also teenagers, and if there's one thing Citrus gets absolutely right, it's the fact that teenagers have no fucking clue what they're doing, especially when it comes to romance. The story is about them, and they have one of the more compelling will-they-won’t-they dynamics that I’ve seen in fiction. It's not for everyone, and certain warnings do apply, but for a show that starts out as incest yuri smut, and has more than enough baggage holding it down, it's still far better than it had any right to be.

I give Citrus a seven out of ten.