Facades are something people use as their armor to shield their true selves from the world around them. One can fake being a happy, giddy person, one can fake whatever emotions they want, but for the main character, Shirasagi Hime, she pretends to be the “perfect girl”, the most likeable girl in the entire world, so she can get with a good-looking millionaire, the ideal husband. One day however, she runs into the manager of a peculiar cafe, and to repay her debt for injuring her, she must work in this cafe until her injury is fully recovered. Now, you can guess what happens to said injury…

Now let me take you on a journey through my experience of “Yuri is My Job” through three stages: The initial intrigue, the frustration, and the acceptance.

To start this journey, we start with the initial intrigue, where Hime has to work at this cafe, where its theme is an all-girls academy where there are hierarchies, complex relationships, and many rules to adhere to in order to entertain the customers. In short, the customers simply watch all the employees yuri-bait each other. A cafe built upon yuri-baiting, how fun am I right? Hime struggles at understanding her role in all this, and the other employees run out of patience despite not teaching her anything? Truly reflective of a typical work environment, right?

Then comes the frustration. There’s a level of drama in this show that is shown through the character interactions. Eventually, the line between work and life gets blurred, and the employees start taking everything very seriously, forming relationships among themselves through sisterly bonds and the like. A friend of Hime’s gets dragged into the mess as well, and it turns out she’s obsessed with Hime. We get some backstory of all the characters, with drama so mind-numbingly baffling, which also ended up making the workplace very tense. Virtually everything in the backstories were based on misunderstandings, and we’ve seen our fair share of shows like, for example, “Rent-A-Girlfriend”, “Girlfriend, Girlfriend”, or “Nisekoi”. All these trashy harem or romcoms just got on my nerves, and this show also made me quite angry at points.

Now, I’ve watched a solid amount of anime. At some point, even such trashy shows can produce an amount of fun, and hating things isn’t that fun, so I decided to accept it for what it is, a trashy show. I ended up liking it, and thought that it provided a very solid form of ironic entertainment. Seeing the interactions between the characters, the misunderstandings that built, the needless drama, everything just became a comedy for me, so I just revelled in the ironic beauty of it all. Why be so negative about things? All in all, I seemed to enjoy it.

This show isn’t good, but you can’t deny there’s entertainment there to be seen. Not only is the setting interesting, but the characters all have distinct and interesting personalities, ranging from a character who lies all the time, to an obsessed girl that has likely thousands of pictures of her best friend in her phone. Isn’t it all so entertaining?

Who am I kidding? This review was filled with lies. The three stages are just me catering to the masses who enjoy this stuff. This show isn’t good, and its attempts at drama are absolutely abhorrent and contrived. The characters are basically completely unlikeable, with the “yuri” being completely off the deep end with how inaccurately portrayed the romance is.

What’s the lie? What’s the truth? What to believe? In the end, that’s what Hime’s character is, a girl with a facade so strong that any attempt of trying to reconcile with others seems hardly believable. In the end, the truth lies somewhere in between all the chaos, just like my opinion on this show.