Bad Girl

Episode 11

While I'll usually have a preference for one of Bad Girl's three segments over another, episode 11 was wildly lopsided and honestly would have been a perfect episode of anime if the opening act had been the entire focus.

Picking up where the previous episode left off, Yuu and Atori are now in Suzu's room, who immediately chews Yuu out for dumping all of her Atori body pillows in her room, giving the other girl an unlimited amount of ammo to tease her indefinitely. Once Yuu can concoct an explanation for the situation that hides her own degeneracy, the three decide to play video games together. Even from the opening moments of this scene, it's clear that the dynamic between these three characters is so much more developed than in previous excuses to put them in a room together. Suzu is now more overtly flirtatious with Yuu, Atori can't help but see Suzu's coldness as an attempt to play hard to get and overtly come on to her, and Yuu is the adorable puppy dog that connects everyone via a shared leash.

While this gaming sesh is initially just an excuse for Yuu to, totally accidentally, bump into and have any form of physical contact with Atori, her crush and bestie decide to make the Mario Party spoof game more interesting and tie punishments to losing. Things escalate rapidly from Suzu having to call Atori “Onee-chan” to the cool beauty being forced to wear a cat-girl maid cosplay while Atori laughs at her (not sure how these are punishments exactly, but I digress). However, when Suzu finally wins a game and forces Atori into a fox girl maid outfit, both she and Yuu are so immediately stunned by how attractive she is in the cosplay that the entire affair turns into one big ego boost for Atori.

To me, this segment is Bad Girl at its best. Three teenagers who are in a rapidly developing situationship accidentally test each other's boundaries in a cute and believable backdrop. If Bad Girl more regularly featured these funny baby lesbian adventures with this trio of girls, it'd genuinely be one of my favorite anime of the season, if not the year! Every time it dips its toe into these waters, Bad Girl comes off as genuinely hilarious, adorable, and deeply informed about what it's like being a young person figuring out their sexuality and sexual attraction.

Instead of a full episode of the show's best material, though, we get two more segments that focus on Rura, Mizuka, and Yuu hanging out in the woods. While conceptually, I think there's a decent amount of material to be mined from the attention-seeking Rura forming relationships with two other girls who aren't attracted to her in the slightest. These segments get a bit too wacky for my taste. Between the trio getting high on what I can only assume is Atori's bathwater and the episode resolving thanks to Mizuka apparently being able to talk to animals, I wasn't feeling these kinds of hijinks after the episode's incredibly strong and more grounded opening.

The post-credits segment was pretty cute, and featured Rura throwing a subby little fit after telling her stream chat that she's finally making friends, and they respond with praise instead of their usual bullying. This scene both speaks to my affinity for taking streamers down a peg and captures how cute it can be when you throw a brat like Rura off of her game. Even if two-thirds of this episode wasn't my jam, the opening act is so good that I can't help but love this episode and wish more of Bad Girl was like it.

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Lucas DeRuyter is the de facto Bad Boy of anime reviews (no one else was using the moniker). He rolls with ANN's This Week and Anime crew, and you can check out his coolest work in his portfolio. You can also find him sticking it to the man on his Bluesky account.

Bad Girl is currently streaming on HIDIVE.