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The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide
You are Ms. servant

How would you rate episode 1 of
You are Ms. Servant ?
Community score: 3.6



What is this?

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Told from an early age that her only worth is as a killer, Yuki had known nothing else except cold efficiency and following orders. Now that she has a chance to leave her past behind, she arrives at the doorstep of Hitoyoshi Yokoya, asking to be employed… as a maid. Thus begins the journey of a former assassin learning what it means to be ‘normal’.

You are Ms. Servant is based on the manga series by Shotan. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.


How was the first episode?

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James Beckett
Rating:

One of my favorite kinds of gags are the one's where everyone involved puts an inordinate amount of time, money, effort, and skill into executing an inexcusably stupid punchline. Think of the elaborate and dangerous stunt contraptions from the Jackass movies, for instance. Or if you'd like an analogy that is closer to home, just watch any of the great bits from anime like Nichijou or Asobi Asobase. Now, I'm not arguing that You are Ms. Servant hits the same highs as those legitimate comedy masterpieces, because it doesn't, and I fully recognize that this show's shockingly lush production values probably come from it being rooted in the most well-worn of wish-fulfillment fantasies. On the surface, this is just like of the hundreds of comics and cartoons about a schlub who has a beautiful and quirky love interest literally delivered to his front door. The difference between You are Ms. Servant and its lesser peers really comes down to two factors: It looks really good, and it made me laugh.

To the show's credit, You are Ms. Servant has more going on than just its visuals and its jokes. The premiere occasionally tries to play Yuki the Maid's obviously harrowing and traumatizing previous line of work for genuine pathos and our main man Hitoyoshi has at least a modicum of personality—which bolsters any efforts to play the romance between the two so straightly. That said, I'm considering those other elements of the story to be window dressing, at this point. If anything, the fact that You are Ms. Servant is taking itself even this seriously only makes it funnier to me because it contributes to the overall effect of trying way too hard to tell a simple joke. Does that make my enjoyment of this show partially ironic? Maybe. Or, maybe, I'm just enough of a connoisseur of high-quality trash that I can respect when shlock tries to elevate itself above its natural station… so long as it can walk the walk.

To that end, what won me over to You are Ms. Servant's side was nothing exceptionally complicated. In fact, I can narrow my positive score for this premiere down to two specific scenes. The first is when the episode lovingly animates an exceptionally complicated handstand-flip-thing for Yuki to do when it turns out that she actually sucks ass at basic chores like mopping, only for a bucket to land right on her head. That's classic slapstick, right there. The second scene was the payoff to a separate joke about Yuki having a borderline deranged love for tonkatsu sauce. Seeing her wake up in the middle of the night to drink the devil's gravy straight from the tube was funny enough, but then we learn about her psychotic anthropomorphic tonkatsu sauce dreams, and that, my friends? That's just Cinema™, right there. Somebody get Scorsese on the phone; I've got a show that he needs to add to his watchlist right away.


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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

I had to look up the starting date that the manga You are Ms. Servant is based on, and I was half-convinced that I would discover that it dated to 1994 or some similar time. As it turns out, it began serialization in 2020, which means it's trading in nostalgia for the days when wandering assassin-maids (or other oddball maid types) roamed the streets of Japan, looking for single young men to move in with. Now that I'm writing this, I'm not sure there were all that many random-maid-meets-boy series in the '90s, but that's still the decade this series strongly reminds me of. I was shocked to get through an entire episode without Hitoyoshi falling into Ms. Servant's breasts.

This episode doesn't seem entirely sure what kind of story it wants to be. There are definite wish-fulfillment aspects, mostly in the premise: one day, a lone maid in pseudo-Victorian clothing presents herself at Hitoyoshi's door. He's living alone and in filth, so this seems like a godsend. The humor angle then kicks in: she's not actually a maid, she's an assassin inexplicably dressed like a maid, and if you give her a mop and bucket, within seconds the one will be broken and the other on her head. But wow, can she ever shred lettuce with her amazing knife skills? Then, just as you're settling into the idea that this will be a silly episode, it turns out that Ms. Servant is breathtakingly lonely and has never eaten something that tastes good, Hitoyoshi's mother left the family when he was little, taking his younger sibling with her, something he has nightmares about. And while there's no law stating that you can't combine multiple genres into a single show, cramming them all in a single episode feels like too much, and in this case means that it doesn't do any one of them justice.

The strongest element right now feels like the bittersweet one. Both Hitoyoshi and Ms. Servant are lonely, and while the exact reason she showed up on his doorstep is vague, it's still clear that they could find a lot of solace in being there for each other. Since this is the note the episode ends on, I hope it will be the dominant one. Both Hitoyoshi and the narrative are very busy presenting what they want us to see. Hitoyoshi's narration even tells us that he's “enjoying his summer vacation” when it's plain that no such thing is happening. This isn't completely without potential, but it also doesn't excite me to see any more of this very unsettled show.


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Caitlin Moore
Rating:

My list of grievances with You are Ms. Servant, in order from petty to considerable:

  1. The localization choices are evidenced in the title. Hitoyoshi refers to the eponymous housecleaner as “Meido-san” in Japanese. Seems like an easy one, right? It's just “maid” transliterated into katakana, so just call her that. But instead, they went with “servant,” which has a very different connotation in English. “Maid” is relatively neutral, if gendered, while “servant” has an old-fashioned, negative connotation. Anyone can hire a maid, but if you have “servants” you're probably rich and snobby. Plus, “servant” is the only word in the title that's not capitalized, which implies either a Dom/sub dynamic or a lack of understanding of English mechanics. It all just sounds clunky.
  2. The animation is beautiful. Normally this would be a good thing, but I am resentful because a lot of interesting, well-written shows aimed at female audiences look like trash while junk like this gets a lavish treatment. This is purely a “me” problem. Am I bitter? Yes, yes I am, that was never in doubt.
  3. Hitoyoshi looks an awful lot like Otaru from Saber Marionette J, which isn't a terrible thing but it does draw attention to the fact that…
  4. I feel like I've been rocketed back to the ‘90's/early ’00s with a plotline like this. You are Ms. Servant's concept doesn't resemble modern shows so much as 20+-year-old series like Hand Maid May and Mahoromatic, where a teenage boy finds himself with a maid (or maids) for Reasons. The boy is on his own but incapable of caring for himself – in this case, evidenced by the trash bags that fill his considerably-sized home – and one day a beautiful woman shows up on his doorstep to fill his life with laughter and love.

The basic structure isn't unsalvageable, as evidenced by series like Ms. Kobayashi's Dragon Maid. However, you better have solid enough writing to back up such a forced concept, and I don't think You are Ms. Servant has the juice. It wants us to feel like Hitoyoshi is helping his maid just as much as she is helping him, but it seems to be aiming for fluffy cute moments without putting a lot of work into making the characters actually, you know, interesting enough to care about.


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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

Look, I know what this is supposed to be: a sweet, innocent love story between a mismatched pair. On one hand, we have Hitoyoshi, a normal kid living alone. On the other, we have the titular Ms. Servant—an assassin who has been let go from her old job and has no idea how to live a normal life.

The issue I have is that this is another one of those lazy wish-fulfillment fantasies where the guy doesn't have to do anything besides exist for a pretty girl to randomly come into his life and be obsessed with him. Like, Hitoyoshi literally lives in filth—his floor is littered with full garbage bags. (Though I have to wonder, how is he clean enough to bag his trash but lazy to the point he won't take the bags outside? Is it just that the creators didn't want him to seem too gross?) All Hitoyoshi has going for him is that he is a baseline okay human being: he doesn't do bad things and is generally kind to those around him.

Luckily, Ms. Servant has a bit more to her than that. She's a young woman who has lost her purpose. Up until now, she had a job—a reason to exist. But now, without that, she's floundering. She has no social network of friends to fall back on, no home, no basic life skills. The only thing she knows how to do is kill—and she's rightfully proud of those skills. However, what she wants to be, even if she can't yet articulate it, is a person.

Having someone treat her normally—take her in and want to help her—means everything to her as a person who has nothing. And so we get the numerous cute interactions between the pair. But what really sells these scenes is the art design for the show. Ms. Servant's character design and facial animations are top-tier, making her both attractive and pitiable in equal measure.

So while this rom-com subgenre isn't really my cup of tea, I can at least say it is one of the better premieres of its type I have seen in recent seasons. If these kinds of wish-fulfillment, ultra-sweet rom-coms are your thing, you should definitely give this one a watch.



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