The Summer 2025 Anime Preview Guide - Bad Girl

Yū Yutani is a first-year high school student who is a good girl. However, to attract the attention of the school's disciplinary committee chairman and "Madonna" Atori Mizutori, she begins to act like a delinquent.

Bad Girl is based on the manga series by Nikumaru. The anime series is streaming on HIDIVE on Saturdays.

This episode reinforces much of what we got back in episode one. Yuu is a girl trying to be bad and failing at it, though still managing to stand out in the best possible way when it comes to attracting her crush. Atori, on the other hand, loves cute things (in a non-sexual way) and finds that Yuu fits that bill to a tee. Lastly, Suzu is head-over-heels for Yuu, but is so firmly planted in the friend zone, no amount of hinting at her true feelings is ever going to get her out of it. From there, the show simply takes these three, plops them into different situations, and watches as they interact and natural comedy ensues.

That's basically what we get in this episode—from Yuu trying to prove herself to be a “lone wolf” and coming across as a cute puppy instead, to Yuu and Atori volunteering at a kindergarten, only to find the kids like Atori as fanatically as Yuu does.

Luckily, there is a bit more to this episode than just the comedy. Through the laughs, we learn a bit more about Atori—how she's been naturally forced into the “perfect angel of a girl” box ever since she was little. Being placed above everyone against her will has robbed her of many simple childhood experiences. And it is through her (misinterpreted) interactions with Yuu that she is making up for lost time.

We also get our first peak at our fourth heroine, Rura, whose meaty thighs serve as a perfect wall for Yuu to hide behind in one scene. We also get a tease of her life as a livestreamer in the post-credits. I'm not sure how she'll fit in with the yuri dynamic going forward, but I'm excited to find out.

In the end, this anime seems enjoyable enough—and as I said last week, “if lighthearted yuri rom-coms are your thing, Bad Girl sure won't disappoint.”

This show has a great little setup. Yuu wants her crush, Atori, a member of the school's Public Decency Committee, to notice her. So, after being overlooked herself and seeing that her delinquent-looking friend Suzu is getting Atori's attention, Yuu decides to become a delinquent herself. The problem is that she's really really bad at being bad.

Let's be real here. Yuu has a point. She's just a rock in a field of other rocks. She's been walking through the school gate for weeks, if not months, by this point, and has never been greeted by Atori. It's only once she makes an effort to stand out from the crowd that Atori even starts to notice her existence. Of course, rather than going the whole “Bad Girl” route, she could have just said hello loud and proud like a normal person—but then we wouldn't have this show, now would we?

What follows is a series of events where Yuu fails hilariously at being bad but still manages to fail her way into becoming Atori's friend. However, while they find each other cute, for Atori it's more of thinking a small animal is cute, while Yuu's thinking more in the yuri direction of things.

Adding Suzu to this mess is where things are elevated to the next level. Suzu has the hots for Yuu and is jealous of Atori. Thus, she lashes out in ways that force Yuu to act rather than cower (as is her instinct). And in the third vignette of the episode, where Suzu and Atori encounter each other with Yuu absent, we get a lot of humor out of the idea that they both find Yuu cute but for vastly different reasons.

If lighthearted yuri rom-coms are your thing, Bad Girl sure won't disappoint. It's nothing groundbreaking, but you'll get your fix if nothing else.

I have to admit that there were a lot of squares on my “What Will Episode 2 of Bad Girl Be About?” bingo card, but I completely neglected to add a square for “Yuu's Innocent Mind Gets Twisted After Suzu Tricks Her Into Checking Out Deviant Pornography on the Internet, and Now She Wants to Do Petplay with Atori.” I, uh, guess that is on me for not expecting Bad Girl to get to the real shit in just two weeks. No bingo for me, then.

It's a win for the audience since it turns out a more deranged and flagrantly horny Bad Girl is an even more entertaining Bad Girl. It's funny and all to see Yuu try and fail to be a run-of-the-mill delinquent, but it's even funnier to see Yuu get her brain broken by smut and immediately throw herself into a series of wacky misunderstandings about her beloved senpai's proclivity for giving lewd belly rubs. It's also funny to see Yuu get cussed out by Atori's cult of evil kindergartener devotees. Sometimes, I wonder if we're supposed to think that Atori is smart enough to catch on to Yuu's blatant crush on her, and is simply being coy, or if she's just a total airhead. After today, there is no doubt about Atori's malevolence. The fact of the matter is that this girl has the power to sway entire armies of young women under her thrall. She's some kind of mesmerizing vampiress, and she must be stopped.

At the very least, someone needs to lock her away for long enough for poor Yuu to get enough time to detox from her wiles. Did you see Yuu's soul almost leave her body when Atori promised a gift so good it would “knock her socks off?” Yuu probably didn't even know what pornography even was before Suzu led her astray, and now Atori's getting lewd enough to involve socks? We might all be laughing at Yuu's suffering, but this girl is going to end up in the Lesbian ICU if Atori keeps this up.

If nothing else, I think this anime needs to receive due recognition for including the recorder as an instrument on the soundtrack without driving me to commit acts of random destruction and violence. Out of all the jokes we get this week, the one that made me laugh the most was probably the stupid recurring gag where the show played the Also Sprach Zarathustra melody from 2001: A Space Odyssey on a doofy sounding recorder every time Yuu's brain drifted off to thoughts of Atori taking her on a “space odyssey” of her own. That's the kind of flawless comedy that deserves a four-star review, I'll tell you what.

It is conventional wisdom that you should never change who you are to try to appeal to someone else in a relationship. However, if you happen to be a little disaster lesbian who thinks that her own deeply ingrained do-gooderieness is the only thing standing between her and a shot with the hottest hall monitor in school, then the only option is to transform into a "Bad Girl". In this case, we can at least be thankful that the subject is entertainingly terrible at transforming into a delinquent. It's a comedy, so her suffering is our gain, after all.

Bad Girl is based on a four-panel gag manga, which is obvious from the get-go. The premiere is essentially just a series of sketches where our hapless heroine Yuu attempts to become a rule-breaking punk that could not possibly be ignored by Atori Mizutori, the “school disciplinary committee chairman”—which is apparently the Japanese Educational System's fancy label for their homegrown little hall cops. I hate to be the one to break it to everyone, but ACAB applies to Atori, too, though there's no accounting for taste, I suppose. Yuu is head-over-heels for Little Miss Baconator Jr., and that's what matters here. In between Yuu's failed attempts to disrupt Atori's bus commute and convince everyone that those binder clips in her ears are totes-for-realsies piercings, we also meet Suzu, Yuu's best friend, who very clearly has a crush on her. (I'm pretty sure she even somehow sleeps with a Yuu-themed daikamura.)

As a core trio of a bubbly lesbian rom-com, these gals are pretty solid. Yuu is just thickheaded enough to sell the premise without being annoying, and Suzu is a great not-so-straight woman to her pal's antics. If there's any weak link here, it might be Atori herself, who is charmingly airheaded—though I honestly wish she were either a bit stupider or a bit meaner. We need a superhumanly oblivious freak like Nozaki-kun to balance out Yuu's earnestness, or maybe a (slightly) darker side behind that perpetual grin to provide some more comedic contrast. As is, Atori is…fine, but it is hard to see what Yuu sees in her, especially when there's a perfectly good Suzu just waiting in the wings.

Still, if you're looking for a romantic comedy that is as colorful as a box of freshly pulled taffies and just as bad for your blood sugar levels, then Bad Girl is a reliable pick for the season. I don't know if it has the chops to stand up to some of the best yuri sitcoms out there (my kingdom for a new season of The Demon Girl Next Door), but it is good fun all the same.

We've all been there, haven't we? As naïve young internet users, we search, click a link, and all of a sudden are face-to-face with something we never imagined: porn. Or at least, I assume that's what Yuu encounters during her ill-fated internet search; I can't imagine anything else that would have conjured up a recorder version of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” that resulted from the search “schoolgirl x dog.” Not seeing what Yuu sees is probably the best part of the joke because it allows the viewers' imagination to take over and opens the door for poor Yuu to get some truly terrible ideas about what Suzu and Mizutori are doing in their spare time. It's a pitch-perfect gag, and while we do eventually see what Yuu found (more or less), the entire first segment of episode two is an exercise in letting imaginations run wild in a very funny way.

Bad Girl is turning out to be exactly the right kind of goofball comedy. Yuu's head is perpetually in the clouds as she stretches her admittedly awkward imagination to become “bad.” Mizutori thinks she's playing along, but is playing a different game. Poor Suzu is just sort of on the sidelines, trying to cope with both her crush on Yuu and the total inanity of everything that's happening. Even better, none of it is particularly mean, although I'm a bit concerned that could change with the new character Rura. She gets the post-credits scene this week, and the jokes about why her followers are watching her streams aren't great. Or at least, they're on the crueler side of things; making fun of a girl being popular online because of her cup size isn't quite in the same wheelhouse as kindergarteners fighting a high schooler over their mutual crush on the same girl.

Still, this second episode solidifies Bad Girl as a solid comedy. The characters are silly without being one-note, the gags are well-timed, and I laughed out loud twice – once at the “Zarathustra” scene, and once when Yuu accidentally swallowed the arrow she was trying to fire out of a blowgun. It reminds me of Yuru Yuri but with a slightly older sense of humor, and I don't think that's a bad thing at all.

How do you get the attention of the ultimate good girl? Become a Bad Girl! Or at least that's Yuu's flawed reasoning when it comes to getting senpai to notice her – Mizutori is the person who stands at the school gate to check that everyone's in compliance with the rules and dress code, and Yuu figures that if she's going to get her attention, she'd better be bad. The problem is, of course, that she's so used to be good that she has a very…limited idea of what “bad” even means. It's like when I realized that my “guilty pleasure” was reading Regency romances and how tame that is compared to most people's.

Bad Girl is also the first of three yuri series we'll be getting this season (the other two being See You Tomorrow at the Food Court and There's No Freaking Way I'll Be Your Lover! Unless...…), and it wasn't really on my radar as such. But even if Yuu doesn't actually have a crush on Mizutori, her friend Suzu 100% has one on her. Suzu seems to have been pining after Yuu for a while now, with no real hope of ever getting through to her – and a fear that Mizutori is going to take Yuu away from her. I also have a terrible feeling that Suzu sleeps with a Yuu doll – the scene of her lying in bed shows something that looks like the top of Yuu's head right next to her. One of the most unhinged scenes features Mizutori brandishing the dog ears and collar she bought for Yuu and Suzu freaking out (and then having her very own fantasy about) Yuu wearing them. Innocent and pure, this love is not.

That's most of the humor in this episode – Yuu's terrible attempts at being “bad” that fail because she's so sweet and good and the decidedly less tame thoughts of Suzu, with Mizutori falling somewhere in the middle. No two people are on the same page, creating plenty of misunderstandings that no one even realizes are happening. It doesn't always work for me in terms of humor, but I could see other people finding it very funny, especially if you're a fan of CGDT shows, because this is playing with that framework. It also looks very nice, with crisp colors and good details, like the way you can absolutely tell that Yuu's “earrings” are binder clips with the metal handles removed or that one girl in class who's clearly very annoyed by Yuu and Suzu. It's presented in three short segments, which rarely works for me, but I could still see this winning me over despite myself. I think it's got its heart and humor in the right place.