You are Ms. Servant

Episode 7

If it can always be 5 o' clock somewhere, then surely it can always be Halloween somewhere, too (and it is—in downtown Salem, MA). And sure enough, this week we got dress up, a zombie movie, and a power outage; all the ingredients for a quintessential Halloween episode. And while this certainly won't go down in the books as one of the all-time greatest Halloween episodes, and I certainly would've preferred something on the spookier side of things, it was still cute and enjoyable all the same.

Somehow, we've made it this far in the series before Yuki's come to realize that—as it turns out—maid outfits aren't exactly something you tend to see people wearing on a day-to-day basis. Really, at this point, it's pretty up in the air whether or not she realizes that people having maids isn't super normal, either. All the same, however belatedly, she's finally catching on to this. So of course, this can only mean one thing: a classic dress up montage. Who among us doesn't love and appreciate a good dress up montage? That's a rhetorical question, because the answer is nobody; surely one of the precious few, remarkably rare things all anime fans can agree on is that we love a dress up montage, right? I think my favorite of the outfits was probably the red dress that Hitoyoshi's younger sister picked out, but obviously, there's nothing not to love about a witchy outfit.

Speaking of outfits, if there can be said to be any story-centric parts of the episode (which feels like a bit of a stretch this week) it's undoubtedly where we learn that Yuki has a younger sister and that the bell on her headband is something of a keepsake—and her only one, at that—of her. It's not the only sentimental item that she tends to wear—we also learn that her master gifted the maid outfit to her. Which makes me wonder: so was Yuki's becoming a maid her master's idea, or hers? Did her master give that to her because Yuki already expressed interest in becoming a maid, or did Yuki's interest in becoming a maid come from her receiving this outfit? It's interesting to think about, and I'd be curious to learn.

Still, the Yuki's-younger-sister-thing feels like something that's definitely going to come up again before the series ends, which at this stage, would mean sooner rather than later. At this point, the only possible candidate for Yuki's younger sister—if we've even met her at all at this point, which we might not have—is the pink-haired girl who, if I recall correctly, we met briefly last week. More specifically a character with pink twintails (if there's any fellow Chaos;Child fans reading this, I can't help but feel reminded of Senri while looking at her) stands out in an anime where everyone who's not Yuki, Hitoyoshi, Hitoyoshi's younger sister, and Grace, could've been mass-produced on an anime background character assembly line. Which, in an anime that's as well-animated as this one (not to mention how well-designed most of the main cast is), is kind of a shame.

In any case, the other main bit of the episode is where our squad goes to see a legally distinct zombie movie—Batting Dead. I know it's super cliché, but I love it when a group of characters goes to see a scary movie and there's an unexpected scaredy-cat who gets really jumpy after the movie because they're just so scared. I, personally, am a huge lover of horror movies, so I find this adorable, and I never tire of it no matter how many times I see it. Kind of like how I never tire of seeing Agemochitaro, who come to think of it, I don't think I've seen as much of so far as I would like to. He was such a big part of the episode where he was introduced, and I think his design is like the peak of anime dog designs. Yet this week, seeing him featured—even if only briefly—made me realize just how little we've seen him the past few weeks, which is a shame for such an adorably designed dog. I hope we get to see more of him moving forward.

This realization similarly got me wondering if this series might, weirdly enough, be trying to do too much in one season. This dovetails with the thought I had last week, too—how despite, on paper, this being a series about Yuki being a maid, we actually haven't seen a ton of that so far. So, we have Yuki as a maid, Yuki as a student at Hitoyoshi's school, Agemochitaro, Grace, Hitoyoshi's younger sister, and we've had tastes of Yuki and Hitoyoshi's backstory. And now, there's a younger sister for Yuki in the mix as well. And while I feel reasonably confident it's this pink haired girl, we don't yet know that for a fact. She could be someone else entirely—almost certainly another assassin.

We're now more than halfway through season one. And I worry that at its current pace, it might be on a path toward stretching itself too thin, rather than taking a moment to breathe and letting us appreciate/expanding on what's already present thus far. I appreciate that this anime has introduced a lot of fun elements, I'm just starting to worry if it's trying to accomplish too much in too little time.

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You are Ms. Servant is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.