You are Ms. Servant

Episode 9

School festival episodes are a staple of school anime of all kinds, regardless of how relevant school life is to the central plot of the show itself. Code Geass, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Card Captor Sakura—there's no shortage of great school festival episodes out there. Sure, they tend to be canned, and more often than not they end up boiling down to “hehe let's do a maid cafe,” but they're charming all the same; some things are cliché for a reason. This is all to say that usually school festival episodes are a fun and familiar highlight, but surprisingly, that's not the case in Ms. Servant, which has somehow found a way to make a boring one.

To be more specific, this wasn't necessarily an actively unenjoyable episode, but it certainly wasn't enjoyable either—in a word, it was boring. And I was expecting more, considering not just the fact that it's a school festival episode, but also how much it was built up just last week. There was so much hype built around how the sauceless Yuki was going to go all-out to get the premium sauce, but just like last week, this ultimately went nowhere; in fact, maybe I'm remembering wrong, but I don't recall Yuki's sauce-deprivation even being mentioned this week. If it was, it was a short, fleeting mention. But either way, I don't think it's unfair to say that it had no bearing on this episode whatsoever, despite how important the last episode tried to make it feel.

I get that the point of this week's episode, narratively, was for Yuki to learn about friendship—namely, by way of Naka. But in some ways, Yuki's already learned about friendship—not just through Hitoyoshi, but also through his sister and Agemochitaro. Sure, now she's learning about it in a more conscious way, but do we really need yet another side-character who's inevitably going to get kicked to the curb next week to do that? Would it not make more sense to use a pre-established character for this, rather than another side character who might be more likable than I think, but I wouldn't know because we've barely had much time to get to know her and we almost certainly never will? It almost feels like self-sabotage at this point, when this anime continues to bring in new gimmicks every week, rather than focus on the ones it already has. Why haven't we seen more Agemochitaro—it's criminal how this anime can have such an adorably designed dog that they're doing virtually nothing with. I'll never stop being bitter about this, in particular.

And speaking of the revolving door of side-characters-of-the-week, oh my god, I completely forgot who Nazca was. I was so confused watching the episode—I kept wondering, am I supposed to know who this is, or am I just an uncultured fake fan? After I finished the episode I tried looking up “Nazca,” but wasn't finding any relevant results. It actually wasn't until I was writing this review that I remembered last week's episode, when one of Hitoyoshi's friends talked about buying some new album, that I realized Nazca was probably that in-universe singer—and sure enough, she is.

But anyway, as for the events of the episode, I guess it's cute that Yuki is now more aware of what friendship is, even if I wish this had been done in a different way (which is to say: not by way of yet another side character who's doomed to vanish into the ether next week). The idea of a mascot cafe was cute too, and I wish we'd gotten to see more of it. The meat and potatoes of this episode—the game of cops and robbers—just wasn't terribly fun to watch. It was just bland. Much like Yuki herself, this episode was greatly in need of some sauce.

So with that being said, concluding thoughts: this was a really meh episode this week, neither particularly good nor bad. I expected more not just from a school festival episode, but also, an episode that was kind of being built up last week. I'm not sure if my hopes were high enough to warrant calling it a disappointment per se, but it's anticlimactic all the same. This anime started slow, got better in the middle, and now we're starting to see it slow down again; I hope it's able to clean up its act before it wraps up in a few weeks.

Rating:

You are Ms. Servant is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.