The Maid I Hired Recently is Mysterious
最近雇ったメイドが怪しい
Romcom by BLADE, SILVER LINK Based on a manga by Wakame Konbu
Length: 11 episodes Aired: 2022 (Summer) Rating: C
Plot: After his parents died in a car accident and had to left the old staff go, young Yuuri tried to live on his own, which was a lot harder than he expected. One day, he's surprised on his doorstep by Lilith, a maid offering her services, which he reluctantly accepts. Yet, he feels something is off with her: she's far too competent to be working for free in a dingy old mansion, sometimes looks like she's muttering curses, and he seems to lose himself in her eyes.
Thoughts: A few months ago I looked at The Great Jahy Will Not Be Defeated, which I've found to be an extremely amusing show that combined a lot of the things I look for in the cute girls genre to the point I'll probably write about the manga once it wraps up, so it's only appropriate I look at another adaptation of of Wakame Konbu's work, which came out the following year. Unfortunately, while the premise had some potential, there's so little meat in the story it could have easily been a 4 part 30-45 minute OVA.
While the romance angle was a bit weird, the dynamic between both can be funny at times: Lilith teasing him and saying something like "oh, of course I put a love potion on your food" and Yuuri, no filter fully honest replying "I KNEW IT THAT'S WHY I LOVE YOUR EYES AND CAN'T STOP THINKING OF YOUR BEAUTIFUL FACE", cut to Lilith blushing, but I've found that a bit too thin and yet, a bit too reliant on repeating this over and over. While I often complain these sort of shows (or the manga they're based on) often go overboard with the number of characters they feature and then end up not having enough time to do anything with them, I think this was one case where the cast is too small, and with just Yuuri's classmate Tsukasa and her butler Fujisaki (who is aware of who Lilith really is), closer to being recurring than regular characters, the problem of the show feeling just a one-note joke gets a lot harder to ignore because you are seeing the same episode repeating over and over, and when the character dynamics change, it's something like Yuuri crying how he can't live without Lilith anymore and then the next story he's thinking she's suspicious again. Overall It feels there's no progression at all and it's just repeating the same scenario over and over, same reason why I maybe should have written something about a show like Kimagure Orange Road or Miyuki by now but then realise I'd have to watch them again and I'd probably just prefer to write about their soundtracks (yes yes I'd still say after hearing that song), really not a fan of the style of romcom that resets everything at the end of the chapter/episode, and also why I regard Maison Ikkoku so highly: sure, there's a lot of padding based on misunderstandings because Takahashi gonna Takahashi, but it isn't just a love story, it's about growing to be worthy of someone's love on one side, and about overcoming grief and allowing yourself to be loved again on the other. On something like Don't Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro, which you could argue started from something even thinner, a fetish webcomic by a erodoujin author, you can see the dynamics between the characters gradually change. At least in this adaptation, by the end it doesn't feel it changes that much from the first three episodes. Maybe the biggest problem was that the payoff for the story just wasn't there, the big mystery that made Lilith look so suspicious and cagey about her past really doesn't feel that much of a big deal. Something that would be more interesting would be getting into if Yuuri loves Lilith romantically, as an older sister or as a friend, which comes too late to the story, I'm sure not for the manga, although if it explores this is a different matter, I just read the last chapter after watching the last episode.
Visually it's one of those shows that tries to do something a bit different: colours have the textures of very vibrant watercolours, which works in some places, in other it gives "flash game developer running photos in Akvis for backgrounds", and characters have a pencil-like outline. This is something other shows also did and even I experimented with when I did the Gunbuster Science Lessons in HD, but I ended up also adding a denser, thinner line for the same reason it irks me a bit here: sometimes it has a big gap and it annoys me because the rest of the colours are quite strong. While I'm not fully on board with how this looks, it's not something that gets way too distracting and I'm always in for studios to experiment in shows that could look pretty generic otherwise.
At the end, this is a show that I wanted to like more, but the premise was far more basic than I expected and stretched pretty thin, when there were other themes the story could have explored. These sort of shows are almost always an automatic B-grade around here, but this is closer to a D. Quite disappointed after the ride that was The Great Jahy.
Plus:
The initial dynamics are fun (Yuuri having no filter, Tsukasa being a romantic, etc)...
Minus:
... but it doesn't have anything else beyond that, making it feel stale.
Extremely thin premise
