Citrus (Volume 1) – Love Affair?
When Aihara Yuzu’s mother remarries, she finds herself at a new school. Its strict regime doesn’t gel with Yuzu’s fun reality and she soon butts heads with the student council president, Mei who is also her new step-sister!
Citrus (Volume 1) – Love Affair?
What happened?
Yuzu loves fashion, fun, and hanging with her friends. She’s constantly chatting on her phone or playing with her bleached blonde hair. Unfortunately, the new school does not allow most of those things. On her first day, she is given a dressing down by a member of the student council. She swears she didn’t know, but that won’t save her, not when the student council president Mei shows up and dishes out some tough love. It’s not going well for Yuzu at all, but then she sees Mei kissing the young hot teacher. Mei sees Yuzu who turns and runs.
At home, Yuzu discovers that the man her mother married was Mei’s father and that they are now living together. Of course, Mei’s father works out of town a lot so he’s not there, but Mei is! Mei is frosty to Yuzu who ends up asking her about the teacher and the kissing. She finds it funny that the student council president would be getting up to stuff like that. Yuzu asks her what it was like, continuing to tease her. However, Mei is getting frustrated and kisses Yuzu to shut her up. What the hell?
Yuzu’s only friend at the new school Harumi told her that Mei was the granddaughter of the school Chairman and was set to inherit everything. Of course, that meant that Yuzu was now the granddaughter of the Chairman too! She used this knowledge to push things at the school, first getting too casual with the Chairman and then taking the microphone in an assembly to tell everyone about the teacher kissing Mei and how he already had a girlfriend. Basically, she stirred things up something rotten!
Things were so out of control that Yuzu was expelled and Mei went to live with her grandfather. That wasn’t what she wanted. She was just trying to look out for her new step-sister who had kissed her and then grabbed Yuzu in the bath. However, this news upset Yuzu’s mother so she went to see the Chairman to set things straight. Yuzu found him in his office having a heart attack and basically saved him. There was no way he could expel her now and he allowed Mei to decide where she wanted to live. She chose her home, not because Yuzu was living there but because it was her home…
What did you think?
I’d heard a lot about Citrus but never anything other than it being about two step-sisters that embark on a romantic entanglement. It does seem to be fairly polarising, which meant that I needed to check it out and see what all the fuss was about. Firstly, I did enjoy it and found Yuzu’s story to be very interesting. It did a great job of showing how her life was turned upside down and how she struggled to adapt to that.
The way they introduce Mei was great as well. It’s hard to believe that they didn’t meet before the marriage, but maybe that’s how they do things in Japan. It was odd that he left for another country so soon after getting married and leaving his daughter with his new wife. Again, that may be more normal there than in the West. We certainly see a lot of anime characters with absent parents so why not.
I liked how it painted Yuzu as a big troublemaker and Mei as the perfect student, but it was actually the other way around. The way Mei teased Yuzu was particularly mean, especially as Yuzu didn’t know what to make of it and how to react to it, showing that she’s not nearly as rambunctious as she puts on. Yuzu also showed that she is dependable by how she fought to get Mei back even though they had their issues because her mother wanted her back. Of course, saving the Chairman will no doubt ease Yuzu’s worries.
Volume highlights
Other posts in the series
- Anime
- Season One
- Episode 1 – love affair!?
- Episode 2 – one’s first love
- Episode 3 – sisterly love?
- Episode 4 – love me do!
- Episode 5 – under lover
- Episode 6 – out of love
- Episode 7 – love or lie!
- Episode 8 – war of love
- Episode 9 – love is
- Episode 10 – winter of love
- Episode 11 – love you only
- Episode 12 – my love goes on and on
- Season One
- Manga
- Citrus
- Citrus+
- Volume 1 – She’s Coming Home Tonight!
- Volume 2 – This Time, We Handle it Together!
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If you remember Domestic Girlfriend, the same thing happened. Dad got married without warning and the son never had a clue who his new stepsisters would be. Surprise!
I bet if we looked we could find this trope somewhere else.
I’ve actually never seen Domestic Girlfriend although it is on my to-watch list. I bet you’re right. It’ll be there just like the abandoned high school student whose parents work abroad.
Nope. Much worse than that. Boy’s father gets married and he never had a clue he was even looking. Total surprise.
One of his step sisters is the young teacher he has the hots for and the other is the girl he lost his viginity to. It isn’t just a train wreck, it is a train with radiactive waste colliding with a train full of high explosives.
Haha! Now I have to see it…