In a near future, the world is peaceful because, in part, of an elite group of teenaged girls who are trained in the art of defense and assassination. Called Lycoris, they are highly skilled, obsessively competitive and dangerous.

When Takina comes close to putting one of her Lycoris peers in danger, she’s shunted away from the headquarters to a branch office/cafe. Here she meets an infamous Lycoris, Chisato, who only uses non-lethal bullets. Despite the obscurity of their office, and the absurdity of their situation, Chisato and Takina are drawn into a series of terrorist attacks that could shake the foundation of their peaceful world. This is Lycoris Recoil, Streaming on Crunchyroll

Okay, that’s the basic setup. And, I have to be honest…it’s really stupid for a reason I will get to in a second. I wouldn’t have watched it at all, except I saw someone on Twitter describe it as “John Wick with cute girls” and after redefining in my head it as “John Wick with moe blob-faced girls for imagination-impaired adult men” I started to watch it. I really like it, despite a list of flaws longer than the cast and staff. ^_^

So if I like it, why do I call it stupid?  Let’s start with the idea of 16 year-olds being better at assassination than anyone else. For one. Then you take the two absolute best agents you’ve ever had…and exile them. For reasons.This is SO fishy that it reminds me of why Magical Girls have to be so young. No one with an ounce of emotional maturity could possible not see that some shit is up. I’m not sure I would have been that naive at 16, even.  On top of this, we have a series of character types, not characters. Including an absurdly young-looking hacker, thank you Serial Experiments Lain for giving us that forever. And let’s not forget drunken adult lady. Our one bright light is the office head, who is black, gay, smart and a decent guy, who just happens to have an obviously tragic backstory and was an assassin and all sort of other bad things. Also, a bunch of reveals that are super obvious. 

And a gloaty bad guy. I fucking hate gloaty bad guys. Get your thing done right, then gloat. UGH.

Despite these flaws, I’m really enjoying the heck out of Lycoris Recoil, because really, it’s John Wick with moe-faced girls and that is Perfectly Okay. ^_^

The Yuri is very much by implication. Since Lycoris (pronounced licorice with a soft ‘c’, not ‘sh’) work in pairs, and rely on each other in life and death situations, we’ve got a totally Spartan dynamic between couples. Chisato is, apparently flakey and maybe not super insightful, but she’s cheerful and absurdly good at what she does, while Takina is brooding and dark, making them the traditional Yuri trope pair, only make them assassins. In a recent episode, Chisato went for a femme fatale look and Takina took the butch route and we all nodded in approval. (Of course most of the art seems to be more obsessed with Takina’s head briefly hitting Chisato’s butt, thus a Beavis and Butthead rating. )

Specific episodes are underwear-level humor, with a very unfortunate tendency by the translators to rely on utterly outdated and lazy translation choices. Insisting on using “panties” for underwear, and saying an admired character “swings that way” when discussing that he is gay. I commented on Twitter that translators don’t have to do that – they are not obliged to make characters sound like 80 year old homophobes. They can and should make better choices in 2022. We can’t tell the writers to stop pandering, but we can expect the translators to grow the fuck up.

And still, I am very much enjoying this story. Watching two children beat the crap out of supposedly professional hitmen is amusing.  I’m good with amusing crap.

Ratings:

Art – Pretty bad, honestly, but whatever
Story – Cute girls shoot guns, men drop like flies
Characters – Surely Chisato will both help Takina find meaning in life and redeeem herself then convince Takina to reject the things she thought she wanted, probably by fake-dying.
Service – Heh heh, Takina’s head touched Chisato’s butt
Yuri – Takina’s head touched Chisato’s butt/ Butch x femme dynamic / Sisters-in-arms/ Two girls on the screen together

Overall – A fun 7

This ain’t no Birdie Wing, and fandom has even odds on Chisato fake-dying by the end of the season, but if you like mindless violence perpetrated by anatomically inaccurate teens, this may be your jam.