Smut That Doesn't Suck: Yamada's First Time

Ecchi anime is not a genre known for innovation. Most studios are content to churn out the same sort of show featuring female stereotypes from the same old otaku fetish checklist, changing up only the scenario and the selection of fetishes featured. The same can be said for shoujo romance stories – the details may differ, but time after time, year after year, we get the same sort of story about some poor unpopular, shy young lady who falls for some insanely hot, popular guy. The two do everything except talk with one another about their feelings or concerns, and everything is building up to the big confession of love. Now, what would happen if you flipped the formulas for both and fused them together? What if you made a show about a pervy girl who wants nothing more than to get laid and accidentally ends up falling in love in the process? The result would be something like B Gata H Kei (“B Cup H Type”), a title which Funimation wisely changed to Yamada’s First Time.

Editor's Note: While this series shows nothing explicit, and does not go over porn or hentai, the works covered are highly sexually charged, and some images used will reflect this. Reader discretion is advised.

This is the story of Yamada – just Yamada, first name withheld. She ostensibly has everything a teenage girl should need  - great looks, popularity, athletic skills, and confidence practically pouring from her pores. There’s only one thing that Yamada wants to improve on: her sex life. More specifically, she has a goal to sleep with 100 guys before she leaves high school. There's only one little problem: Yamada is a virgin. She's convinced that any guy worth sleeping with will judge her for being a virgin. As such, she needs to find a ‘cherry boy’ to get that pesky hymen out of the way. She finds her cherry boy in the form of Takashi Kosoda, a perfectly ordinary classmate of hers. He’s baffled by Yamada’s sudden interest in him, and Yamada in turn is baffled by his inability to pick up on her fumbling come-ons and dirty mind. Over the course of the series, Yamada discovers that losing her virginity is not as simple as it seems. Even worse, she may be doing the one thing she wasn't ready for – falling in love.

Yamada is a big part of why this show is so unusual. She’s no wilting violet – if anything, she’s the polar opposite. She’s popular, self-confident to the point of arrogance, and obsessed with sex. It’s not just that she wants to bang 100 guys for some vague, popularity-related reason; it’s that her whole worldview is based on sex. Every action she takes is to either make herself more appealing to guys or to move forward with her deflowering. Many an innocuous comment or action becomes pure innuendo once filtered through Yamada’s mind, and it never occurs to her that other people’s minds don’t work that way. It’s no exaggeration to say that Yamada has a one-track mind. So why is the idea of Yamada being a horndog so unusual? Well, as I implied before, teenage girls in anime and manga seem to be incredibly oblivious to their own feelings and desires. They always wonder why their hearts are beating so fast around their love interest or agonize for ages how to state that they like someone as more than just a friend, so that we can experience the blush of first love alongside them. Over time, though, all that sugary-sweet romance can become sickeningly dull, and you begin to wonder how there can be so many high-school age girls with no awareness of their own desires. Speaking as someone who was once a teenage girl as well as someone who spent time in fandoms with lots of teen girls, I know just how pervy the mind of a teenage girl can be. While Yamada may be a very exaggerated take on it, her lustiness would be a lot more familiar to a lot of young women than the tremulous shyness of your standard shoujo heroine. Best of all, the show never shames Yamada (or anyone else, for that matter) for wanting to have sex. Other characters may critique her methods, but there isn’t the slightest hint of slut-shaming to be found here. If anything, having sex is viewed as just another part of being in a relationship, just as much as going on dates or making out. It even promotes safe sex, complete with a fictional condom brand (with earworm-y jingle) that pops up time and again on the show.

Of course, it’s not just Yamada’s dirty mind that fuels the humor. For all her perviness, she’s also very naïve about sex and relationships. She has a vague idea of what sex is, but she has no idea how to get it beyond what she reads in magazines, and for all her confidence she’s unsure of what guys will REALLY think of her body. This conflict is on display from the very first scene, where Yamada inspects herself in the bath. Nice hair? Check. Flawless skin? Check. Beautiful breasts? Check. Everything is looking awesome, but what the hell is going on between her legs? Is it always supposed to look like that? The conflict only increases when she starts making moves on Kosoda and it always results in her giving wildly mixed messages. She’ll scoff at his inability to read her mental message of “DO ME NOW” one moment, only to turn around and flash him her bra, then run away in embarrassment. I know that some people were turned off by this show because they thought Yamada’s mixed messages strayed too far into tsundere territory, but here they are played for laughs instead of fetish fuel, which to me makes it infinitely more tolerable.

You’ll note that I have yet to bring up the rest of the cast, and the main reason for that is that most of them are there either to inform the viewer about Yamada or to serve as a comic foil against her. Yamada has a number of friends who support her, most notably her best friend Takeshita. She mostly serves as Yamada’s conscience, doing her best to restrain Yamada’s bluntness and one-track mind while providing both Yamada and Kosoda support and advice on their relationship. She also has those who get in the way of her future cherry-popping, most notably Kosoda’s family friend Miyano and the practically-perfect-in-every-way Kanejo. Miyano is almost hopelessly moe, a pretty, sweet bespectacled girl with a gift for cooking, but sadly not so gifted at either coordination or at making her massive crush on Kosoda known to him. Kanejo is probably the most unironic character in the cast, the sort of rich bitch that's been showing up in shoujo stories since the genre began. Of course, even she is played for laughs, between her increasingly petty obsession with winning and her bizarre obsession with her older brother (to the point that she has a well-guarded shrine to him, covered in photos). Then there is Kosoda himself, the straight-man to all the ridiculousness around him. In a more traditional ecchi series, he would probably be the lead, the kind of finds himself constantly flustered by the attentions of a number of lovely ladies. While Kosoda is a purposefully plain guy, he’s not some ridiculous caricature of a loser nor some panty- or boob-obsessed weirdo. He's a genuinely decent and upstanding person, and mostly he’s just baffled as to why this pretty, moody, and occasionally strange girl wants to be with him. Still, he does his best to be a good boyfriend, to communicate his feelings with her and to try and accommodate Yamada's demands, even after he finally figures out her pervy purpose.

The story as a whole isn’t anywhere near as subversive as Yamada herself. It goes over a lot of the same old events every other high school story goes over – school festival time, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, sports day, etc. Each of the 12 episodes is split into 2 parts, most of which featuring separate plotlines - a fitting choice considering the show’s origin in a 4-koma manga. Despite the brevity of the source material, there’s a lot of jokes to go around and the pacing is snappy enough to keep them coming until it’s time for the requisite quiet moment between our lead couple. The show is at its best when it keeps its focus on Yamada and Kosoda, deriving some of the best jokes out of their fumbling attempts at a relationship. This only becomes more apparent when the show shifts focus to Yamada's rivalry with Kanejo midway through. While the jokes keep coming, they're nowhere near as raunchy nor as relatable. Thankfully, the show finds its way back to those two by the last few episodes, as the two finally come to an understanding. I was honestly a little disappointed that it ended so soon, as the last episode seemed to be establishing a new sort of normal for our leads and finding plenty more comedy in that. Alas, such is the fate of any show based on an ongoing manga.

 

Visually, the show is nothing special. The animation is bright, colorful, and on-model, but unremarkable beyond that. What it lacks in visual flair, though, it more than makes up for it with visual gags. Since we spend so much time with Yamada’s inner monologue, we see just how wild her imagination can get, full of every sort of innuendo and sexual simile you could imagine. The culmination of these visual gags are the eros deities, little super-deformed characters meant to personify the libidos of a select few characters. It’s a fun idea in theory, but they ultimately serve more as a redundant Greek chorus than as a source of humor. Yamada’s is always reminding her to go get her some, Kosoda’s is basically a personification of his boner, and Miyano’s and Kanejo’s are so underutilized that they might as well not be there. Musically, the only notable things are the opening and ending, both being bouncy, squeaky little odes to first love. While I do have a slight preference for the opening, I still spent a lot of time skipping over both.

The sub is perfectly competent, but the show really shines in the dub track. It’s no surprise that the dub is both well-made and fun to listen to, being a Funimation effort. If it has any major failing, it’s that Jaime Marche’s adaptive scripting tends to be a little too slang-laden for its own good. She has a loose and fast approach which works well with the humor, but at times the dialogue reeks of someone trying too hard to be hip like the young folks. I do have to admire her ability to come up with all sort of creative terms for sex and virginity. Over the course of the series, we hear phrases like:

•  Get up all in these guts
•  Freak freak nasty
•  Get that pansy in my pansy
•  Ride his disco stick
•  Mt. Pork-o-lay-lay
•  Feed the trouser snake
•  Getting my pipes cleaned
•  Getting it on like Donkey Kong

And so much more! Again, the slanginess and pop-culture references could annoy some, but I was amused more by the audaciousness and creativity that went into them. The dub cast as a whole is solid, something that's also typical for a Funimation dub. The performances are suitably broad and for the most part the voices fit the characters. The best part of the dub is by and large Brittney Karbowski’s performance as Yamada. She brings loads of enthusiasm to her performance, and it goes a long way towards both enhancing the humor and making Yamada all the more endearing. Her performance, more than any other factor, makes the show a delight to watch, and as such I would have to recommend watching the dub instead of the sub.

 

Yamada’s First Time wasn’t a big hit. Neither the otaku crowd nor the shoujo fans could get behind this series in Japan. Sadly it didn't do much better here, if the fact that it's already been re-released under the S.A.V.E line is any indication. This to me is a real shame, because while it’s not a masterpiece by any means Yamada’s First Time is a smutty and funny take on anime romance. Its charms lie in its pleasingly subversive heroine and its frank and funny take on teenage relationships, and I for one am glad that Funimation released it. The world of anime could use more shows like this one, the kind of shows that take a little risk, get a little saucy with the humor, and find some mirth in one of life's most personal milestones.