I'm on the unhappy end of divided about this series. I'm a huge, heart-fluttering fan of Milk Moringa's Girl Friends, and Citrus kept popping up in advertisements with a cheery "If you like Girl Friends, you'll love Citrus!" I cracked, sat down, and read all of Citrus. I'm putting my series review on the first volume though, because English-speakers start here and the story does come with a hefty amount of content warnings.

The red flags start with the premise. Yuzu is the typical bubbly, happy manga protagonist, with a kind heart and penchant for fashion and make-up. Out of the blue, her mother informs Yuzu that she has remarried and her new (conspicuously absent) husband drops off his daughter, the quietly powerful Mei Aihara. Yuzu takes one look at Mei and realizes she's a lesbian, which is hilarious except for the fact that they are now sisters. The pseudo-incest kink is uncomfortably strong.

Harmful manga cliches build up from there: the all women's high school the Aiharas' attend is rife with closeted women who love women (wlw) who want to "practice because it's not real;" women fight other women; a predatory teacher stalks the halls; a middle-schooler is a sex worker/cam girl, which creeped me out; arranged marriages are planned without consent; emotional abuse & manipulation is normalized or framed as wacky hijinks. Going through the first few volumes, every plot point and character felt more like a cliche and/or homophobic micro-aggression incarnate. I almost stopped reading several times, and the reviews that call Citrus a trashy romance series aren't wrong.

However, the story gets better as it goes. Uta's writing grows by leaps and bounds on the page, and she eventually unpacks her cliches and complicates them, making the characters three dimensional. The pseudo-incest becomes not a kink, but a plot obstacle. The abuse is addressed, and abusers are punished and/or reformed. The conversational homophobia and the notion of "practice" are condemned, and characters come out of the closet.

In a few ways, Uta's art and story outshone Girl Friends, which surprised the heck out of me. Outside of the covers, the story's tone and art are less male-gaze/fan service oriented. Since there are other wlw, Yuzu and Mei don't experience the crippling isolation Mari and Akko feel. The world of Citrus is stubbornly, loudly, and proudly woman-centric. Mei's character arc, her triumph over her abuse, and Yuzu's support during this process are especially satisfying.

All that being said, readers have to wade through several volumes of harmful shite before they GET to this good stuff, and that is asking a lot. At its best, Citrus reminds me of Fruits Basket and at its worst, it reminds of Ranma ½. I only recommend Citrus to readers who can stomach a lot of problematic bullshit for the sake of an ultimately rewarding story. I absolutely do not recommend this series to writers looking for models of positive wlw rep. Girl Friends wins that contest by a long shot.