Citrus

シトラス

9.0(2)

OtakuDen

6.4(298,488)

MAL Score

Ranked #8448

Popularity #455

Drama
Girls Love
School

Episodes: 12
Duration: 23 min per ep
Aired: Jan 6, 2018 to Mar 24, 2018
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

Yuzu Aihara’s first summer as a high school freshman takes an unexpected turn when her mother remarries, prompting Yuzu to transfer schools. Stylish and outgoing, she treats the disruption as a fresh chance to make friends, fall in love, and finally experience a first kiss. That optimism quickly clashes with the rigid atmosphere of her new ultra-strict all-girls academy, where her flashy look stands out immediately—especially to Mei Aihara, the striking, intimidating student council president who confronts Yuzu and even searches her in an attempt to confiscate her cellphone.

After an exhausting first day, Yuzu returns home to an even bigger surprise: Mei is her new stepsister. Yuzu tries to bridge the distance between them, but Mei’s cold demeanor pushes Yuzu into provoking her—only for Mei to suddenly pin her down and kiss her, leaving Yuzu shaken and confused. As Mei withdraws without explanation, Yuzu is left to grapple with what that kiss meant, and with the pain she glimpses behind Mei’s guarded expression.

Otaku Consensus

Citrus earns its notoriety by treating yuri as full-contact melodrama: Passione’s polished close-ups, Takeo Takahashi’s brisk direction, and Naoki Hayashi’s compression keep the 12 episodes moving with tabloid force rather than slice-of-life drift. Its lasting weakness is just as specific: the series leans on coercive intimacy, love-triangle escalation, and abrupt emotional turns often enough that viewers split between addictive soap opera and genuinely troubling romance.

Why You Should Watch

Watch Citrus if you want yuri romance with the volume turned up: confrontations, jealousy, cohabitation tension, and messy attraction treated as the main event rather than subtext. It is closer to the combustible melodrama side of the genre than the restrained self-discovery of Bloom Into You, and far less gag-driven than Sakura Trick. The appeal is not “healthy relationship goals”; it is the charge of watching two emotionally armored girls collide inside a school system built on image control. Fans who like romance anime where every episode forces a new boundary, confession, or power shift will get the most from it. Viewers who need careful consent framing or slow-burn realism should know that the controversy around Citrus is part of its identity, not a side note.

Key Characters

Y
Yuzu Aihara(VA: Ayana Taketatsu)
Yuzu is the show’s emotional accelerant, a gyaru-coded lead whose openness makes her both the audience’s entry point and the character most likely to challenge the academy’s controlled social order.
M
Mei Aihara(VA: Minami Tsuda)
Mei became the series’ most polarizing figure because her elegance and authority are inseparable from the cold, unreadable behavior that drives Citrus into psychosexual melodrama.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
Passione’s adaptation foregrounds faces, hair, uniforms, and body language, giving the anime a glossy visual emphasis that matches its reputation as heightened romance rather than grounded school drama.
2
The series runs only 12 episodes, airing from January 6 to March 24, 2018, which gives the anime a compressed structure where emotional reversals arrive quickly and rarely have slice-of-life decompression time.
3
Naoki Hayashi’s series composition keeps the focus tightly on relationship escalation, aligning with the AniList tag profile: Yuri at 97%, Cohabitation at 96%, LGBTQ+ Themes at 92%, and Psychosexual at 88%.
4
The opening theme is performed by nano.RIPE, while Jun Sasaki is credited for the opening composition and Kazunori Watanabe for the ending composition, giving the show a pop-anime frame around material that is much thornier than its surface presentation suggests.
5
Citrus remains one of the more visible modern yuri anime despite divisive scoring: on MyAnimeList it holds a 6.42 average from 298,410 votes while still ranking #454 in popularity.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: The anime is based on Saburouta’s original manga, and the adaptation’s reception is closely tied to the source’s status as a widely recognized, frequently debated yuri title.
Fun fact 2: Izuro Ijuuin served as both character designer and chief animation director, a dual role that helped keep the character models visually consistent across the show’s drama-heavy close-up work.
Fun fact 3: AniList’s tag distribution captures why discussion around the series is so charged: alongside Yuri, Inseki, and Cohabitation all above 96%, the database also lists Rape at 35%, reflecting how often viewers flag its boundary-crossing scenes.
Fun fact 4: The show’s critical footprint is unusually split for a genre title: web reviews commonly call it entertaining and visually competent, while also identifying trope reliance and problematic intimacy as the main reasons it is hard to recommend without caveats.
Fun fact 5: Citrus finished airing in the Winter 2018 season, and its 2,443 AniList favourites indicate a durable fanbase even with an AniList score of 61/100.