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Bad Girl (2021)

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  • Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
    • The series is normally as grounded as your average Kirara yonkoma. In chapter 25, though, Yuu dresses Atori up sexily so they can hitchhike, and it works so well they attract a herd of people, cars, helicopters, and forest animals in the blink of an eye. Atori ends up riding a horse while everybody else follows in her wake. The manga turns into My Deer Friend Nokotan for two columns, before everything goes back to normal.
    • It does end up getting something of a callback in chapter 34, which is just as utterly bizarre. When Mizuka, Yuu, and Rura are lost in the forest, a herd of animals get drawn to Mizuka's Atorinium, the bottled scent of her sister. Mizuka casually reveals that, because she has no friends, she talked to the animals so much she learned their language. She asks a boar to show her the way out of the forest. We cut to the three girls on the train, complaining about the trip.
  • Captain Obvious Reveal:
    • In chapter 17, Sakiki cryptically reveals to Yuu that Atori is going to an amusement park with "somebody special", and Yuu spends the rest of the chapter stalking Atori going on what looks like a date with another girl. In case you couldn't guess where this is heading from all the Relative Error cliches, the bios at the beginning of volume 2 already spoiled the identity of the girl in question.
    • In chapters 35 and 36, when Yuu overhears two girls gossiping about Atori moving to Chicago and gets in a tizzy about The Moving Experience, a savvy reader can immediately spot that it's a setup for some Out-of-Context Eavesdropping and Poor Communication Kills.
  • Like You Would Really Do It: The prospect of Atori moving to Chicago is raised in chapter 35. The odds that this series is going to write out the character the plot revolves around midway through its run are slim, to say the least. Sure enough, it turns out to be a case of Out-of-Context Eavesdropping, and everything returns to normal.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: In Nikumaru-sensei's original concept, Rura was the head of the student council and Atori's direct superior, implying she was meant to have a much more prominent role in the story. However, in the final version, she was downgraded to a borderline-Ascended Extra who hovers on the sidelines, not contributing much to the group dynamics, and only getting involved with the others through happenstance (like stumbling on Yuu and Mizuka in the woods). Her role as Atori's comrade on the student council was given to Kiyoraka, who also barely appears and has a pretty one-note charactization. It seems like Nikumaru-sensei either didn't know what to do with them after splitting them into two different characters, or had his original plans shot down by his editor. By the end of volume 3, Mizuka is a far more prominent and influential character than either of them, despite being the last one introduced.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The series begins with Yuu declaring she wants to be a "bad girl" to get Atori to notice her, and she changes her look and actively Pokes The Poodle to try and prove she's a real menace to society. However, Atori befriends Yuu almost immediately, with no real effort on Yuu's part, and the story quickly segues into fairly standard "Senpai noticed me!" territory instead of Yuu's embarrassing attempts to Poke The Poodle, like the title, synopsis, and first chapter all suggest the story will be about. The author lampshaded the way the premise drifted in chapter 14 by having Suzu point out Yuu forgot all about being a "bad girl". Yuu pledges to work harder at being a delinquent, but even after that, "Senpai noticed me!" continues to be the focal point of the story, while chapters where she makes an actual effort to be a rebel are few and far between. The volume 1 extras reveal Nikumaru-sensei changed the character dynamics quite a lot at the behest of Kirara, so it's possible Executive Meddling is to blame.

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