Negima! ReOverViewLook, Part 1

A little after my Love Hina reread, I got started rereading Mahou Sensei Negima, the series Ken Akamatsu worked on after Love Hina finished up. I made it up to Volume 16 or so, stopped reading, and then went back a few weeks ago and wrapped up the storyline through Volume 18 or so.

Negima is interesting in a lot of ways. To my knowledge, it’s the longest series Akamatsu ever worked on, at 38 volumes. His next series, UQ Holder, is a spinoff / sequel to Negima, so its current 25 volumes are sort of also part of Negima. And unlike Love Hina or AI ga Tomaranai!, it’s not doing the same thing for 38 volumes, or shaking things up in little ways only to return to the status quo after a few chapters. The story of Negima changes and evolves as it goes on. Unlike Love Hina, which I noted was very consistent in its art style, tone, and characterization, Negima fundamentally changes in tone and story structure multiple times over its run. Negima is ambitious, massive, absurd in its scope. Right from the get-go, it gives us an entire class of 30 students to get to know, plus a bunch of other supporting characters, and it just keeps adding more, along with more locations, concepts, villains, and Greek and Latin spells.

Negima starts humbly, as more or less a cross between Harry Potter, Love Hina, and a child-teacher comedy. Ten-year-old Negi Springfield graduates from his magic academy in Wales and is assigned to teach a class of middle school girls in Japan. Most of the girls accept him right away. But Asuna Kagurazaka, who was in love with their former teacher and Negi’s good friend Takamichi T. Takahata, refuses him at first. It doesn’t help that every time Negi tries to use magic, he somehow blows all her clothes off. Yes, that returns from Love Hina. But the constant nudity and nudification-based combat is not just an annoyance like it became in Love Hina. It keeps dragging the series down even as it tries to get more and more serious, complex, and dark. You can always trust that every pitched battle for the fate of the world will be interrupted by a cutaway to a girl getting her clothes blasted off at some point. In a lot of ways, Negima becomes much more than the reincarnation of Love Hina that it starts off as, but it never entirely shakes that legacy, and that keeps dragging it down for a good while into its run.

Another early decision that drags the series down throughout its entire run is making the main cast so young. In a Love Hina-esque comedy world with no rules, characters like Mana Tatsumiya, who’s a hardened mercenary soldier and firearms expert at fourteen years old, are funny because we know that’s not how any of this works. But as the series gets more serious and starts to have real fighting and real stakes, the characters being so young starts to cause problems. It’s implied that Mana was out on the battlefield killing people as a small child, which is more disturbing than fun, but it’s never played as anything more than, “Wow, she’s such a badass!” The battles in earlier stories usually don’t involve actual death; they’re dangerous but non-lethal. But later, in the Magical World Arc (which will be covered more in later parts if I ever feel moved to write them), this same cast of fourteen-year-old girls and their ten-year-old teacher are thrust into various dangerous, lethal, and traumatic situations. They have to fight to the death; escape from slavery; suffer implied threats of sexual violence (which is usually Love Hina-style stupid and played for laughs; it only becomes sinister when you think about how it fits into the larger situation); make moral choices with huge consequences; and they’re portrayed as somehow stronger, smarter, more talented, and better trained than both adults and immortal beings that have been alive for thousands of years. They’re basically a cast of Mary Sues. I hate to use that term, because it has so much baggage. But I don’t know what else to call it when a ten-year-old boy is the only one with the power and wisdom to save two entire worlds of people, and everyone in the cast, including the centuries-old vampire, acknowledges it.

For all the problems I’ve mentioned, though, Negima has held up better than Love Hina. I still prefer the art of early Love Hina with less compositing and CG, but Akamatsu matures a lot as a writer over the series, which makes it even more baffling that he kept going with the nudification-based combat for so long. While I don’t love every character in Negima, I can name a lot that are likeable, have interesting arcs, act in believable ways, and are clearly thinking at a much higher level than the reptile-brain impulse that characterizes most of the Love Hina cast. The plot arcs are usually well paced and manage to find something for every member of the huge cast to do, no matter how minor; at the very least I can always find one or two panels that show me what the Narutaki twins, or Misora Kasuga, were doing during any given story. The world is not quite as fleshed out in the small details as it could be, but it’s a mixture of sci-fi and fantasy ideas and modern technology that feels unique and fun. (The Harry Potter books tell us things like where wizards buy underwear and how they send office memos, which are details we don’t get from Negima, but where the Harry Potter books take place in a small corner of Scotland and involve about thirty named characters lobbing sparks at each other, Negima takes place on a massive scale across two planets and at least three different eras of time, so a few details get left out.)

The Early Stories: Volumes 1 – 2

The early Negima stories are mostly one-offs and a lot more Love Hina-styled comedy than later stories, even the smaller stories that come up between arcs later on. There’s a lot of shenanigans between Negi, Asuna, and the other girls as they all get used to each other and Negi gets to know the members of his class and learn how to be a teacher. Volume 2 has a longer story about Negi and some of the girls spelunking into the huge secret temple beneath Library Island to recover a magical artifact that will help them pass their final exams.

Volume 1 is Lova Hina-like in more than just general tone. A bunch of Negima characters are spiritual descendants of Love Hina characters, in that they look similar and have superficially similar personalities and roles in the story. Asuna is a spiritual descendant of Naru, the energetic, hardworking, and violent girl who gets off on the wrong foot with the main character, but is forced to be around him by circumstances and slowly grows to respect him. Unlike Naru, who was (supposedly, academically) smart, Asuna is athletic and strong but academically dumb, often compared to a gorilla. Nodoka Miyazaki is the spiritual descendant of Shinobu from Love Hina, the quiet, shy, somewhat childish girl who falls in love with the main character early on, before anyone else sees how great he is. Unlike Shinobu, Nodoka is bookish and smart.

As the series goes on we meet more of these characters who are spiritually descended from a Love Hina character, but Akamatsu differentiates all of them from their predecessors in very obvious and decisive ways. Naru could never make up her damn mind about anything, and she always made everything more complicated by jumping to stupid conclusions and flying off the handle. While Asuna does this sometimes, we see later on that she’s actually a lot more mature than she seems. It’s actually Negi who tends to make situations more complicated, and Asuna tends to simplify things for him by presenting a more straightforward point of view. Also, while it seems early on that Asuna might be the Chosen One, the inevitable romantic interest for Negi the way Naru was for Keitaro, by Volume 9 or so, nothing about the True Asuna Ending seems inevitable at all, and the series basically squashes that option by the end.

As for Nodoka, her love actually gets to advance. Her intelligence, both in book learning and in emotional intelligence, make all the difference for her compared to Shinobu. While her love does get stalled eventually, the reasons for it are completely different, and much more tragic, than what happened to Shinobu. And unlike Shinobu, who gets mocked and bullied by the other characters, in Negima the other characters are sympathetic and even admiring towards Nodoka.

But in the early volumes, it looks like these characters are set up to be the same as their Love Hina counterparts. In hindsight, it’s worth it to see how Akamatsu later subverts his own tropes, which even he seems to have realized are dumb (not that he manages to get rid of every dumb trope in his work, as I mentioned above). But it does make reading Volumes 1 and 2 just that little bit more of a slog.

Also, as much as I like a lot of the characters in Negima, there are a few pretty prominent ones that I never took to, mostly because they fit into that Ken Akamatsu “bevy of brainless beauties” mold that I mentioned in the Love Hina reread. One of them is Ayaka Yukihiro, the absurdly rich shotacon class president who serves as Asuna’s rival, and she’s around a lot in the early volumes. Now, even Ayaka is more complex and interesting than equivalent characters in Love Hina, but I still find her pretty annoying a lot of the time, and it doesn’t help that she has just as much Mary Sue energy as the rest of the cast, if not more, so the series is always talking her up as this paragon of humanity. Still, I’m sure even Ayaka is someone’s favorite character. She gets enough development that you could reasonably like her if you don’t find her usual shtick as annoying as I do.

But some other characters that would later become my favorites do show up and get some screen time in these early volumes. Aside from Nodoka, there’s also her best friend Yue Ayase, a short, sarcastic girl who likes philosophy and very weird drinks. Yue is present in a lot of Volume 2, though we don’t get to know her that well until later. And there’s Konoka Konoe, Asuna’s best friend and the granddaughter of the school principal. Konoka is bright, positive, and cheerful, but she’s also quite intelligent. She knows how to have fun, but she’s not rowdy or obnoxious like a lot of the “fun” characters in Ken Akamatsu’s manga tend to be. In Volume 2 there’s a storyline about her grandfather setting up marriage meetings for her to try and get her into an arranged marriage, but that story was later dropped and what Akamatsu does with her later on is a lot more interesting than that would have been. (To be honest I like Konoka from Negima?! even more though. Negima?! was an anime that reimagined the series as an absurdist comedy. I also sometimes call it “Pani Poni Negi” because it was made by Shaft and the style is very similar to their show Pani Poni Dash. Pani Poni Konoka was hilariously weird, somehow knowing and airheaded at the same time.)

If the series were ever rebooted, I think a lot could be done to tighten up these early volumes and make them fit more neatly with the tone and plot of the later stories. They’re pretty tedious to read, a lot like Love Hina but even more directionless since we don’t know where the series is going at this point.

Evangeline Arrives: Volume 3

Evangeline A.K. McDowell, the villain introduced in Volume 3, is my favorite Negima character and probably my favorite character Ken Akamatsu has ever created (granted I haven’t read much of UQ Holder, which she is also in). She’s a loli vampire, hundreds of years old, incredibly powerful but often held back by her conscience and morals, despite how much she leans into the “evil villain” role that she’s been given by society. Her difficult life (and afterlife) has made her harder and more pragmatic than she might have been, but she’s never as evil in deed as in her words, and even a lot of seemingly cruel things she does are actually tough love. I can’t even remember if I liked loli vampires before Evangeline or if I started liking them because of her. And as a servant, she has a robot girl named Chachamaru Karakuri, who is technically a robot maid since she sometimes dresses in a maid outfit while serving Evangeline at home. Now, a loli vampire with a robot maid for a servant is a great symbol of how the world of Negima combines magic with sci-fi and modern technology, and also the most goddamn anime thing ever, and I love it.

Evangeline isn’t quite as interesting in Volume 3 as she later becomes—we mostly see her playing the villain role and stomping Negi in encounter after encounter, until he manages to outwit her at the end and then win her respect. But she does carry the volume. About half of it is about Negi doing his best to grow and figure out how to get around this obstacle in his way, and the other half is Negi learning about Evangeline and her past with his father. At this point the series’s main story starts to kick in as we learn about Negi’s father, the Thousand Master, and how he saved Negi from an attack that destroyed Negi’s village five years ago, even though he’s supposed to be dead. So Evangeline is not just a great obstacle or an interesting character; she also helps advance the main storyline.

Chachamaru is also a great character who we get to learn more about in this volume. I loved the chapter where Asuna and Negi tail her, hoping to catch her on her own and take her out separate from Evangeline, only to discover that she’s beloved in the community because she feeds stray cats, helps old ladies cross the street, and plays with local children. They still try to attack her, but at the last minute Negi calls back his attack because he hears her asking Evangeline to feed her cats if she dies. Negima comes back to this question again and again over the series: how ruthless is Negi willing to get to achieve his goals? This was the first time he had to ask himself, but it wasn’t the last.

The Kyoto Arc: Volumes 4 – 6.

This is the first big arc. It takes us out of the academy, introduces a ton of important characters that stay with us through the end of the series, and fills in a ton of details about the world and how magic works.

After defeating Evangeline, Negi finds out that his father had a house down in Kyoto. He wants to visit to look for evidence for his search, but he can’t get away from his teaching duties, so he hits on the idea of taking a field trip to Kyoto. Before leaving, the headmaster warns him that the Kantou Magic Association from the northeast side of Japan has a sometimes unfriendly relationship with the Kansai Association that oversees Kyoto, and the Kansai group might try something if they hear that a Western wizard is leading a field trip into their territory. On the train there, a splinter cell of the Kansai association attacks and tries to kidnap Konoka. Negi fights them off, along with Asuna and Setsuna Sakurazaki, a swordswoman and demon hunter from the Shinmei School (which is the same school that Motoko’s family ran in Love Hina. We even see Motoko or her sister vaguely in a flashback, which raises so many canon-breaking questions about the world that I have chosen to pretend don’t exist).

Setsuna is Konoka’s bodyguard, trained from a young age to defend her from threats. When they were younger, they were friends, but Setsuna has started to distance herself from Konoka, believing she can’t protect Konoka effectively if they’re too emotionally close. Setsuna is definitely somewhere on my top ten list of best Negima characters. While she has a vaguely similar arc to Motoko from Love Hina, where she has trouble balancing her devotion to the sword with her desire for love, the more serious situation around her, and her tragic past, makes her hesitation much more sympathetic. Her devotion to the sword isn’t some abstract, theoretical thing like it was with Motoko; it’s an actual worry whether she’ll be strong enough to protect the person she loves when the time comes. And she does love Konoka, as a friend at first, but later on also romantically. As a yuri fan I of course find Setsuna slowly acknowledging that she loves her mistress and best friend, while Konoka gently but unceasingly tries to let on that she’s open to Setsuna’s love, absolutely adorable. But I also like it from a story perspective. In Love Hina, so many characters’ arcs revolved around falling in love with Keitaro. Motoko’s whole arc was that she hated Keitaro, but then she fell in love with Keitaro. Negi is no Keitaro—he has a lot more personality, he’s smarter, much nicer, has a cool side to him, and he’s only ten, but he’s still much more mature. But still, it would get ridiculous if the entire cast was in love with Negi. And if your cast is thirty girls plus Negi, and not all of the girls are in love with Negi, it’s only natural that some of them might fall in love with each other. And Setsuna’s relationship with Konoka has its own interesting dynamics, different from anyone’s relationship with Negi: while there’s no age difference and no real rivals, Setsuna has to contend with a social class divide and the realization that she’s in love with another girl, plus her own trauma and self-esteem issues over her past. It’s also more interesting than where Konoka was headed before Setsuna came into the picture: in Volume 2 she was running away from her marriage meetings and hitting on Negi, so if not for Setsuna, she probably would’ve been just Asuna’s best friend and another also-ran in the battle for Negi. And Setsuna also figures in character development for Asuna and Evangeline down the line.

In Volume 3, Negi’s talking pet ermine Chamo showed up and introduced the idea of a Pactio, a contract that a wizard can make with another person to grant them their own powers so they can help in battles. Negi makes a Pactio with Asuna to fight against Evangeline. During the Kyoto arc, Nodoka becomes the second girl to make a Pactio with Negi in a silly story about sneaking around the inn after dark and stealing kisses. (Kissing Negi is what triggers the Pactio.) She gets an artifact called the Diarium Eius, a diary that can read minds. The first time I read this story arc, this blew my mind. I was expecting Nodoka to get treated like Shinobu, be kept in the dark about magic forever, willfully ignore more and more obvious signs that something is supernatural about Negi, and then finally find out about magic and ultimately be forgotten except in the naked group shots that still plague Negima. (I’ve been purposely not mentioning them to focus on the good parts.) But Nodoka not only gets a useful artifact, she also gets a story where she’s the key to winning a battle, and is clued in to the truth about magic right away.

Nodoka helps Negi and Asuna defeat Kotaro Inugami, another character who sticks around for the whole series and becomes pretty important. This also blew my mind the first time I read the Kyoto arc. I couldn’t believe Akamatsu had introduced a male character besides the protagonist who wasn’t just a useless loser meant to make the protagonist look better by being even more worthless and skeezy. Kotaro is, in fact, the first sign of Negima shifting gears into a shounen action series. He’s the strength-obsessed rival character, basically the Vegeta or Katsuki Bakugo of Negima.

We also meet Konoka’s father, Eishun Konoe, the head of the Kansai Magic Association who was also a companion of Negi’s father. Like the Harry Potter books that Negima takes inspiration from, Negi keeps meeting old friends of his parents through the series and gradually learning more about them from the reminiscences of their old friends.

The arc ends with Konoka being captured by the enemies, which include Chigusa Amagasaki, an onmyoji; Tsukuyomi, a rogue Shinmei swordswoman obsessed with Setsuna; and Fate Averruncus, a mysterious mage. They use Konoka’s latent magic power to summon the Ryomen Sukuna no Kami, a massive ogre, and an army of demons. Negi, Setsuna, and Asuna do their best to fight it off, but in the end the academy headmaster finds a loophole in the spell that keeps Evangeline bound to the academy and sends her to help. Evangeline unleashes her full power and defeats the ogre, showing for the first time how powerful she actually is. Tsukuyomi and Fate both show up again, Fate in a very major role, but here he mostly neutralizes Negi so that Evangeline’s power is needed. His strength also spurs Negi to escalate his combat training in the next few volumes.

When I read the Kyoto arc for the first time back when it came out, I thought it was genius. I didn’t read Volume 3 until after I read the Kyoto arc (Barnes and Noble was out of stock, that was how things went back then), so I missed the gradual shift from Love Hina-style harem comedy to action. So at the time it felt like we went straight from the usual dumb antics to an exciting story that introduced a ton of great characters and took existing ones in interesting directions. This time it didn’t impress me quite as much. It’s still a good story, but tonally it’s really uneven, even more than the rest of Negima. Volume 4 is mostly serious and action, and while Volume 6 has some lighthearted moments, it’s also a lot of serious action. Then Volume 5 is a pillow fight for Negi’s lips organized by Kazumi Asakura, the school reporter and spiritual successor to Love Hina’s Kitsune. The harem comedy shenanigans here are better written than the shenanigans in Volumes 1 and 2, mostly because the characters are more defined and we know their motives and desires, so there’s some emotional stakes to it. Nodoka has confessed her love to Negi at this point, and he hasn’t given her an answer, so she’s almost obligated to take part. Yue joins her to try and fight the other girls off of Negi for her best friend’s sake, and captured my heart right away when she monologues about how stupid her classmates are and how terrible this situation is for poor Nodoka, who has a serious crush on Negi and now has to compete with a bunch of girls who are just messing around. I do like what we eventually get out of this—Nodoka on the magic side, relevant to the plot, fully aware of what’s going on, and in a good position to advance her relationship with Negi. But it still feels jarring to interrupt a serious storyline with fighting and high stakes for a classically stupid Ken Akamatsu harem comedy interlude.

Also, all the chuunibyou Ancient Greek spell incantations, and massive lore dumps about the history and theoretical principles behind the magic spells in the extra material, which I loved so much when I was younger, feel tedious now. I skipped over all of it this time. I can read the Greek alphabet, but not quickly or fluently. When I was younger I took the time to go over every single word, really taking in every alpha and zeta, enunciating every phi and chi, noting the word-final form of sigma and every rough breathing symbol, and because I was a massive chuunibyou dork, it gave a ton of weight to the battle scenes. It gave me a thrill every time I got to the last panel of Evangeline’s invocation and read her “Kosmike Katastrophe”, and she snapped her fingers and destroyed the Sukuna with what I knew, thanks to the extra lore, was an ice spell that lowered the proximity around the ogre to absolute zero, the utter absence of molecular motion. And I’m still a massive chuunibyou dork, but I’m a lot lazier and more ADHD now, so I just skimmed over the incantation until I got the last page and didn’t read the extra lore about the spell.

But I still find the effort put into the spells and their lore fascinating. When I think of an intellectual mangaka, or even an intelligent mangaka, Ken Akamatsu is just about the last person I’d ever think of. But he, or someone on his assistant team, had to put this all together. That was such a surprise to me, and is maybe an even bigger surprise to me today. I have no idea if the Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit in Negima is accurate or if it’s just a bunch of nominative nouns and infinitive verbs they looked up in a dictionary and strung together with Japanese word order. But even that, even the very idea that Western spells are in Latin and Greek and Eastern spells are in Sanskrit, goes far beyond what I’d expect from a man whose idea of humor was Naru having diarrhea and trying to get away from Keitaro so she could take a shit while Keitaro wants to talk about their relationship. Which just goes to show that we all contain multitudes.

Conclusion

It sounds like I’m being hard on Ken Akamatsu both in this post and the one on Love Hina. And I am. Frankly, if I read either Love Hina or Negima for the first time today, I’d drop them quickly. All the praise for Negima I wrote here comes with a huge caveat: there’s still constant, artless nudity covering every single page, eroding the gravity of even the most serious situations. For example, that big battle with the Ryomen Sukuna no Kami, which ends with that awesome moment where Evangeline comes out of a portal and blows it away? Just before that battle, Asuna loses her panties and runs out into the fight without them. Even during some of the most dangerous moments, panels are framed so we can see up Asuna’s skirt to her naked butt. It’s not funny, it’s not sexy, and it adds nothing to the story. And you only even get to that point if you read Volumes 1 and 2, which are the same kind of tedious, repetitive comedy as Love Hina, stuffed to the gills with girls getting their clothes blown off. Even as the narrative tells us how amazing, powerful, smart, strong, and wonderful these girls are, Akamatsu simply can’t resist blowing their clothes off or conjuring mysterious winds to blow up their skirts so we see their panties or putting scenes in the bath for no reason (similar to the “sexposition” in shows like Game of Thrones).

But Negima is still interesting, because you can see Akamatsu growing as a writer right there on the page. There’s still a lot of bad habits and stupid shit left over from his older work, but as far as writing, Negima is far and away above what passed for a character arc or a storyline in AI ga Tomaranai, or even Love Hina. The huge cast isn’t just about looks or gimmicks like “ninja girl” and “robot girl”. Some of the characters play supporting roles and some of them are in main roles, but each one has her own path, her own goals, her own growth to do. That’s very different from Love Hina, where everyone’s path ended with falling in love with Keitaro and the only difference was just how little chance they had with him. And even Negi himself has a personality, and a past, and goals informed by his past, and the girls who fall in love with him (and even the ones who just regard him as a little brother or a best friend) are responding to that. Some respond to his virtues, like Nodoka, who admires his clear vision of what he wants to achieve, and the hard work he puts into achieving it. Some respond to his faults, like Asuna, who worries about his tendency to throw himself into danger all alone, refusing to ask for help or consider the consequences. Those virtues and faults feel uniquely Negi’s, and the way each girl reacts to him feels uniquely hers.

To put it another way, lots of mangaka made rowdy harem comedies in the same time period that Akamatsu was making AI ga Tomaranai and Love Hina. A lot of them showed standard harem comedy archetypes falling in love with a bland average guy with no personality. Akamatsu’s work did a lot of that as well. But even as far back as the middle of AI, and certainly in Love Hina, there was some real heart and some real vision to what Akamatsu was doing. He wasn’t a hack trading in the usual cliches of harem comedy. In a lot of cases, he was actually defining what would become the usual cliches. I don’t see To-Love-Ru ever existing without Love Hina, for instance. Love Hina draws heavily on the setup of Rumiko Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku and makes it rowdier, hornier, constantly nakeder, and more over-the-top unrealistic. (Akamatsu acknowledges the influence of Maison Ikkoku in some of the extra material.) To-Love-Ru does basically the same thing for Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura. In some ways, being the cliche definer works against him now, because it’s all been run into the ground and I’m sick of seeing it. And some of the things he introduced I didn’t like even back when I first read Love Hina. But even now, I got invested in some of Love Hina’s characters. I cared what happened to them, and I wanted to see them happy in the end. I just can’t say the same for a lot of other harem comedies that followed in Akamatsu’s footsteps.

That germ of a good writer, one who understands character and uses it to drive a story, starts to sprout in Negima. You don’t see it until Volume 3, and it doesn’t become incontrovertible until much later in the series. And of course, it’s not perfect. Negima is still full of storytelling and character flaws, even setting aside the obnoxious constant nudity and skeevy gremlin sexuality. For instance, pretty much every villain until much later just gives up, tells Negi and the girls how awesome they are, and walks away, which lowers the stakes once you know they were never in any real danger. And there’s the Mary Sue energy I talked about earlier, and the tonal clash when harem comedy and shounen action collide. And the fact that, until quite late in the series, everybody can do magic in front of a bunch of non-magical people and just say “It’s just CGI bro”, and the non-magical people will just believe that and go, “Wow, CGI sure is advanced nowadays!” Unlike Love Hina, which was very consistent and even, Negima is inconsistent and uneven. Its tone and its writing quality jump all over the place. Some story arcs are better than others, for sure, but even within a single story, things are uneven.

I can forgive a lot of those flaws, though, because Akamatsu was doing his best to grow. He could have just stuck to the premise he started with in Volume 1: Harry Potter but horny. He didn’t, and he probably lost some readers along the way. He probably also turned away some readers who were there for a shounen action series but weren’t interested in naked girls on every page. Eventually he does manage to give up that weird security blanket, and I respect how hard it probably was to reach that point and how much courage it took.

I Take It All Back: Kaleido Star and Konosuba are Pretty Good After All

A few years ago I watched between one and five episodes of a bunch of anime trying to find something to follow through on after I dropped Last Exile. I didn’t really like any of them except for The Ancient Magus’s Bride, and until recently I had not gone any further with any of them, including The Ancient Magus’s Bride.

However, I did go back recently and give two of those shows another chance—Kaleido Star and Konosuba. I liked both of them a lot more than I did a few years ago. In both cases, though, I don’t think my opinion back then about the first few episodes was wrong. Both take more than a few episodes to appreciate. I’ve always believed that anime pretty much set their trajectory in the first episode and if the first few episodes are bad, the show isn’t going to get any better. But in these cases I was wrong, and I’m reassessing that belief. If the concept is bad or the writing is fundamentally terrible, you can tell from the first episode. A little while ago I rewatched the first episode of The Soul Taker because I thought maybe it was actually better than I remembered. Nope, it was poorly written from the get-go. On the other hand, it can take a lot longer than five episodes to set up character arcs and relationship dynamics, and if the storytelling style is extremely subtle it can’t always be appreciated right away. Neither Kaleido Star nor Konosuba are subtle, but they do both get a lot of their appeal from characters and relationship dynamics, so to appreciate them you have to watch enough to get to love the characters and to notice how their relationships work.

Kaleido Star: Third time’s the charm

When I watched Kaleido Star for that older post, it wasn’t the first time I’d watched it. I rented the first DVD from Netflix way way back. Then I watched it on Crunchyroll during that brief period when Crunchyroll and Funimation were buddies and all the Funimation stuff was on Crunchyroll, and that was when I wrote that older post about it. This time I watched it on Funimation.

I kept watching Kaleido Star and trying to like it because I love the concept so much. A cute shoujo-flavored drama series about a girl trying to make it as a star in a Cirque du Soleil-style prestige circus is a great idea. There’s so much romance and style inherent to the setting, so much potential for character conflict and growth. Plus Sora is played by Ryo Hirohashi, the voice actress who played Alice in Aria, Rakka in Haibane Renmei, and Kyou in Clannad, who has one of my favorite voices in the business. (In a stunning twist, she also played disgusting creepo ball boy Mineta in My Hero Academia.)

The show does take advantage of its setting, but it takes a while for everything to coalesce in a satisfying way. At first it seems like everyone is just being mean to Sora for drama, but as the show goes on we start to see how the way they treat Sora at first comes out of their own personalities. Kalos, the circus owner, is always throwing down the gauntlet and challenging Sora with something crazy. At first it seems like he just behaves that way to create plots, but after a while it becomes more clear that this is his way of discovering and cultivating talent. He throws down crazy challenges at new talent because if they can overcome his challenges, they’ve proven their worth and he can inject some new blood into the show instead of relying on the same old people. Layla, the current star, is also constantly picking at Sora, but she turns around when Sora manages to learn her signature move, the Golden Phoenix, in three days. Layla is a hardcore hardass stone-cold hard-driver who’s so passionate about Kaleido Stage that she can’t help but take it as a personal insult if someone she deems unworthy is put on stage, but she respects hard work. Eventually Layla becomes something like Sora’s mentor. While she’s never the nurturing type, she does keep pushing Sora to improve and develop and uses competition with her as a way to motivate Sora’s growth.

The show ends up a lot more down-to-earth than I was expecting from the first few episodes. A lot of plots hinge on the idea that Kaleido Stage is still a business and has to make money for its investors. And once Sora reaches the top, she has to confront the idea of what it means to be a star and the constant competition someone at the top has to face. That helps keep the show grounded and the stakes clear even when there are elements that are unrealistic or straight up supernatural. The plot unexpectedly kept me hooked; there were plenty of times when I watched another episode just because I really wanted to know what would happen next.

Kaleido Star is an original idea by Junichi Sato, the director of Aria. And like Aria, it takes a while to get going. I didn’t even start to get on board until Episode 7 of Season 1, and I don’t think I was fully invested in it until around Episode 11 or 12. Unlike Aria, there’s plot going on from the beginning, so it’s easier to watch the first few episodes and think, “This is how the whole show is going to be and I’m not into it, I’m out” like I did the first two times I watched it. But by sticking with it I started to grow attached to the characters and get interested in how they and their relationships with each other would develop, just like Aria. It all leads up to an amazing finale for Season 1. Season 2 starts off a bit rough, and again takes a long time to get going. It’s never quite as strong as Season 1, but in the end it’s still satisfying and it brings a more nuanced and complex character arc for Sora to work through, and wraps things up in a good spot for all the main characters.

As a final note, I actually watched the dub for a lot of Kaleido Star (as well as Konosuba). It’s a real mixed bag. It’s an ADV dub from back in the day, which means uneven quality and obnoxious creative liberties with the script. Luckily they didn’t go too far with the creative liberties on this one; all their dubs after about 2005 or so fall somewhere on a continuum between “liberal translation” and “troll dub”, but this one’s closer to “liberal translation”. But it’s still uneven. Some of the actors really didn’t read their lines well, like the actress who plays Layla. There were some scenes where Layla was performing in a movie or a play, and the dub actress tried to read the lines with worse acting to make it sound like acting so it would be differentiated from Layla’s actual emotional moments. Unfortunately she already wasn’t very good at acting, so when she played Layla performing it was so bad that it made me wonder if she was trying to slander Layla by implying she was shit at acting. Some of the actors can read their lines okay, but were miscast and don’t fit their parts at all. Ken’s voice, for example, sounds wrong for the character, much too old for one thing. Rosetta is even worse; the actress can deliver her lines well, but Rosetta is twelve and she’s cast to sound like she’s thirty-five. Sora’s voice actress, Cynthia Martinez, definitely plays Sora as more obnoxious and throaty than Ryou Hirohashi, who plays Sora with more strength than she does Alice but still with the wispy, creaky quality that’s natural to her voice. At first I didn’t know if I could spend a whole series listening to Martinez’s performance, but I got used to it and I think she found the role a bit more and struck a balance where she still sounded youthful and energetic but not as obnoxious. A lot of the supporting and minor characters were actually pretty well cast, like Anna and Mia, Anna’s father, and Layla’s off-Broadway director friend Cathy. Yuri and Leon were voiced with accents, which could have been a disaster, but they went light enough on the accents that it at least fit with everyone else’s performances and didn’t go into parody territory.

Konosuba: More than just girls getting horny over weird things

I’m not a very big fan of isekai. I haven’t watched much of it because what little I have watched I haven’t particularly enjoyed. I’ve got a raft of problems with the genre. In its purest form it’s basically the otaku horny version of The Chronicles of Narnia, which in my opinion was a good enough concept for like two or three shows, but now there are like fifteen of them per year and the genre is flooded. I recognize the irony here: the same thing happened to cute girls doing cute things, and I still love that genre. But I liked the basic tropes of that genre, while the basic tropes of isekai, the very things that make it isekai, are already a stumbling block to my enjoyment. I like interesting and unique worlds in my fantasy, but the worlds of isekai shows are always the most generic Dragon Quest knockoff thing you can imagine. The real-life video game mechanics in a lot of isekai shows annoy me. I don’t find it interesting or clever that the characters basically learn new abilities by leveling up in a menu after they kill some number of monsters to gain experience points. I prefer something more like we see in shounen anime, where learning a new ability requires good teaching, a strong conceptual understanding, and intense training, because it’s more realistic and it gives you chances to build character and plot. And I really can’t get into shows about the characters playing an online game, like Sword Art Online or Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks? I just find it an uninteresting premise for a story. There are some angles to the premise that would interest me: exploring how people construct identities, maybe, or how they make real connections with other people in an artificial world over artificial goals. Or more cynically, how people ignore or detach themselves from reality and substitute the game world, and the effects that has on their psyche and worldview. Or some angle that uses the created and artificial nature of the world to comment on something else, or to play with the nature of perception or reality. But shows about online games never go in those directions. They’re always some fantasy action-adventure story that loses even the slight bit of interest I would normally have in a fantasy world because it’s not even a real world and nothing they do there actually matters. I don’t care if dying in the games means they die in real life and I don’t care if the creator of the game hid some secret message in the depths of the programming; it just doesn’t do it for me. I watched .hack//Sign back in the day and it was one of the most boring anime I’ve ever seen. The fact that I watched the whole show week over week for half a year when it was on Cartoon Network still astounds me and really speaks to how desperate I was for any anime to watch back then. And even setting aside all those personal problems I have with the genre at a conceptual level, a lot of isekai shows just aren’t very well written from a plot or character standpoint.

Anyway, now that I’ve pissed off literally everyone with that establishing rant, I’ll say that Konosuba is the exception that proves the rule. Zombie movies are another genre I’m really not that into. My favorite zombie movie is Shawn of the Dead, the parody of zombie movies that’s half a romcom. It’s a similar situation with Konosuba. It’s the only isekai I’ve seen so far that I liked, and it’s the parody of isekai that’s half a harem show. It turns all those pet peeves I have about isekai shows into strengths by using them as sources of humor and plots. I liked Konosuba so much that I’m planning to check out some of the other newer isekai which people have pointed to as standouts in the genre, like Re:Zero, to see if I might enjoy them too.

My original assessment that Konosuba was just going to derive humor from cute girls getting horny over weird things was fair given I was only looking at the first five episodes, and also given that even if the first episode of an anime has clever jokes, you never know if it’s going to maintain that energy or if it’s just going to get lazy and fall back on the same two jokes over and over. But Konosuba does keep bringing clever jokes, and it does have more jokes up its sleeve than just cute girls getting horny over weird things. Even the jokes about cute girls getting horny over weird things worked better on an ongoing basis than I expected. It’s not just the same weird things making them horny over and over; the show keeps escalating the weirdness so things stay interesting.

Konosuba’s best moments usually boil down to three things that it does really well. First, the characters. Like with Kaleido Star, it takes time to learn what makes these characters tick. It takes time to realize that they do have actual personalities which the jokes stem from, not just one joke they do over and over that represents the sum total of their personalities. It takes even longer to realize that these characters actually have relationships and interplay with one another. They aren’t just crazy comedy weirdos thrown together for laughs. They start out looking sort of that way, but soon you notice that they actually have dynamics to their relationships. When Kazuma and Megumin fight over who gets to go in the bath first after they both get slimed by giant toads, and then end up going in together, it’s not just a stupid harem situation. It’s an actual expression of their personalities and relationship. They’re both petty, so when Kazuma raises the stakes by saying they should go in together, basically challenging Megumin to a game of chicken, Megumin can’t back down. Then they do go in together, and it ends up not being sexy at all. They just casually sit around and have a bath, because neither of them (at least at this point) considers the other attractive or sexually interesting in any way. Their bath together is only interrupted because Aqua comes back, and Kazuma is worried what she’ll think about them casually sitting around naked together.

The supporting characters are more of a mixed bag; some are really good (I like Yunyun a lot), some are pretty much just one joke, or just whatever joke the story needs at the time (Wiz feels like a plot device, but at least she gets Yui Horie into the show, so I appreciate her for that). But the core quartet has a real bond. Not a sweet bond or a wholesome bond. It’s more like shitty friends who constantly razz each other and laugh at each other’s misfortune, but they stick together because no one else will put up with any of them. But that’s what’s best for the comedy and the tone this series sets, and it also makes the infrequent sweet moments land that much better.

Second, the world. The world of Konosuba is (intentionally) the same sort of generic Dragon Quest-style fantasy RPG world seen in most isekai shows. But in its search for jokes, the series subverts, deconstructs, or comments on elements of that generic fantasy RPG world, and in doing that, it often creates a world that feels, despite its absurdity, somehow more realistic and logical. For instance, we find out a lot about how regular people live in this world that we don’t find out in other similar shows, because Kazuma is dropped into this fantasy world with no special abilities and has to build himself up from nothing. He doesn’t instantly fall in with royalty or have any way to stand out and make a living from the get-go. He has to start out sleeping in a stable and doing day labor on construction sites. It’s funny, but it also shows us what it’s like to be a commoner with no powers trying to make it in this world. He also isn’t the only loser otaku from Japan who died and came into this fantasy world. There are others who did have magical abilities, and their presence has had a profound impact on this world. And some of the trope subversion makes for more original takes on the usual creatures. For instance, there are no male orcs in this world, because adventurers kept killing them off. Orcs are an all-female species. It’s played for a joke (one which I enjoyed), but it was also a logical conclusion of the trope of the evil orc army.

Third, the plot. Konosuba’s plot is surprisingly well written. It’s not just a regular fantasy adventure story with jokes and silly world elements thrown in; the plot itself contributes to the humor and usually stems directly from the characters’ actions. The stories in Konosuba could only be done in Konosuba, because only characters as immature and foolish as these ones could get themselves into these situations. And because the world actually works consistently, the characters can actually use the mechanics of the world, no matter how weird or stupid they are, to their advantage to resolve situations. Because the characters and world are so well done, the plot just needed to stitch them together in a satisfying way, and it does that as well as you could possibly ask for.

I enjoyed Konosuba so much that I watched it twice in about two weeks’ time. First I watched the dub, which, as dubs go, is fantastic. The casting is all on point. The actors nail the line reads and comedic timing. Comedic timing is a major strength of Konosuba, so it had to be right for the dub to work, and they got it right in my opinion. Next I watched the subtitled original Japanese version, which is also fantastic. I didn’t know much about any of the actors playing the four leads. Sora Amamiya, who plays Aqua, also played Kaori Fujimiya in One Week Friends; and Ai Kayano, who plays Darkness, was also Menma in Anohana and Utaha in Saekano. Those are all characters I liked and vocal performances I liked, but not ones that I loved or which stood out in my memory. Rie Takahashi, who voices Megumin, had only done one character I knew: Ena Saitou from Yuru Camp. And Jun Fukushima, who voices Kazuma, is like an eternal background voice. His listing has very few main roles and very few shows in general. But they all did great, striking the perfect notes for their characters and getting the interplay right.

Conclusion

Anime is good. Kaleido Star and Konosuba are good. I’m glad I gave them another chance. That’s all.

Digest: Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san and Tamako Market

In this frightening and uncertain time of global travail, the otaku’s heart is best soothed by one thing: cute girls.

Both of these shows, Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san and Tamako Market, have cute girls out the wazoo. They also have cute stories and cute art. Neither one is of exceptional quality, but both serve well enough as a salve for an otaku’s sickly spirit.

Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san: Cute Girls doing Vampire Things

Akari Amano loves dolls. When she hears rumors of a living doll stalking the woods at night from her occult-loving friend Sakuya, she runs off to meet the living doll and discovers a 360-year-old vampire named Sophie Twilight. Sophie’s not a living doll, but she’s close enough that Akari quickly fixates on her and inserts herself into Sophie’s life. After a few weeks she even moves into Sophie’s mansion with her, and introduces Sophie to her best friend Hinata. Soon after, Ellie, an even older vampire who was with Sophie in her early days, resurfaces after sleeping for 100 years. Sophie, Akari, Ellie, and Hinata start spending time together as friends, the humans learning about the vampires and the vampires about the humans.

I was pretty skeptical of Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san at first, especially when they showed us Sophie’s dakimakura cover and huge collection of expensive figures. Making characters otaku became such a lazy shortcut to fill out their lives in the 2010’s. And the rest of the setup is very standard cute girls doing cute things. But by a couple episodes in, I was enjoying it, even though it doesn’t bring much new to the table. Following the formula, they picked a fun theme, vampires and humans living together. They picked a beautiful setting, Sophie’s mansion and the cute little Japanese neighborhood around it. They chose an art style which is very colorful and bright, but fairly detailed, with normal proportions instead of chibi. They got some cute girls, some of whom are vampires, and picked the “everyone is in love with each other” dynamic. Then they put the girls together and let interplay happen.

But Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san works because all the pieces they chose fit together so well. The characters are all very adorable and quite lovable. Their personalities are pretty standard, but everyone has distinguishing elements and a great visual design to make her stand out from other characters of the same type in other shows. And there’s a spark, a chemistry to their interactions that not every cute girls doing cute things show manages to pull off. They have conflict and disagreements, but they talk it out and learn to understand each other. There’s just as many moments of friendship and support—real friendship built between different people who don’t always get along or understand each other, not superficial “of course we’re best friends!” moments. Even though the main four aren’t all equally close to each other, every pairing gets at least a small moment so we can see them interact. It always feels like everyone knows and likes each other.

Ellie was especially a pleasant surprise, because when she showed up, I thought she was going to be so annoying. She fights with Hinata at first when Hinata calls her cute and treats her like a child, so she could’ve been constantly causing fights and being rowdy. She also enjoys wearing skimpy clothes and sucking blood from young girls, so she could’ve been a source of never-ending fan service. But she ended up being neither of those. She and Hinata talk it out and Ellie explains that she hates being treated like a child because when she was human, she always looked up to her beautiful mother and awaited the day she would grow up and be equally beautiful. But she became a vampire before she had the chance to grow up, so her childlike appearance is a sore spot. Hinata understands, and the two of them actually become good friends for the rest of the series. It makes sense that she likes wearing skimpy adult clothing, and the series doesn’t really take advantage of it for fan service shots; there are a few, but they’re very tame and very infrequent.

And speaking of Ellie’s backstory, the series also uses the vampire stuff really well. The lazy version of this story would have taken away the vampires’ weakness to the sun and let them eat normal human food, and then somewhere around Episode 8 there would have been a joke where someone says “I forgot you were vampires!” and the vampires briefly feel shame for their unvampirely conduct. They didn’t do that; nearly every story touches on some way that being a vampire affects Sophie’s and Ellie’s daily lives. The vampires are in constant danger from the sun, but they still sometimes brave the danger to spend time with their human friends or go to things they want to do during the day. The classic beach episode ends up being a life-or-death affair for them, and there’s an episode where Sophie gets stranded under a tree without her parasol and has to wait for the sun to go down. And Ellie loves makeup because of her affection for the trappings of beautiful adult womanhood, but since she has no reflection, she can’t put it on well. So we get some funny scenes of Ellie sitting in front of a mirror and clumsily smearing makeup all over her face, and then a nice scene of Akari putting it on for her.

A lot of anime I’ve been watching recently have pretty forgettable opening and ending sequences. Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san is a nice surprise here too. Both the opening and ending song are really fun and accompanied by cute animation that captures the spirit of the series.

Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san is a nice, enjoyable, pleasant watch for fans of cute girls doing cute things (like me) and vampires (like me). It’s got cute girls in adorable goth loli outfits having fun together, drinking blood, avoiding the sun, and enjoying each others’ company. It’s not groundbreaking, but it does what it does well.

Tamako Market: The Base form of Kyo-Ani

It would be tasteless of me to talk about Kyoto Animation without mentioning the completely senseless arson attack they suffered last year. Many were injured, a few died, and the studio may never recover, so those who survived are out of a job.

Kyoto Animation made some of my favorite shows ever—Clannad, Kanon, K-On, Chuunibyou de mo Koi ga Shitai, Hibike! Euphonium. It made The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and though I’m still deep in oblivion towards that series, it occurs to me that I fell into those feelings when there was no more anime to watch and I was reading the light novels. It wouldn’t be the first time Kyo-Ani improved on their source material. Even shows of theirs that I find less successful, like Lucky Star or Beyond the Boundary, are always good enough for me to finish. This ANN column goes a bit deeper into what makes Kyo-Ani special among anime studios.

Unfortunately I also have to count Tamako Market among that second group of shows I find less successful. The show follows a group of characters running family businesses in an old-fashioned Japanese shopping arcade. Tamako, the main character, is the daughter of a mochi shop and beloved by everyone for her cheerful and hardworking nature. One day, a weird talking bird named Dera arrives in town and starts living with her. Dera comes from a mysterious island kingdom and was tasked by its prince to find his destined bride, but he ignores this mission for most of the series and the story just follows the characters’ daily lives.

Tamako Market has all the usual top-rate things about Kyo-Ani shows—the top-rate animation, the visual storytelling, the adorable designs, the full and lived-in world—but for me the premise didn’t have enough meat on it, the story doesn’t really go anywhere, and the characters are likable but not instantly engaging the way the characters in my favorite Kyo-Ani shows are. It’s slice of life in a very pure sense. It abandons even the thin pretense of stakes and tension that K-On maintains. Tamako is cute but not that interesting as a main character once you get past her superficial quirks, and most of the show happens around her. And interesting things do happen, but in almost all of them, Tamako mostly plays the part of a static object. Her childhood friend and neighbor, Mochizo, is in love with her and constantly trying to catch her attention. Shiori, a classmate from the badminton club, overcomes her shyness to become friends with Tamako. Tamako’s little sister Anko has her first crush on a boy. Tamako’s humming a song whose name she can’t remember sets off memories of her dead mother for her father. But Tamako’s involvement in almost all of these storylines is minimal. She doesn’t know Mochizo is in love with her, and she never realizes how much Shiori is struggling to make friends with her, and in the other storylines she’s usually a spectator instead of an actor.

Tamako is somewhat of a character with no arc, like Akari in Aria, the kind of character who changes others around her instead of changing herself. But the show’s storytelling is so subtle that it’s hard to even see how Tamako is causing these changes. So for me it ends up being a series of interesting slice of life vignettes without any connective tissue. In some of these vignettes the subtle storytelling worked beautifully. The show likes to upend expectations. It misleads you as to who Tamako’s friend Midori and her sister Anko are actually in love with. But it slips in little grains of the truth beforehand, using entirely visual storytelling, so that if you’re paying attention, you feel that the final reveal is completely logical and motivated. The subtlety also helps keep some of the cliched elements, like Mochizo’s crush on Tamako, from feeling tiresome. And it helps dampen how truly strange and out of place the final plot line, when Dera’s master returns for him, is in this nostalgic old-fashioned Japanese shopping arcade. But it also takes emotional impact away from a lot of the show’s events, which made me care a lot less than I might have about the characters and what they were going through.

I enjoyed watching Tamako Market. It’s a beautiful show with a ton of character, and its subtle visual storytelling stands out among anime, which often belabor their plot points and overuse exposition. But I was also kind of glad when it was over, and I don’t think I would ever rewatch it. I liked a lot of the characters while I was watching the show, but they also didn’t stand out in my mind after I was done, and the show lacked any kind of story or thematic continuity, even compared to K-On. There’s a sequel movie called Tamako Love Story that I don’t feel at all moved to check out, because I simply don’t care who Tamako falls in love with. Tamako Market definitely wasn’t a waste of time or bad, but it lacked something, and for me that lack puts it nearly on the same level as Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san, even though it felt so much more original.

Social Facades in “Yuri is My Job!”

As usual, I picked up Yuri is My Job! for the most superficial of reasons. I like yuri, I like the subgenre of yuri about yuri girls schools, and the art on the cover was really cute. Then it sucked me in with its interesting plot and characters, and I kept reading because I wanted to know what happened next. But Yuri is My Job isn’t really about yuri girls schools. It’s only tangentially about yuri. The characters aren’t even in an actual yuri girls school; they’re in a cafe themed as a yuri girls school, where they all play characters and act out scenarios as if they’re in Maria-sama ga Miteru or Strawberry Panic. That’s fitting, because the series is actually a lot more concerned with social facades, the constructed personalities that people adopt to make it easier to live in society and relate to others, than it is about yuri, and the fiction of the cafe is an integral part of exploring that theme.

The cafe at the center of Yuri is My Job! plays the part of a yuri girls school, Liebe Girls Academy, and the patrons play the part of honored guests visiting the school and being waited on by a special cafe team formed from the school’s most beloved students, who the cafe staff play. The main character is Hime Shiraki, an extremely small and cute girl who’s adopted a peppy, sweet character to match her appearance. However, she’s actually manipulating everyone to like her, and hopes to someday use her appearance and constructed personality to marry into money and live a comfortable life. Hime accidentally knocks over Mai, the manager of the cafe, and with Mai’s wrist injured, she press-gangs Hime into working there so they have extra help until her injury heals. Mitsuki, another waitress who’s tall and cool, takes an immediate dislike to Hime, and Hime responds by laying on the sweetness as thick as possible. Hime takes advantage of the appearance of friendliness that Mitsuki has to maintain out on the cafe floor and arranges for she and Mitsuki to become schwestern—“sisters”, like the soeurs in Maria-sama ga Miteru. Hime discovers that Mitsuki dislikes her because she’s actually Mitsuki Yano, a former friend of Hime’s from sixth grade. Mitsuki thought Hime had betrayed her, and she was so hurt by it that she told everyone about Hime’s facade. This damaged Hime’s relationship to her classmates so much that she was alone until graduation, and Mitsuki transferred away, so they never had a chance to clear the air. Hime’s best friend Kanoko also joins the cafe to spend time with her and ends up in conflict with Sumika, the most senior member of the floor staff. Kanoko is secretly in love with Hime, and Sumika finds real romance to be a threat to the facade of the cafe.

All the characters in Yuri is My Job! have complicated relationships with social facades, which is fitting, since Liebe Girls School is also a facade, and the way each character engages with that tells us something about her. Hime’s facade is thickest and most obvious of the main characters. She treats her entire daily life as a performance, a game with the goal of winning everyone’s love, and she slips easily into the same pattern while working at the cafe. Yet over and over we see her contempt for people who are charmed by her facade. She doesn’t seem to be that happy to be tiny and cute, and she doesn’t seem to enjoy being peppy and perky and lovable. Early on, when some girls in her class compare her to the pure, beautiful heroine of a shoujo manga, she demurs, saying she’d rather be like the tall, cool beauty, who she sees as more practical and effective. She’s very taken with the tall, cool, beautiful Mitsuki the first time they meet, and later tells Mitsuki she’s jealous of Mitsuki’s body and appearance. She seems to think being pleasant and lovable and relying on the goodwill of others is the only way to make it with the hand she was dealt, and that she’d have more options to forge her own path if she were more of a cool beauty. She wants to marry a rich man because she sees herself as otherwise outmatched in the world; people won’t take her seriously because she’s tiny and adorable, so social “soft” power is her only option. To Hime, netting a rich husband is a high-level act of social power. It’s not really what she wants, but it’s something she can get with just her cute face and her constructed lovable personality. If she can net a rich husband, she’s set; all she has to do is keep her husband on her side, and his money will make her way for her in the world.

And in pretty much every situation, that’s what Hime does: she tries to make everyone love her, and then she aims for the highest level of social power she can achieve with that love. When the cafe runs an election for Lady Blume, Hime insists on campaigning for the title even though everyone tells her it’s not quite proper for a first-year student and she probably won’t win. It’s important to her, even though Lady Blume is a completely fictional construct that only exists inside the fiction of the cafe. The election is somewhat rigged. They do collect customer votes, but each of the staff members gets 90 votes to simulate a student body voting, and those votes are combined with the customer votes to decide the winner. And even within the fiction of the academy, Lady Blume isn’t a position of any real power. Mai vaguely describes the Lady Blume as a model student who evokes an image of “they’re all so wonderful”, but the Lady Blume has no official duties or privileges even within the fiction. It’s purely about influence. The Lady Blume does get to make one decree, but it’s a decree within the fictional world of Liebe Academy, so its scope is sharply limited. Hime doesn’t even have a real decree in mind; she says she wants to decree that everyone must love her, which Kanoko reminds her is something the Lady Blume already has. Yet Hime still sees it as a desirable position of social influence, and after she accepts that she can’t win on her own, she throws her weight behind Mitsuki in the hope that some of the sheen will reflect onto her as a Blume Schwester.

Yet even though Hime, the master of facades, tries to secure positions of social power in any group she finds herself in, she also gravitates towards people like Mitsuki and Kanoko who aren’t good at social facades. The first time she meets Mitsuki in sixth grade, Mitsuki is crabbing at her and some other girls for being in the way when Mitsuki’s trying to clean. The other girls are annoyed at Mitsuki, and try to hurt her by convincing Hime to replace her on piano at the upcoming school recital, but Hime lies that she can’t play the piano to protect Mitsuki. Later, she goes out of her way to make friends with Mitsuki and tells Mitsuki about her social facade. It’s similar with Kanoko. Kanoko is quiet and unsociable, prefers to be alone, and can’t stand her sociable classmates. But she doesn’t know how to refuse when the other girls push off a project they don’t want to do onto her alone. Hime starts seeking her out, trying to help her, even telling her she should speak up if she doesn’t like the work she’s been asked to do. When Kanoko gets angry and breaks the sign she was asked to make, Hime covers for her, then opens up to her, telling Kanoko about her facade and advising Kanoko to construct a facade of her own so it’s easier to get by in class. In both cases, Hime could have been content to join in her classmates’ disdain, but she was drawn to the outcast, to the person without a facade, and she went out of the way to use the power of her own facade to help them.

Kanoko does develop a facade of her own, but it’s not quite the one Hime had in mind. Kanoko maintains a facade that she and Hime are just best friends, when she’s actually in love with Hime. She’s terrified of anything that could interrupt the status quo, such as Hime finding out Kanoko is in love with her, or Hime developing feelings for someone else, so she sees Mitsuki as a threat. Just like Kanoko, Sumika is trying to maintain a status quo facade, but in her case it’s the facade of the cafe itself. She sees real-life romance as a threat to the image of Liebe Girls Academy friendship the staff portrays for customers, because in the past, a bad romance between coworkers put her at the center of problems for the scenario. So when she discovers by accident that Kanoko is in love with Hime, it brings them into conflict. Sumika seems to understand better than anyone else that the fiction of Liebe Girls Academy can’t exist unaffected by the reality of the staff’s own lives. Kanoko insists that Hime will never discover her love, so it will never affect their performances at the cafe, but Sumika doesn’t believe that’s possible when Kanoko’s feelings are so intense. And her meddling, big sisterly nature drives her to worry about Kanoko, to keep trying to help her even when their goals are at cross-purposes. Eventually, Sumika becomes for Kanoko what Kanoko is for Hime. Kanoko is the only person in Hime’s daily life who knows that her personality is a facade. She’s the only one who sees Hime behind the scenes, who Hime can talk to naturally without putting on a performance. And Sumika, having discovered the facade that Kanoko hides her love for Hime behind, offers to play that same role for Kanoko, to be the one Kanoko can talk to about her love for Hime. These developments in real life do affect the fiction of the cafe, just as Sumika predicted. With Kanoko’s and Mitsuki’s votes, Sumika wins the election for Lady Blume. She asks Kanoko to be her schwester, and Kanoko accepts. Sumika decrees as Lady Blume that all the cafe staff keep being friends, asserting the status quo of the fictional scenario that she did all she could to maintain.

Sumika’s real personality may be caring, sisterly, and meddlesome, but Kanoko only discovers this after unwrapping several layers of Sumika’s own social facade, which she only does at Hime’s urging. Inside the cafe, Sumika plays the character of a bookish, caring, but flippant sempai. Sumika’s fictional character is always reading, shirks responsibility, and flirts shamelessly with the younger girls. Outside the cafe, Sumika presents herself as stylish, confident, and carefree. Hime and Kanoko are both shocked at the contrast between her character in the cafe and how she appears outside. Kanoko at first takes her at face value and assumes she’s shallow and that her character inside the cafe is a complete fabrication. But Kanoko discovers that Sumika’s character is drawn from elements of her real personality. She may dress stylishly, but she actually does enjoy reading. She actually does care about the other staff both personally and professionally, and she wants them to enjoy and learn from their time working at the cafe.

Mitsuki is even more hopeless with social facades than Kanoko. She’s literal-minded, terrible at reading social cues, and not good at guessing intentions. She’s also strongly emotional. When Hime starts working at the cafe, she can’t stop herself from being angry whenever they talk behind the scenes, but she is able to put on a convincing enough performance inside the cafe that even Hime is thoroughly confused as to how someone can hate her so much yet pretend to be nice to her. But even though she’s grown, she still has trouble with facades. Her serious, tempestuous character in the cafe is essentially her real personality reacting to the fictional scenarios. When she and Hime were friends, she saw Hime blow off the other girls in class to hang out with her over and over again. She saw Hime tell them lies, and then come to her and tell her that it was a lie and her friendship with those girls was all a sham. Yet when Hime quits the piano recital and lies to the other girls for Mitsuki’s sake yet again, Mitsuki is so shocked and angered by what she overhears from the door that she bursts in and tells the other girls Hime is lying. Not only is Mitsuki unable to construct a facade for herself, she’s also unable to distinguish the facade from the real thing. Even though Hime always used her facade against the other girls and never against Mitsuki, Mitsuki couldn’t understand that what she was hearing Hime tell the other girls was a white lie. She spends three years puzzling over why Hime turned on her like that. But she does make some progress. She does realize it made no sense for Hime to turn on her, and wonder if Hime had a reason for what she did. She even feels bad for the way she lashed out at Hime afterwards, and hopes to someday learn to understand social complexities so she can avoid hurting anyone like that again. So when Sumika and Mai invite her to join the play at Liebe Girls Academy, she sees it as an opportunity to learn.

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When I first started reading Yuri is My Job!, the setting of a cafe themed after a yuri girls school seemed weirdly complex and overly meta. If it were just a setting for a modern-day girls romance, like Girl Friends or Hana and Hina After School, which I thought the series was at first, then it would be. Those stories get by just fine with basic school and work settings. So why does Yuri is My Job! have such complex, meta window dressing?

Noticing the theme of social facades answered part of the question: a themed cafe is perfect for a story about social facades, because themed cafes are a very extreme form of social facade, one that the customers willingly submit themselves to, and which they still respond to emotionally even in full knowledge that it’s fake. When we see others act pleasantly, and hear them speak pleasantly, some sub-logical part of our brain translates that into a pleasant feeling, even if our logical brains are fully aware that they aren’t behaving that way naturally. So customers at themed cafes can enjoy being waited on by maids or having a tsundere go from tsun-tsun to dere-dere towards them over the course of a meal, even though everyone knows the wait staff are just putting on a show. Hime uses the same facade personality for her classmates as she does for the cafe customers, but the cafe customers are one step ahead of her classmates, because they already know it’s a facade.

A maid cafe or tsundere cafe would have also given us a fitting backdrop for a story about social facades, but a yuri girls school cafe is uniquely suited for telling this story, because facades and formalities are a constant preoccupation of anime and manga about yuri girls schools. Lillian Girls’ Academy in Maria-sama ga Miteru has a strong image of elegance, purity, and cleanliness. It expects certain standards of behavior and appearance from its students. The student council uses an elaborate system of titles—Rosa Gigantea, Rosa Chinensis en bouton, Rosa Foetida en bouton petite soeur. Several stories in the series revolve around certain characters’ suitability to hold these titles, and passing them on is regarded as a very serious affair. Yet these titles confer little more actual power than the title of Lady Blume does in Yuri is My Job!; they’re mainly about social power, their holders expected to exemplify the academy’s attributes most highly. Or in other words, Lillian expects its girls to maintain a certain type of social facade, and the Rosa title holders are those who are best at maintaining it.

The soeur system of Lillian Girls’ Academy, referenced by the schwester system of Liebe Academy in Yuri is My Job!, represents multiple layers of facade. Soeurs are formally bonded under an institutional system, but in Maria-sama ga Miteru, their actual feelings often lie somewhere between a very close friendship and a romantic yearning. The soeurs system gives them a facade to cover up feelings of romantic attraction. They can be together like girlfriends without anyone questioning it. Even the name is part of this facade—it implies that they’re close like sisters, not like romantic partners.

But in Japan, the sort of relationships between schoolgirls that we see in Maria-sama ga Miteru have also been recognized as something different than friendship or sisterhood. The modern yuri girls school anime and manga descend from a genre of literature called Class S that existed in the early 20th Century in Japan. Class S literature co-evolved with an actual thing that was happening in early 20th Century Japan. According to the essay “Women Loving Women in Modern Japan”, “Even if [two schoolgirls] engage in a homosexual relationship (or simply experience feelings of attraction for a member of the same sex) during junior high or high school, they are not considered to be lesbian or bisexual—Class S is seen as a phase, nothing more”, even in modern Japan. Japanese society doesn’t regard Class S relationships as real romances; they are at best play-acts of romance, a practice run for a relationship with a man later in life.

But Yuri is My Job!, draws a clear distinction between that sort of Class S relationship, which mostly exists inside the fiction of the cafe, and romantic attraction between girls. Romances between girls outside the fiction are treated as romances, not as a phase or a sisterly bond or a spiritual connection. Kanoko’s feelings for Hime are not the gently ambiguous feelings between Yumi and Sachiko in Maria-sama ga Miteru; they are very much the intense and slightly creepy feelings of someone with an unrequited love that they’re afraid to act on because it might ruin a friendship. When Sumika tries to talk to Kanoko, to understand how she can feel so intensely for Hime and also be so dedicated to hiding her feelings, Kanoko decides to trust Sumika because Sumika always took her feelings seriously as romance. And the relationship between two of the previous staff that led Sumika to be afraid of the effect of romance on the fiction is also unambiguously a romantic relationship. One of the pair was Sumika’s schwester, and Sumika tells Kanoko, “We got along just fine, but we weren’t in love”, clearly distinguishing a schwester relationship inside the fiction from a love outside it. Mitsuki even discovers that one of her female classmates is in love with another, and her social interactions with them both have gone awkward because she’s trying to find an opening to confess and Mitsuki is getting in the way. In Yuri is My Job!, romance between girls is not a facade that can be hidden behind an institutional bond wrapped up in a cute name like “sisters”. It’s real romance, with all the complicated, tender feelings and raw emotional power that comes with it.

That’s why Yuri is My Job! had to take place in a cafe themed after a yuri girls’ school. Social facades are integral even to the fictional genre that the cafe is based on. That makes it the perfect setting for the girls to grapple with social facades in their real lives, to learn more about the complicated ways they interact with the truth of things.

Love Hina: At Best an Archaeopteryx

I’ve been going back and reliving some of my favorite anime and manga from the past. And mostly they’ve turned out to hold up pretty well. Aria, it turns out, is still a masterpiece. K-On, it turns out, is still sweet and fun and dorky. Card Captor Sakura, it turns out, is still cute and clever and full of endearing characters and lovely art. G Gundam, it turns out, is still weird and insane and full of ethnic stereotypes but also sort of awesome in its over-the-top ridiculousness.

But Love Hina, well, the odds were always stacked against it. It was very of its time. Shounen comedy and romance have grown a lot since 2001 when Love Hina wrapped up. There’s still a scuzzy bottom tier of anime like Kiss x Sis and Oniichan dakedo Ai Sae Areba Kankei Nai yo ne (which I of course own on DVD) that are so exploitative and trashy they make Love Hina look like an absolute masterpiece of character and plot executed in the utmost taste. There’s also stuff like To Love Ru that very directly follows in the Love Hina mold. But there’s stuff out there now that scratches a similar itch, stuff like the Monogatari series and even Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai, which is a lot smarter and better written and more creative in almost every aspect than Love Hina. They’ve set the bar higher.

Still, I had to give it a chance. Love Hina, like Evangelion and Card Captor Sakura, had a huge influence on me when I was younger. I first encountered a lot of the things that still appeal to me in the anime I enjoy in Love Hina. A world that resembles the real world, but elevated, where characters with larger than life personalities have real relationships and relatable problems. Dorky, cheesy comedy revolving around the characters’ quirks and the way their personalities mix. Some drama, but an overall optimistic tone. Cozy scenes of fun, warmth, and friendship amidst natural beauty. Those are all the things I love in Bakemonogatari or Aria or Honey and Clover or Yuru Camp. I’d gotten some of them in other anime before Love Hina, but never packaged up in such a perfect way. It felt fresh and different, even compared to Tenchi Muyo, or the few episodes I’d seen of Ranma ¹⁄₂ and Urusei Yatsura. It felt chaotic, wild, stylish, whereas Urusei Yatsura and Tenchi Muyo felt somehow sedate and old-fashioned, like catching old episodes of Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie.

Love Hina took place in a world that was at once more grounded and less logical than those older anime. Unlike Tenchi Muyo, where the girls all had superpowers because they were aliens, the Love Hina cast included a samurai with demon slaying magical abilities and a mad scientist who could build a mechanical turtle armed with missiles and a jetpack, and there was no explanation for it. They were just there. Unlike Tenchi Muyo, where the main plot was tied up in alien stuff and it was all fairly consistent and coherent, Love Hina’s elements clashed. The main plot was about trying to get into a university and find true love, very plain and down to earth compared with Tenchi Muyo’s alien royalty power struggles. Keitaro, the main character, wasn’t a generic nice boy who comes into superpowers like Tenchi; he was a feckless loser whose brain and body were both clumsy and spastic. But sometimes the characters would just fall into the mysterious ruins of a lost civilization while arguing about whose fault their last dumb fight was. Sometimes a demon would just pop up and need to be slain, or a robot would go berserk and need to be stopped, or a housemates’ squabble would turn into a superpowered battle. And always, always, always, whenever these things happened, the girls would end up partially or fully naked in the most strange and absurd ways. Love Hina was all clashing world elements and mood whiplash and tempests brewed in teapots, and that created an over-the-top unreality unlike any anime I’d seen up to that point.

I could have stayed content to leave Lova Hina in the past. But I knew at this point I had enough distance from it that I wouldn’t be devastated if it wasn’t good anymore. If Aria had turned out to be terrible, that would have hurt. The flaws I did find in it hurt. But I was trying a new and incredibly stupid way of watching anime when I watched Aria: I would sit with a notebook and pen and write down anything that seemed even moderately worthy of complaint, missing the next three or four lines of dialogue as I scribbled in my notebook and missed the subtitles going by on screen. And I still came away thinking the show was a masterpiece. If Aria could survive that, surely Love Hina should be able to survive a normal reread if it was actually any good?

The Reread

So, did Love Hina survive the reread? No, but it didn’t quite go down in flames either.

Love Hina hasn’t become awful garbage, but it has become frustrating and tedious. In fact, I realized during this reread that for years I’ve been unconsciously judging all harem and shounen romance anime according to the “Love Hina test”: I look at a character, story development, or relationship and say to myself, “How would Love Hina handle this?” If the series I’m judging handles it differently from Love Hina, that usually means it’s good. Quintessential Quintuplets, for example, keeps on setting up plot elements that look like they’re going to mimic some annoying plot element from Love Hina, then subverting it at the last minute. I watched Quintessential Quintuplets (and read the manga) before I reread Love Hina, and a couple times I found myself wondering why the idea of certain developments in Quintessential Quintuplets bothered me so much. Then I reread Love Hina, and there it was—the annoying thing that I was glad Quintessential Quintuplets avoided.

I’ll mention before we go into specifics that the original manga is my version of Love Hina. I saw the anime first, and loved it, but the manga was easier to get my hands on back then, and I liked the character designs better—the anime characters have puffy balloon faces—and the manga didn’t include the dumber storylines, like the one where Naru becomes an idol, or the more annoying characters, like Kentaro Sakata. I watched the anime again about five years ago and it has held up far worse than the manga. The animation is early digipaint and looks rough and gaudy nowadays. The stories are poorly paced and poorly thought out. It goes out of its way to flesh out details from the manga that were left vague, and really does its best to show us why those details were left vague. The opening song, “Sakura Saku”, is still a lot of fun and captures the feeling of Love Hina well, and the Japanese voice cast is good—I’ll always be grateful to it for introducing me to Yui Horie—but there aren’t many reasons to watch the anime nowadays except nostalgia.

I still have my original Tokyopop manga volumes, but some of them are falling apart from being read so often, and I wanted to check out the new translation by Kodansha Comics, so I bought the digital omnibus volumes. The Kodansha Comics translation is plain and literal compared to the Tokyopop translation, abandoning most of the Tokyopop translation’s strange stylistic choices. The production is more professional, with fewer of the typos, misspellings, and empty word bubbles that were common in the Tokyopop volumes. (I cracked up when I saw this line in the Wikipedia article on the characters: “Tokyopop sometimes misspells [Mutsumi’s] name as ‘Mitsumi’ or ‘Matsumi’.”) There’s a line in Volume 8 that I had never seen before, because the Tokyopop volume just forgot to write it in. There are also places where I suspect Tokyopop added text that wasn’t there, such as the titles on the books in Volume 2 when the girls are reading to Keitaro.

Love Hina basically has four phases. There’s the “Keitaro is a loser trying to get into Tokyo University” phase, which spans Volumes 1–8. Then there’s (spoiler alert) the “Keitaro gets into Tokyo University” phase, which spans Volumes 9–10. There’s the Kanako arc, covered in Volume 11, and finally we have the “Keitaro is cool now, oh my god” phase, spanning Volumes 12–14. A lot of manga series change drastically in tone or style somewhere during their run—we’ll talk about that a lot if I ever finish up rereading Negima and writing my thoughts—but Love Hina is actually surprisingly consistent. The crazier elements of the world come more forward in the later volumes, but they’re there nearly from the beginning—in Volume 5, still relatively early, we find out that Kaolla Su transforms into an adult under the light of a red moon. The art style is warmer and feels more organic in earlier chapters—Akamatsu starts making heavy use of compositing and computer-generated backgrounds later on—but there are no major changes to the character designs, and the locations are very consistent.

Volumes 1–8: From Loser to Still a Loser

Love Hina’s trademark, its signature move, is Keitaro stumbling into the bath in some absurd way and seeing the girls naked, and then falling due to his ridiculous clumsiness and either groping a girl or ending up with his face in her boobs. It starts this from the very first chapter, when Keitaro stupidly decides to take a bath in a stranger’s house before he even meets anyone, and Naru comes in and mistakes him for Kitsune.

This gets incredibly tiresome. It’s not even funny the first time, and it does not become funnier with repetition. It’s also not sexy. Even in my early teens, I found hardly any of this series sexy. Nudity in Love Hina is so cheap and so commonplace that it loses all erotic potency. It becomes like looking at anatomical sketches. Akamatsu also doesn’t draw sexy women particularly well. He did resist the “porn star body with gigantic perfectly spherical breasts and spiky salmon-pink hair” look that was widespread at the time, but he does “cute” more effectively than “sexy”. His women’s bodies are peculiarly tubular, smooth and straight and almost featureless, and there’s something stiff and unappealing about the way he poses them when naked. There are a few shots that are an exception, and manage to be a little bit sexy, but they usually happen in idiotic circumstances, and whatever sexiness isn’t drained away by that is nullified by the numbing effect of the series’s constant, artless nudity.

That’s pretty tough to get past. If I read a manga nowadays that had a stiffly posed naked girl with a weird tubular body on every single page and ended every chapter with the main character somehow groping them by accident, I’d definitely never go past the first volume. Only my history with the series got me through it to see the plot and characters at all. Even so, I flipped past a ton of pages that were just naked girls with weird tubular bodies that we were supposed to gawk at.

Volumes 1–8 are a mixture of self-contained stories and stories that advance the main plot, which concerns Keitaro moving into Hinata Apartments as the landlord and trying to get into Tokyo University after failing the entrance exam two years in a row. He meets Naru and falls for her almost immediately. Naru takes longer to fall for him, but not nearly as long as I remembered; by Volume 3, when her crush, Seta, comes back into her life, she’s already feeling conflicted between Seta and Keitaro. By Volume 5 she’s already showing interest in Keitaro and starting to forget her crush on Seta. But contrary to what I remembered, Naru is actually the wishy-washy one who holds back their relationship. Keitaro is about as forward with his affections as is reasonable. He doesn’t do the big confession of love until Volume 9, but he shows interest in so many ways that only an idiot could fail to notice. He gets Naru gifts, invites her on outings with just the two of them, compliments her, indulges her, and constantly puts her above everyone else. If he went any further he’d be an obnoxious creep. Later on we find out that Naru is not an idiot and did not fail to notice, but she was so insanely wishy-washy that she wouldn’t advance their relationship even when it was objectively obvious that she had feelings for him.

That said, Keitaro kind of sucks early on. In the first volume, his aunt Haruka mistakenly thinks he got into Tokyo University, and as soon as he sees the girls respond positively, he stops even trying to correct the misunderstanding. He takes some lumps for it (literally and figuratively), but everyone starts to like and trust him way faster than they probably should, given that the first thing he did was tell a major lie to weasel his way into living with them. His ridiculous clumsiness may not be his fault, but it’s so rampant and so idiotic that it’s hard not to blame him sometimes. But one fault he doesn’t share with many harem protagonists is indecision. He decides very early on that Naru is the girl he likes, and as hung up as he is on the girl he made the promise to fifteen years ago, he’s so hung up on Naru that he tries to change history to make her the promise girl even when presented with evidence that she isn’t. I also can’t bring myself to blame Keitaro for being dense. Most of the girls in Love Hina, including Naru, behave in ways that defy all human logic and rationality, so I can hardly blame Keitaro for having a hard time deciphering their behavior and figuring out what their feelings towards him are. But he’s still not exactly a lovable character. There’s a feeling of insincerity in a ton of what he does, like he’s so focused on what he wants that he only takes notice of other people if it benefits him. So he’s not good at anything, and he’s not a good person, but he’s also not a bad person in an interesting way. He’s just your average loser.

The rest of the cast also gets introduced and starts their arcs here. Yes, the rest of the cast has arcs—kind of. I think that’s another big reason I was so into this series back in the day. A lot of anime I was watching at the time didn’t really have character arcs. Pokemon was designed to go on forever. Ash couldn’t grow or change. Goku in Dragon Ball Z couldn’t change much; he didn’t have an inner life, he was just a big dumb strong guy. Even Card Captor Sakura, which is still a very good show, has very slow-moving and lean character arcs. Evangelion was a notable exception, but Evangelion had such obtuse character arcs that I was too dumb to notice them until I rewatched the show in 2011.

Two of the side characters stand out in this initial phase. The first is Shinobu, who develops a massive crush on Keitaro and spends all her time swooning and dreaming while trying to get him to notice her. (Yes, she wants senpai to notice her.) She’s the first to go after Keitaro when he runs away after failing the entrance exam for the third time in Volume 3, and she also runs after him on her own volition in Volume 8 when he’s on Pararakelse doing archaeology. The second is Mutsumi, who Keitaro and Naru meet by coincidence during their trip to Kyoto to get over failing the exam in Volume 3. Mutsumi turns out to be a childhood friend of both Keitaro and Naru, and integral to unraveling the mystery of the childhood promise to go to Tokyo University. I eventually found her both the funniest and the most likable character in the series. The jokes around Mutsumi are comically absurd, and they take advantage of the series’s madcap brand of unreality, but they don’t rely purely on absurdity for humor. Mutsumi is also the only character in the series who’s kind and selfless as a rule. I always liked her, but I was honestly surprised to still like her so much.

The character arcs, even for the supporting cast, were one big reason I used to be so into this series. The other was what happens in Volume 8: Keitaro actually passes the exam and gets into Tokyo University. This felt very novel at the time. Ash was never going to become a Pokemon master, because the series would be over. But Keitaro actually passed his exam and became a student of Tokyo University. This leads us into the next phase of the series.

Volume 9–10: The Best (?) Part of the Series

Even though the main plot of Love Hina distinguished it from other harem comedies of the time by actually existing, I always enjoyed the shorter arcs more. So Volume 9, which has some of the better short arcs in the series, was always my favorite.

In Volume 9, Keitaro is finally a student at Tokyo University. However, this doesn’t magically solve all his problems like he thought it would. Eventually this loops back around to being a growth moment for Keitaro, but in the short term, he suffers his usual ridiculous bad luck and breaks his leg. Bedridden and desperate, he confesses his love to Naru, who starts avoiding him because she doesn’t want to deal with it. After Keitaro gets back from the hospital, he spends the time while Naru is ignoring him taking part in stories about Motoko, Shinobu, and his aunt Haruka and mentor Seta. At the end of Volume 9, he and Naru decide to trial being boyfriend and girlfriend, and Mutsumi takes them back to her home island for a visit, leading to a long story arc about Mutsumi where we learn more about her motives and the trio’s past together. And this leads me to one reason I always liked the shorter arcs more: the main story involves Naru a lot, and I just don’t like Naru.

It’s not that she has a temper or that she hits Keitaro. That’s tiresome slapstick humor, but it’s not why I don’t like her. In most harem anime, the male lead is the wishy-washy, indecisive one, but in Love Hina, it’s Naru who’s wishy-washy to the point of psychosis. Even though it must have been obvious to her that Keitaro liked her, and even though she definitely likes him—you don’t run off to a desert island to live with a guy you just appreciate as a friend—she still acts like she was completely blindsided by his confession and just disappears, but then has the gall to needle Keitaro about marrying Motoko and egg on Shinobu’s hopeless doomed crush on him. There were ways to write a character this indecisive that could have been interesting and let the story move along, but Love Hina elects not to take them. Instead it repeatedly lets Naru grind the plot to a halt, and we have to focus on other characters just to feel some sense of progression.

There’s not much else to admire about Naru, either. In the early chapters when she didn’t like Keitaro, I appreciated that she still showed him kindness, even if she was bashful about it. But kindness is not a core trait of hers. She tries a little to be kind towards Shinobu, but it starts to look more like cruelty when we realize that Naru knows Keitaro is focused only on her and will never look Shinobu’s way, and yet she doesn’t do anything to warn Shinobu and just keeps egging her on to pursue that hopeless crush. When she isn’t being angry or wishy-washy, she often acts very ditzy. In Volume 8 she causes a disaster with her careless pickaxing. She makes several situations worse because her clothes are being pulled off and she flails around and screams instead of doing anything sensible. She’s academically smart, but she’s not, like, actually smart.

Naru’s indecision doesn’t just grind the pace of her own story to a halt. It also filibusters every other character’s story. The main romance between Keitaro and Naru is so frustrating not only because it progresses at a glacial pace, and not only because it’s stymied and set back by idiotic misunderstandings at every turn, and not only because 87% of the obstacles it faces were artificially created by Naru and the remaining 12% artificially created by Keitaro, with approximately 1% coming from any other source, but also because it invalidates any other possible romance. There’s never any chance that Keitaro would seriously consider Mutsumi, or Motoko, or Shinobu, or Kanako, because he’s been mooning over Naru since Chapter 1. And all of those characters’ arcs are wrapped up in being in love with Keitaro. So reading the main arc, we already see where this is going and I’m frustrated because it’s taking so painfully long to get there. Reading the other characters’ arcs, I’m frustrated because I know this romance is never going anywhere. Naru is the chosen heroine.

This becomes painfully obvious in Volumes 9 and 10. The characters themselves start to realize it. Motoko realizes as she starts to develop feelings for Keitaro that he’ll never look her way, because he’s focused only on Naru. Shinobu also realizes he’s never going to look her way. She thinks it’s because she’s too young for him, or at least too childish, but she too starts to see that he and Naru have a thing. And Mutsumi’s story in Volume 10, the last major story she has in the series, shows how Mutsumi has repeatedly sacrificed her own feelings to let Naru be with Keitaro, ever since the three of them were children and Naru was too young to even remember. This would be a touching show of friendship. It still is kind of a touching show of friendship. But even now, in Volume 10, when Naru and Keitaro are technically boyfriend and girlfriend, Naru is still being wishy-washy. She’s still lying that she hates Keitaro and doesn’t care what he does. She doesn’t appreciate Mutsumi’s sacrifice at all. So Mutsumi’s main arc, which came down to sacrificing what she wanted for Naru’s benefit, comes to nothing. After this, Mutsumi disappears into the background and we find out she became happy at Tokyo University, so that’s something. Motoko and Shinobu still have some lumps to take, though.

Still, Volumes 9 and 10 were probably the ones I enjoyed the most. There was some character development for Motoko, Shinobu, and Mutsumi, and some cute and touching moments, and even though the way the short arcs fit into the larger story was annoying, they have satisfying conclusions on their own terms.

Volume 11: Happily Ever After, Please, Pleeease!

Love Hina, as I mentioned, is surprisingly consistent in tone and art style, but it’s not very consistent in quality. Volumes 1–10 have a mixture of quite good stories, tolerable stories, and bad boring stupid stories. But Volume 11 onward really take a dive in quality. It’s less drastic in Volumes 12–14, but Volume 11 is bad.

In Volume 11, Keitaro leaves for America to study with Seta, and Naru is left to hold down the fort in his absence. After six months, Keitaro’s adopted sister Kanako, who has a huge crush on him, arrives at the apartments and takes them over, turning them back into an inn. She forces everyone to work for their room and board, hoping to force them all to leave since she knows they all have feelings for Keitaro. When she hears the promise girl is at the inn, she goes on the warpath, blaming the promise girl for ruining Keitaro’s life. She’s about to launch Kitsune into space on a rocket, having mistaken her for the promise girl since she seems to be the only one old enough, when Keitaro returns and Volume 11 mercifully ends.

When I first read the series, I hated Kanako. I thought she was annoying and her crush on Keitaro was gross. I was more equivocal on her this time. The story around her is still bad, near the bottom of all Love Hina stories for me, but the character herself is more interesting than I realized.

Ken Akamatsu has a certain archetype. It pops up over and over across AI Love You, Love Hina, and Negima—it’s so commonplace that when I think of the cast of a Ken Akamatsu manga, the first phrase that pops into my head is “bevy of brainless beauties”. But it’s “brainless” in a very particular way—rowdy, hyper, obnoxiously obsessed with sex, and always causing a ruckus. Sometimes they’re curious about romance and sex, inexperienced and a little naive, and love teasing the main character. Other times they’re obsessed with getting people to hook up and love chaos, so they set up ridiculous events to try and trick the main character and the girls who have feelings for him into fucking, or at least kissing. Something about the balance Akamatsu strikes with these characters just never appealed to me. The combination of rowdy and dumb makes it hard for me to like them, and they often feel more like purpose-built story catalysts than fully fleshed out people with histories and aptitudes that shaped them. In Love Hina this meant I was never a fan of Kitsune or Kaolla Su. When a chapter opened on a shot of Kitsune, I’d think, “Here we go again.” In Negima, like 20 of the 30 girls in Negi’s class fit this archetype in some degree.

Kanako, on the other hand, is an intense, quiet, expressionless girl—think Hitagi Senjogahara from the Monogatari series. She’s smart, skillful, talented, a hard worker, calm, and competent. She’s a Lupin III-style master of disguise, talented enough in martial arts to overcome Motoko with her bare hands, and knows the finer points of running an inn, all at the young age of seventeen. She’s also lonely and very weird. When she’s alone, she uses ventriloquism to talk to herself through her cat, Kuro, like Kristoff and his reindeer in Frozen. She’s the polar opposite of the loud, wild girls that make up the rest of the cast—even Shinobu, the “quiet” one, is in a near-constant state of internal chaos. There’s a good idea here, to introduce a character who’s the polar opposite of the main cast in a sort of villain role. And I think Kanako is actually an interesting and good character. Some of her scenes are among the best written in Love Hina. In one scene she’s in her room talking to herself through Kuro, practicing her Naru impression and wondering why Naru’s smile is giving her so much trouble. There’s nothing else in Love Hina quite like this quiet, character-revealing scene. None of the other characters could have a scene like this. Keitaro comes close a few times, but he isn’t capable of this level of self-reflection. Motoko also comes close once or twice, and shockingly even Mutsumi, but everyone else pretty much lives on pure reptile brain impulse.

So there was a good concept, and a good character, but unfortunately it didn’t come together. For this story arc to achieve its potential, the characters needed to grow and change. An interesting direction would be for Kanako’s interaction with the other girls to change her, to help her feel less lonely and learn how to relate to others better. The series flirts with this, but it ends up feeling pointless because Kanako doesn’t permanently grow or change at all. She can’t, because the root cause for her conflict with the others isn’t their personalities; it’s Keitaro. Since Keitaro isn’t even there through Volume 11, it’s impossible to resolve the conflict in any permanent way. Naru makes an effort to get closer to Kanako, but she hides the nature of their relationship from Kanako, because of course she does, so they can never actually grow closer because Kanako will hate anyone who loves Keitaro on principle. I would have liked it better if Kanako wasn’t in love with Keitaro, but was given responsibility for Hinata Apartments by their grandmother in Keitaro’s absence. She would come in and start making extreme changes because of her antipathy towards the slovenly and rowdy tenants, but over time Naru and maybe Mutsumi make an effort to get to know her. She learns to be more open and get over her loneliness, but she resists admitting it because she’s so much smarter and better than everyone in the house and she’s embarrassed to admit she has anything to learn from them. That’s a version of the story that would have allowed everyone to grow and change instead of just fighting over Keitaro.

Volume 11 feels like it’s spinning its wheels because we have a conflict between Kanako and the other girls that can’t progress or be resolved without Keitaro. But it also feels like it’s spinning its wheels because it stalls out the main story. Volume 10 and the beginning of Volume 11 finally moved forward the relationship between Keitaro and Naru. They’re boyfriend and girlfriend now. Naru is waiting for Keitaro to come back from America so they can be together. Everyone knows they’re together now, and Naru is finally secure and doesn’t feel threatened by the other girls. The Kanako arc puts that progress on hold and brings us back to the glacially paced “will they or won’t they” Naru neuroticism that made up so much of the main story in Volumes 1–9. But it’s even worse now, because Keitaro isn’t even in the story. Not only is there no progress, there can’t even be any progress. And this isn’t confined to Volume 11. It bleeds over into Volumes 12, 13, and 14. So much of these volumes feels like filler, like they’re just revisiting the issue of which girl Keitaro is going to end up with when at this point Keitaro and Naru are already together and there’s really nothing else to say.

But setting aside all those structural reasons why Volume 11 is bad, there are a lot of things in it that I just found stupid, starting with the way Kanako walks in out of nowhere, having never been mentioned before. The same was done with Naru’s stepsister and Su’s siblings, but they were bit characters, and Naru and Su weren’t the viewpoint character whose inner monologue we’ve been reading for ten volumes. The series does have the grace to make Keitaro act like he’s forgotten who Kanako is when he comes back and sees her, but that only raises more questions, like how he could have forgotten his own sister (adopted or not) and just how self-absorbed is he. And then there’s “adopted or not”. We find out halfway through Volume 11 that Kanako and Keitaro aren’t related by blood. It’s purely a cheap maneuver to add stakes to the romantic rivalry between Naru and Kanako; before this, Naru shrugs off Kanako’s crush because siblings can’t marry, but after she finds out they’re not related by blood, there’s suddenly an actual threat to her relationship with Keitaro. It doesn’t matter in the slightest in the end though. There’s one horribly written chapter where everyone leaves Hinata Inn on the thinnest of pretenses purely so they can return at the end and have a big come-together moment with Naru where they decide to resist Kanako’s tyranny. In the last third or so of Volume 11, Kanako flies off the handle and tortures everyone while asserting her love for Keitaro, leading to a bunch of the kind of antics that have grown stale at this point.

Volume 11 is a low point for the series. I had major problems with how slowly the main story arc moved up to this point, and then just when it had finally made some real progress, the story regressed to the same painfully slow-moving romantic antics that wasted so many pages of story in the previous ten volumes.

Volume 12–14: The End

Unfortunately, the problems in Volume 11 just get worse in Volumes 12–14. Keitaro comes back and greets Kanako with complete indifference. Kanako loses all her unique traits and just becomes a rival for Keitaro’s affection, and the series proceeds to waste two and a half volumes rehashing Keitaro pursuing Naru and Naru being neurotic about it. This time she’s not neurotic about whether she should get together with Keitaro, but she’s neurotic about whether Keitaro wants to be with her, whether their union is blessed by destiny, and whatever other dumb shit she can think of to be neurotic about. In between, the other girls decide to take one last futile stab at winning Keitaro’s love. There’s an okay arc where Motoko realizes she’s in love with Keitaro and admits it to herself, deciding to pursue him as well. Like Kanako, she then loses all her unique traits and just strives with all her might for Keitaro’s love. Shinobu also comes back into the fray, and Kitsune and Su decide to join in as well just to add chaos to the situation. There’s a long storyline in Volume 12 where Naru runs off again and Keitaro chases her. Kanako gets some closure in this storyline, becoming part of the exclusive club of girls who are allowed to move on emotionally from Keitaro (alongside Mutsumi). There’s a storyline in Su’s homeland where there are martial arts battles on airships and girls changing allegiances and alternately pursuing Keitaro for themselves and helping Keitaro get to Naru, and you can see that Akamatsu was just itching to make an action series, which is why I wasn’t surprised at all when Negima went in that direction.

Finally, finally, finally, Keitaro and Naru declare their love for each other, deciding they don't care if they made a promise to each other when they were kids or not. Of course, they did make a promise to one another when they were kids after all. They're allowed to be together by destiny, the other girls who love Keitaro, and Keitaro's grandma, and the series ends. Then there’s an epilogue following a character named Ema, who comes to visit Hinata Apartments a couple days before Keitaro and Naru’s wedding. All the girls are students at Tokyo University now, and none of them have given up on Keitaro. Keitaro and Naru marry, but of course, at the altar, Keitaro trips and pulls off Naru’s clothes, and she gets mad and chases him.

I’m only mildly exaggerating when I say that they probably could have just taken the last chapter and the epilogue and shoved them on the end of Volume 10 and had a much better ending. There are some good things in these last couple volumes. I liked Naru deciding to become a teacher. It was good to see her finally decide to do something with her life. The Motoko storyline was okay too, although the end result was that she became hung up on Keitaro for the rest of her life just like poor Shinobu, so it was actually a negative development in her life. Most of Volumes 12–14 was utterly pointless though, trying to recapture the antics of the earlier volumes when the story had already advanced past a point where it made any sense. These volumes are better than Volume 11 in that they’re mostly shorter arcs, so at least there’s more variety. But Volume 11 had a lot of potential that it failed to live up to; these last few volumes just feel uninspired.

With the main plot around Keitaro and Naru signed and sealed, these volumes might have been a good chance to resolve some of the other characters’ arcs. This chance was not taken. Kanako’s arc is sort of resolved in Volume 12; she gets formally rejected by Keitaro and they share a moment. Then she joins everyone else doing stupid stuff to try and seduce Keitaro for two volumes. No one else gets any resolution.

Shinobu is the character I ultimately thought was treated most unfairly by the series. Keitaro never takes her crush even a tiny bit seriously, never gives her the tiniest scrap of affection, never formally turns her down, and never gives her any kind of closure. She’s the constant butt of jokes and cruelty from the other characters. She also does all the cooking and cleaning and never gets any thanks for it. In the end she doesn’t even get over her crush on Keitaro. In the epilogue she’s a student at the number one university in Japan, super-hot, more confident and energetic than she’s ever been, and yet she’s still hung up on a loser who’s getting married to another woman the next day.

According to the author’s notes, Motoko is Akamatsu’s favorite character. Unfortunately, she’s a victim of his bad writing habit of conflating “falling in love with the main character” and “growing as a person”. By the end of the series, Motoko may be more in touch with her feelings, but like Shinobu, she’s also spent years carrying a torch for the same loser who’s getting married to another woman. It’s debatable whether she’s actually happier or better than she would have been if she’d stuck with the intense, disciplined persona she had at the beginning of the series.

Motoko is also a victim of another of Akamatsu’s bad writing habits. His work constantly portrays traditional femininity as a thing that all girls should and do yearn for, something that makes them happier when they achieve it. Shinobu goes through the same thing, trying to be “grown up” by wearing fancier clothes and makeup and learning about sex. But I can accept more easily that Shinobu would yearn for that sort of femininity. Motoko starts out wanting nothing to do with it. She’s happy as she is. She decides to pursue romance, studying, and the sword, but even though she holds on to her sword, she nurses a hopeless crush for years, just like Shinobu does, and she takes up writing romance novels as a hobby, and gives up on the idea of inheriting the Shinmei School. She’s changed, supposedly for the better, by becoming more traditionally feminine. As with Shinobu, this isn’t a satisfying arc if you have any interest in Motoko. She’s changed, but it’s hard to say that it was for the better.

Love Hina in 2020

Love Hina is not worth reading in 2020. It’s a grating, obnoxious, tedious series, determined to make naked girls less sexy than bowling pins by constantly shoving them in your face in the dumbest of circumstances. The plot isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever read, but it’s glacially slow. Every subplot and character arc concerns one of the girls as a possible romantic interest for Keitaro, but Keitaro is laser-focused on Naru from the beginning, so all the subplots and character arcs are pointless. If you like any character aside from Naru, prepare to be unsatisfied.

I read Love Hina out of nostalgia. I still like some of the characters—Shinobu, and Motoko, and Mutsumi. Kanako turned out to be more interesting than I remembered. The art is still rather nice to look at. Backgrounds and objects are especially good—Hinata Apartments has a strong sense of being a real place where people live, and the chocolates in the Valentine’s Day chapter in Volume 7 look delicious. There are individual scenes and moments that are excellent. But I can’t recommend anyone read this anymore except for nostalgia’s sake. Even if you like harem anime in general, there’s better stuff out there nowadays—better written, funnier, sexier, you name it, there’s something nowadays that handily defeats Love Hina at it. Love Hina was at best an evolutionary step to where we are today.