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.

A Summer of Cute Girls: Hinako Note, Yuru Camp, and A Place Further Than the Universe

Last summer I watched like five cute girl shows in a row and also read some cute girl manga during the same period. I made some notes discussing and comparing them that I thought were worth writing up as part of my continuing obsession with story structure analysis on cute girl shows.

What makes these three shows worth discussing together, aside from the fact that I happened to watch them all within a short period of time, is that two of them are really good and one of them is pretty not good, and the two good ones illuminate the flaws of the one not good one in an interesting way.

Hinako Note: It’s Pretty Not Good

Hinako Note is a series with a lot of ups and downs. The first two episodes are extremely adorable, with cute characters and a lovely setting. It’s supposed to be in Tokyo, but the cozy little coffee shop / bookstore / girls dormitory where the characters live, and the beautiful green park with all sorts of trees and terraces and food stalls, don’t scream Tokyo to me at all. They actually look shockingly similar to the Swiss Japanese Italian village where Is the Order a Rabbit? takes place.

Hinako is a girl from the country who comes to the city to join a theater club for high school. She has acute social anxiety and whenever strangers talk to her, she freezes up and animals come and perch on her. She also has the ability to talk to animals somehow. She ends up rooming with Chiaki, a soft-voiced sempai who loves acting; Mayu, a tiny cute blond girl who wears a maid outfit and is in love with Chiaki; and Kuina, a laid back girl who likes both reading and eating books, like Bungaku Shoujo. Later, Yua, a semi-tsundere semi-rival for Hinako, comes in as a fifth member of the group.

Hinako Note is very confused about what it wants to be and flails around trying to find its feet for about six or seven episodes before it achieves any sort of consistency. It tries to do a plot in Episodes 3 – 6, but the plot is really bad and turns into a complete mess. Hinako left her home and came to start an unfamiliar life in the big city in order to join the theater club, but it turns out the theater club is on hiatus because the advisor left. So they decide to start up their own little private theater troupe, but then Chiaki’s theater club buddies make her a theater society at the end of an episode (Episode 4, I want to say?). Then in the next episode the theater club advisor is back so they can restart the regular theater club, and they do a play. It’s a complete mess. It continually sets up conflicts only to immediately shoot them down with easy solutions that require no effort on any of the main characters’ parts. You might have noticed from my plot summary that the show resolves the same conflict three times: first with the theater troupe, then with the theater society, then with Ruri, the advisor, coming back to restart the theater club. The second two times were just random happenstance that came out of the blue so something would happen.

Once the theater club resumes, the show focuses on the rivalry between Hinako and Yua a lot and how Yua comes to slowly accept Hinako by seeing how hard she works. This works a lot better. It has an actual dramatic arc where Yua starts out hating Hinako and being jealous of her, then comes to like her a little bit and feel sorry for some of her actions, but then her jealousy flares up again when Ruri casts Hinako as the lead in the play that Yua wanted to lead. But Yua finally sees Hinako working hard and decides to respect and support her. There’s also a nice little subplot about how Mayu dislikes theater because it takes Chiaki away from her, but in the end she uses her propensity for wearing a maid outfit to rescue the production by coming out of the audience to bring Yua a prop she forgot, using the maid outfit to blend in with the setting so it looks intentional.

The characters have their charms, but the character writing is also very confused and messy. Mayu and Yua both love Chiaki, which seems simply excessive, but so far they haven’t realized this about each other and it hasn’t been an issue. Kuina is supposed to be a book girl and a big eater as well as a laid back wacky character, which is just too many traits. And being a book girl is just a minor plot device to explain why she works in a bookstore and who writes the scripts for the theater troupe that they still do for some reason even though the theater society was formed an hour later and then the theater club was resumed the next day. Yua is your standard tsundere rival, but at least she’s consistent. Hinako is a pretty good, pretty consistent character, but she needed a better supporting cast to interact with, because she’s not interesting enough to sustain the show on her own. And Chiaki is pretty bland. She’s supposedly so cool that girls go gay for her—not just Mayu and Yua, but also a group of random girls we see in a flashback who switch from being gay for Mayu because she’s small and cute like a doll to being gay for Chiaki because she’s supposedly so cool.

The art and design are the bright spot of Hinako Note, but even this is marred by the fact that the show, especially in the later parts, throws in near constant and utterly gratuitous fan service, mostly of Hinako or Chiaki. The camera constantly focuses on their bouncing boobs or their butts when they’re laying down, or lovingly pans over their bodies as they’re changing clothes or in the bath, or takes cheap excuses to dress them up in bunny girl outfits like a harem show. Most of the episodes end with Hinako naked in the bath and us getting an eyeful. The next episode previews are all spoken over a piece of art of one of the characters that looks like it came from an eroge. These just get more and more gross and pervy as the series goes on (one towards the end has Hinako on her knees about to lick Kuina’s foot for some reason). What bothers me about this is less the presence of fan service and more the way it’s done. I’m old now and just a pan over a naked girl’s body isn’t going to do much for me; I want fan service to happen in ecchi situations. I want the entire show to be ecchi and sexual in nature if I’m going to enjoy that. The constant and gratuitous fan service also highlights even more how confused this show is about its identity.

A lot of the cute girl shows I haven’t enjoyed don’t pick the right subgenre of cute girls show, or they try to mix and match elements from too many subgenres in ways that conflict. Hinako Note is interesting because of just how badly the elements it chooses conflict. The characters, setting, pastel color palette, and chibi art style are overwhelmingly adorable, somewhere between Wakaba Girl and Is the Order a Rabbit?. That art style works for those two shows because they were pure cute girls doing cute things; they had no plots, they were just about fun and friends and looking at pretty things. When Hinako Note commits to that direction more in Episodes 1, 2, 7, and 8, it works well—much better than anything else the show attempts. But the middle portion, with its limp attempts at plot, reads more like cute girls drama, like a Hibike! Euphonium or a Clannad or, as we’ll discuss below, A Place Further than the Universe, except it’s exceedingly incompetent in its execution. Clannad makes an entire story arc of the theater club being shut down and Nagisa trying to get it going again and recruit members with Tomoya’s help. Hinako Note resolves that problem within the same episode and then resolves it twice more for good measure.

Some elements of Hinako Note read more as wacky surreal comedy with cute girls, like a Digi Charat or a Bakuon!!; Hinako’s ability to talk to animals and the fact that they cluster around her or that she can walk through the city with chicks on her shoulders and no one remarks on it is either a genuine supernatural ability or comedic exaggeration. But I would accept this in a cute girls doing cute things show; after all, in Is the Order A Rabbit?, it’s strongly implied that Chino’s grandfather died and his soul possessed an Angora rabbit. I have a harder time accepting Ruri, who is only nine years old, but is a professional actress as well as a drama teacher in a high school, and also has like C-cup boobs at the tender age of nine. (Her boob size is remarked on in the show.) I would have accepted her, with exactly the same character design, as a very short woman in her twenties. That’s a common trope for teachers in anime, and it wouldn’t have changed anything because no part of her personality and nothing she ever does in the plot are in any way affected by her being a child. But a nine-year-old teacher is too far from anything remotely realistic for me to accept in a cute girls drama or cute girls doing cute things. Hinako talking to animals can just be a weird, mysterious thing that exists on the fringes, but for a nine-year-old to be a teacher, society has to be fundamentally different than it is in real life. That’s fine for a wacky comedy where these things don’t need to be addressed; it works in Negima, or Pani Poni Dash. But cute girls drama or cute girls doing cute things need to be more grounded.

And then there’s the constant fan service, which doesn’t fit within any of these three subgenres. It’s the closest fit with wacky comedy, but in wacky comedy, the fan service is usually played for humor by making it part of a ridiculous situation. Hinako Note just slips it in there for no reason. The characters aren’t aware it’s happening. It comes from no one’s perspective. The camera leering at the girls ruins the cute and fluffy tone that the art and the stories in later episodes create, and sabotages the show’s attempt to be cute girls doing cute things or drama of any kind.

I won’t say I hated Hinako Note; in the end, I enjoyed some parts of it and liked some of the characters. But it’s more interesting for its flaws than for its minimal successes. Someone with some level of competence was clearly working on it, but either they let their worse natures win out or they were overridden by studio executives who were out to make a buck, or they too faithfully adapted a manga that had the same flaws. And what makes it frustrating is that when it finally starts to succeed towards the end, it does so at something that’s well understood. It is well known in the anime world how to make a good cute girls doing cute things show. You pick a fun theme, pick a beautiful setting, you get some cute girls, you choose from a couple standard art styles (something more realist like K-On, something more chibi and cute like Yuru Yuri, or something in between like Kiniro Mosaic) and put your own little spin on it, you put the girls together and let interplay happen, and after that it’s all down to your skill in executing said interplay and how well you planned out the way the girls’ personalities mesh. And that part is indeed hard, but that’s not where Hinako Note messed up. It messed up in the planning stage, the part that should be well understood and almost formulaic at this point. They picked a fun theme, theater. They picked a beautiful setting, the nice little enclave of Tokyo that looks exactly like the Swiss Italian Japanese village from Is the Order a Rabbit?. They set up some cute girls and picked out some of the standard dynamics (the strict tsundere one who yells at the slow clumsy one, the girl who’s gay for another girl, the one who eats a lot, the short girl who looks like a child and hates being called a child). They had an obvious path forward from here: get them together in a theater club or troupe and show them enjoying every day while they prepare for performances and then give performances. Instead the show decided to try and do drama for six episodes, and then gave up and went back to what seems to have been the original plan, based on the art style, all the while sabotaging itself with massive amounts of gratuitous fan service and unrealistic elements that take away the cohesion of the world.

Yuru Camp: It Made Me Want to Go Outside

Pretty shortly after watching Hinako Note, I watched Yuru Camp. This turned out be a good decision, because Yuru Camp is almost certainly the best anime I watched in 2019. I can’t remember the last cute girls doing cute things show I enjoyed so much.

It absolutely nails every part of the formula I described above: the theme (relaxing winter camping), the visuals (beautiful forest, mountain, and lake shots with an amazing color palette that’s both earthy and vibrant—if you told me the backgrounds were all Bob Ross paintings, I’d believe it), the music (a fun, relaxing, eclectic mix of country, folk, and Celtic), and the characters. Unlike a lot of cute girls shows, Yuru Camp actually take a long time to bring the main group together; we don’t see them all on a trip together until the last two episodes. Because of that, I didn’t get as attached to some of the characters as I might have, but I loved loved loved Rin Shima, the de facto main character. Not only is she adorable with her huge bun, her scarf, her shawl, and her introverted, quiet, and bookish nature, she’s also awesome. She’s genuinely competent and rugged, braving the tough road and the bitter winter cold in return for the solitude of an empty campground and a beautiful private view of the mountains and the lake. In the first episode a campground worker sees her going out to the empty campground in the winter cold and comments on how tough she must be. She pitches her tent and sets up her campsite with a practiced efficiency, and she has no trouble gathering supplies, planning out her trips, hauling all her things on a bicycle, or building a campfire from wood she gathers off the ground. But she’s also not perfect; she still has trouble pitching her tent when it’s windy out, she needs help to figure out how to make the coals hot in her portable grill, and she falls asleep in a roadside rest area and ends up having to make camp in the dark. When her first trip by scooter takes some unexpected turns, Rin gets worried and frustrated, but she also keeps her cool and thinks through what to do next, and she gladly accepts help from her friends to get her through.

Rin pairs really well with Nadeshiko Kagamihara, the co-lead, too. Nadeshiko is energetic, friendly, and sort of an airhead. She and Rin meet because Nadeshiko heard she could see Mt. Fuji, so she biked up to the same campground where Rin is camping, but she forgot to bring her phone or any money and she doesn’t know her home number because she just moved, so she gets stranded dying of hunger and has to borrow Rin’s food and phone to call her sister. Nadeshiko later joins the Outdoor Exploration Club and makes friends with its two members, Chiaki Oogaki and Aoi Inuyama. With them she starts to learn more about camping and acquire equipment. She also goes on more trips with Rin, who seems fond of Nadeshiko even though she sometimes acts standoffish towards her. There’s enough contrast between them to be interesting, but enough similarity that their friendship feels realistic. Rin has a type anyway—her other friend, Ena Saito, is also sort of a lackadaisical airhead. The one Rin claims to have trouble dealing with is Chiaki, whose personality is more hyper and purposefully silly. Since the series takes so long to get all five girls together, there’s less focus on group interaction, but we still get to see them interact in pairs or triads throughout the series before the big finish, which means the series doesn’t have to purposely set aside time for certain members of the group to peel off and interact like in shows that build the group right away. Plus, with Rin as the main character, it feels true to her personality that she’d be slow to join a larger group and only want to do it after feeling comfortable with all the members.

Every episode of Yuru Camp felt like it was only ten minutes long because I enjoyed it so much it just flew by. I delayed watching the final episode for a week because I didn’t want it to be over. I ordered the soundtrack from CDJapan because it makes such great music to work or read to. Rin’s peaceful weekends reading by a beautiful lakeside even made me consider camping myself, something I’d never before felt the urge to do. In the middle of writing this blog post I felt a sudden urge to rewatch it, which I’m now doing, and it’s just as I remembered. The first episode just shows Rin go to the campgrounds, set up her campsite, read, make a fire, meet Nadeshiko, eat cup ramen, and see Nadeshiko home, but it felt like it was over in ten minutes and I enjoyed every second of great music, beautiful scenery, and the vicarious cozy feeling of sitting by a warm campfire eating hot soup while piled in shawls and cloaks and scarves.

A Place Further Than the Universe

I watched A Place Further Than the Universe slightly before either of the other two, and it, along with Quintessential Quintuplets, got me fired up to watch cute girl anime again. It’s a comedy/drama about four girls who go on an expedition to Antarctica. Shirase Kobuchizawa lost her scientist mother to an Antarctic expedition and is determined to get down there herself. What she hopes to get out of the trip isn’t entirely clear at first—does she hope her mother is still alive? Does she want to continue her mother’s work?—but her determination inspires Mari Tamaki, aka Kimari, and Hinata Miyake. Kimari is ditzy and lacking in ambition, but she meets Shirase and gets fired up to do something amazing. Hinata has stopped going to school and is working her tail off in a convenience store when she meets Shirase and Kimari and also gets sucked in to their passion. They get their chance by teaming up with Yuzuki, an idol who’s been asked to host a documentary following an Antarctic expedition led by Gin Toudou, an old friend of Shirase’s mother.

A Place Further Than the Universe has a similar vibe to Hibike! Euphonium. The look is more realistic than Hinako Note or even Yuru Camp, the color palette more muted. The characters come off simple at first, but we’re kept somewhat at arms’ length from them and we discover they’re more complex than they seem as the series develops. Hinata, for instance, seems friendly and boisterous at first, and Shirase seems cold and impassive. But we soon discover Shirase is burning with passion, and Hinata is actually deeply standoffish. And also like Hibike! Euphonium, the drama comes from the characters’ actions, which come from their personalities, and not because of happenstance dictated by the script. Every character gets a satisfying arc to unravel what she was trying to get out of going on the expedition. Shirase’s was suitably the most full and satisfying, but I really enjoyed Hinata’s arc, and her unique personality made her my favorite character. Kimari’s and Yuzuki’s were less good, but they also received less focus because their problems were smaller, so it still came together well.

Between the drama, we get to see what daily life is like during several stages of an Antarctic expedition. We see the girls learn how to pitch their tents in sub-zero temperatures, and how to avoid getting lost in a blinding snowstorm, during training. We see them dealing with nausea on the ship ride down. Then we see what meals and work shifts and sleeping arrangements and Christmas are like at the Antarctic base. It sometimes felt like the best written and most moe school video ever. Yuru Camp made me want to go camping, but A Place Further Then the Universe didn’t make me want to go to Antarctica—still, it was a great series that I enjoyed a lot, with light humor to keep the drama from getting overbearing and great arcs for all the main characters.

What made the other two better than Hinako Note?

Yuru Camp and A Place Further Than the Universe are far and away, unquestionably, undeniably, indubitably better than Hinako Note, and it’s interesting to think about why. After all, from the outside, it might look like they’re all the same—three shows about cute girls doing boring daily stuff.

But there’s one big reason why Yuru Camp and A Place Further Than the Universe are better than Hinako Note: both of them are original ideas with carefully thought out casts and clear identities, while Hinako Note is the cute girls doing cute things equivalent of a taco you make by throwing whatever’s left in your refrigerator in a tortilla and microwaving it. Some things it directly stole from other, better anime: Hinako wants to be in the theater club only to find it’s shut down, just like Nagisa in Clannad; Mayu works in a coffee shop, just like the girls in Is the Order a Rabbit?; Kuina eats books, just like Touko from Bungaku Shoujo. Its characters are common tropes: the tiny cute girl who gets mistaken for a child; the tsundere rival who comes to like the main character; the big eater; the gentle, mature sempai; the child teacher. The way they relate to each other is mostly tropes: both Mayu and Yua have yuri crushes on Chiaki, but the show never goes anywhere with this, so it just looks like they were so out of ideas that they just went, “Make two of them in love with Chiaki!”

This refrigerator taco nature of Hinako Note is the main reason why it fails. For a cute girls show, identity is vital. Yuru Camp and A Place Further Than the Universe both have very strong identities. When I read their names, I immediately get a picture of the visuals in my head, the earthy browns and greens and beautiful night sky for Yuru Camp and the muted color palette and bright white snow and orange snowsuits for A Place Further Than the Universe. I immediately identify them with their characters—especially Rin for Yuru Camp, and Hinata or Shirase for A Place Further Than the Universe. I recall specific scenes and events. The whole show—visuals, characters, story, music—comes together in a coherent package. Even less original, more bland cute girls shows can still cohere into an identity, albeit not one that leaves as strong an imprint on the mind as these two extremely good ones create.

But Hinako Note has no identity. It has no idea what it wants to be. The visuals say it wants to be cute, simple, and colorful like Wakaba Girl. It manages to somewhat succeed at that, but it sabotages itself with elements that work against that identity. The attempts at story say it wants to be more of a drama, like Hibike! Euphonium or A Place Further Than the Universe. There’s a big difference between the type and scale of problems the characters face in a drama compared to a more simple, iyashikei cute girls doing cute things show like Wakaba Girl or Is the Order a Rabbit?. In these shows, the characters’ problems are small-scale and resolved easily because the show’s goal is a fun, light feeling of daily life. In Hibike! Euphonium or A Place Further Than the Universe, the problems are much bigger and much harder to solve. They come from the characters’ personalities and personal journeys, and showing how the characters resolve them and how it changes them is the show’s goal.

Hinako Note sets up problems that could be on that scale. Getting a theater club running and a theatrical production put on is the subject of an entire story arc in Clannad. And nearly the entire story of Hibike! Euphonium revolves around rivalries, grudges, crushes, and friendships in a club. The story towards the end of Season 1 where Reina is given the solo but Yuuko insists that Kaori should have it is conceptually pretty similar to Yua’s jealousy when Hinako is given the lead role in the play. But Hinako Note simply resolves these problems with a wave of the hand, by pure coincidence, so it utterly fails as a drama. On the other hand, these kinds of problems don’t set up a fun, light, everyday tone, so they don’t fit an identity as an iyashikei show either. Later on, when the show does find some measure of success, it does it by scaling down the problems to Mayu getting lost at the beach and feeling embarrassed because everyone treats her like a child and she just proved them right.

And the unrelenting, utterly pointless fan service works against both identities as well. Neither Yuru Camp nor A Place Further Than the Universe would do something like a scene late in Hinako Note where Hinako and Chiaki are sitting at the table talking, and while Hinako thinks about what she wants to say, the camera pans over Chiaki’s boobs and ass for no reason and then goes under the table and shoots up her skirt apropos of nothing. That’s because they understand the stories they’re telling, and the place that eroticism and fan service have in those stories (pretty much none). A Place Further Than the Universe is a touching story about four girls who become friends and find themselves while doing something extraordinary for personal reasons. If it was the same characters, same story, same visual style, same dialogue, same voice actors, but the camera was constantly focusing on the girls’ boobs and asses and we got shot after shot showing how their boobs bulge out under their orange snowsuits, it would be as if everything happening in the show was occurring under the gaze of some unseen horny man leering at the girls from the sidelines. That detracts from everything happening on screen. Just imagine the camera pulled back a little and you could actually see the disgusting horny man leering at the girls from the sidelines. Imagine you could hear his inner monologue thinking, “Look at those great tits! That amazing ass! I want to rub my face on them and touch myself!” while the girls were having personal revelations and learning to survive in Antarctica. It would completely undercut the girls as characters and devalue their personal journeys, which are the things that make this show great. Same for Yuru Camp—the feeling of relaxing immersion is ruined if some horny man is constantly leering at the girls from the sidelines. Both of these shows understood that that sort of eroticism would completely destroy the tone they were trying to create and the feelings they were trying to invoke, that there was nothing inherently sexual or erotic about their characters and that it would be ruinous to try and impose that eroticism on them, and consequently both ended up on this list of most feminist-friendly anime of 2018 that I randomly turned up when I was looking up one of the minor character’s names.

I’m hammering on this point about the fan service so much because it’s the most common mistake for cute girls shows to make. Even K-On got this somewhat wrong, with Mio tripping and showing her panties on stage and Sawako forcibly dressing Mio up in fetish costumes. But K-On minimizes the damage to its tone; we viewers don’t see Mio’s panties, and the fetish costumes aren’t revealing and aren’t framed in an overtly sexual way. And unlike Hinako Note, K-On did this only when it was an actual part of the story. Mio trips. Sawako forces her into costumes. It’s not being imposed on scenes where it doesn’t fit in at all. Eroticism and fan service work when they’re a purposeful part of the show’s story and tone, as in harem and ecchi shows like To-Love-Ru and High School DxD. You may or may not like these shows, but they were made to be sexy and the fan service is part of that purpose. Throwing fan service into a show where it doesn’t fit is like throwing birthday cake into your refrigerator taco. It may taste good in the right setting, but it can’t be just thrown into whatever food you want as some magic spice to improve it. If you put birthday cake in the wrong food, you’ll ruin both the birthday cake and whatever that food was.