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.

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.

Aria the Finale: Part Three of an Aria Retrospective

Part One of the Aria retrospective.

Part Two of the Aria retrospective.

---

Anime has a tough relationship with endings. Lots of anime never actually end; they get cancelled before they can, or they just keep on going so everyone can keep making money, or the source material has no ending. When they do end, I can’t think of many that end well. Oftentimes they’re based on source material that had a terrible ending, like OreImo, so their hands were tied. The most famous example of a terrible anime ending is Evangelion, which got another chance to end in The End of Evangelion because its original ending was so bad, and now has yet another chance with the Rebuild movies.

So it’s no small thing that Aria manages to end so gracefully. It’s no small feat that it manages to end exactly as we would have expected from Episode 1, yet still surprise us. It’s no small feat that it wraps up every character arc, changes everything, splits everyone apart, yet does so in a believable way. It’s no small feat that it makes a happy, expected ending still so satisfying, and gives every character exactly the happiness she deserves. Well, not every character, but we’ll talk about that.

However, even though its ending ends the entire series, the ending is what I remember least about Aria: The Origination. That’s because it avoids a mistake a lot of terrible endings make: leaving too much story to be explored in the last episode or two. Aria: The Origination could have waited until Episode 12 to start promoting our heroines to Prima and then rushed through the aftermath in two episodes. Instead it starts all the way back at Episode 9, promoting Alice from Pair straight to Prima. This turns out to be enormous for the story: instead of 11 episodes of filler followed by an emotional height, we get to see how everyone reacts to Alice’s promotion. For Aika, Alice’s promotion is a little bittersweet. She’s happy for her friend, but she also feels a little disappointed that her junior colleague beat her to Prima, and a little insecure about her future, which starts to seep into other parts of her life. Since Alice’s promotion happens early, we get to explore Aika’s feelings over meaty parts of several episodes, especially the second half of Episode 10, where she frets over the slow progress of her relationship with Al. But after this, Aika determines to work even harder until she’s worthy to rise herself, and soon after, Akira gives her the Prima exam and promotes her to Prima as well.

While her friends are finishing up their paths to Prima, Alice begins adjusting to her new life. She has to get used to working hard every day with customers and she has to learn to respond to her Prima alias, Orange Princess, but the hardest adjustment turns out to be that she can’t spend every day with Akari and Aika anymore, and even though her customers are great, she feels lonely. Without the routine of coming together to practice every day, Alice doesn’t know how to ask to spend time with her friends. She can’t think of a pretense and she feels awkward asking to be together for no reason. But the three of them come together and acknowledge that they’ll have to work harder to spend time together now that Alice has full time work commitments, but they resolve to put in that work and find whatever time together they can, even if there’s no real reason for it.

Meanwhile, Aika is frustrated that her career isn’t progressing as fast as she wants, and she starts to transfer that anxiety onto her relationship with Al. A night of moon-watching with Akari, Alice, and Al ends with Aika and Al trapped at the bottom of a well, relying on President Maa to bring help, and Aika crying again, this time because of an astronomical phenomenon that she thinks metaphorically represents her relationship with Al never progressing. Akari, on the other hand, is sanguine as usual. She’s happy for Alice (and later for Aika when Aika also surpasses her) and copes easily with Alicia’s abrupt announcement, soon after Aika’s promotion, that her own exam is the next day. As soon as the glove is off Akari’s hand, Alicia announces that she’s retiring and getting married. Akari copes less easily with this announcement, but as good natured and unflappable as she is, she manages to get through it.

Even before Alice’s promotion, Aria: The Origination treats us to a look at Akira’s past and a glimpse of Athena’s dim-witted way of dealing with interpersonal issues, and lets us see Alice explore Alicia’s unique style of teaching. Episode 6, “That Wonderful Extracurricular Lesson…”, is one of my favorite episodes of the entire Aria series. Alice tries to covertly discover how Akari and Alicia’s mentor relationship works without scolding, which she assumes is a requisite part of being a mentor, delivering Aria’s usual gentle, silly humor. Halfway through the episode, Alicia calls Alice out and gets her to come talk straightforwardly about it. Alice had just assumed Alicia wouldn’t talk to her and that she had to spy to find out what she wanted to know, but Alicia, consistent with the philosophy she describes to Alice in this episode, doesn’t consider it at all beneath her to spend time explaining how she thinks about being a mentor to a junior colleague. There’s lots of clever dialogue and even more gentle, silly humor in their conversation, and by the end I had the sense that maybe Alice would have learned more from being mentored by Alicia than Akari did. Not that Alicia always behaves consistently with the philosophy of mentoring she describes in this episode—I can think of several times when she didn’t, including “That White, Kind City…” from The Natural—but that illustrates that Alicia too, as perfect as she appears, is only human, a consistent theme of her character development across both The Natural and The Origination.

The Origination does have a couple of clunkers. Episode 3, “Those Feelings Within…”, can’t seem to figure out what story it wants to tell about the maker of the little heart-shaped chocolates in the glass bottle, and ends up a series of scattered, poorly motivated happenings. Episode 7, "In That Gently Passing Time...", introduces a retired Aria Company Undine who’s living happily with a son and fisher-bro husband purely as an excuse for loving pans over white lace, and as a framing device for a story about Grandma and President Aria’s past. (President Aria used to be homeless. Which explains why he loves eating and sleeping so much. Also, he’s like a hundred years old.) But, unlike The Natural, in The Origination these episodes were mixed in with moving, lovely stories about the main characters, so it was easier to forgive them. Also, The Origination is superbly animated throughout, so even the episodes that don’t quite make the story land still present lots of beautiful imagery.

On the whole, I loved this series. Except for one thing.

Aika is Akira, But in a Mirror, Darkly

Cait Sith and the mystical cat god stories may have been my least favorite part of Aria, but second place surely goes to Aika.

I’ve never been a big fan of Aika, but if anything, I expected to like her more rewatching the series. I expected coming back with a little distance would bring to light some depth to her personality or some kind of character arc that would make me appreciate her more than I did back when moe points were my main measure of a character. But the more I tried to find something to like about her, the less I liked her. It all came to a head in The Origination.

In Episode 5, “That Keepsake Clover…”, the three trainees see Athena and Alicia both exhibiting their special talents—Athena her singing voice, and Alicia her dexterity with an oar. Aika realizes that Akari and Alice also have special talents—Alice is a natural at driving a boat, and Akari is Akari—and agonizes in her usual hysterical fashion over whether she herself has any special talents compared to them. She talks with Akira, who had to spend her entire career in the shadows of Alicia and Athena but still came out with a strong identity of her own as an Undine. Akira tells her that she was the last to get promoted to Prima, and after Athena’s promotion she was depressed and pitied herself a little. Thanks to baby Aika, she regained her confidence and pushed through to become the Prima she is today. Aika doesn’t remember this, but after hearing Akira’s story, she decides that her talent is persevering, being reliable, and working hard, and redoubles her efforts.

My major problem with Aika is that the evidence contradicts everything the series tries to tell us about what kind of person she is. She’s supposed to be practical, hardworking, reliable, and serious, but all we ever see her do is make eyes at Al, obsess over what Alicia thinks of her, primp, scream at Akira over minor things, yell at Akari and Alice like they’re mental defectives she’s been burdened with, fight with Alice over childish things, and burst into tears at the drop of a hat. She’s supposed to be hardworking, but all the evidence suggests Akari and Alice work equally hard—I’d even say Alice is more hardworking, because she goes to school every day and then comes home and practices on top of whatever homework she has. She’s not even a nice person: she spends a ton of time whining about things and yelling at or deriding her friends, and she and Akari are only friends because it seemed like a convenient way to get closer to Alicia. Unlike Akira, who can be mean sometimes but always thinks she’s helping, Aika behaves in a lot of petty, bullying ways from pure selfishness or from some sort of fragile, inflated egomania layered on top of her insecurity.

At the end of the day, I was never going to buy that Aika was a hardworking person who earned everything by sheer will and perseverance. Akira, who lacks the ethereal beauty and appealing personality of Alicia or the incredible singing voice of Athena, reached the top of the Undine profession through hard work and persistence. We’re meant to see Aika as the same. But Aika didn’t earn anything: her parents own Himeya. Not only are they rich, they own an Undine company. We never see her parents, so we don’t know what kind of people they are. If Aika were truly hopeless and could never have made it to Prima under Akira’s tutelage, it’s entirely possible they would have paid off a shill mentor to pass her. Even if we assume they have too much integrity for that, her parents employ one of the top three Undine in Neo-Venezia, so she had a straight shot to training under that top Undine with no effort at all. Then, instead of being grateful that she gets personalized one-on-one instruction from someone whose salary can sustain an entire company (judging by Alicia’s ability to keep Aria Company afloat on her own), Aika spends all of her time complaining that Akira is too harsh and threatening to run away to train under Alicia.

Contrast that with Akari and Alice, who were also privileged to train under top Undine. Akari was handpicked by Alicia, out of all the people, including Aika, who must have been vying to be her apprentice. She was chosen by Alicia herself based on what Alicia saw in her. We don’t see how Alice came to train under Athena, but since she’s a prodigy, the most likely scenario is that Orange Planet noticed her talent and took her in, and since she was so talented they decided to put her with their best Undine to help nurture that talent. Akari and Alice both ended up training under top Undine because their talent justified it. Aika, on the other hand, is training under Akira because her parents pay Akira. (And are her landlords, since Undine at the big companies live at their company’s dormitory.) We see no evidence in the series that Aika is anything other than mediocre. Alice’s talent is made clear many times, and aside from Akari’s obvious personal qualities, the other Undine on the traghetto in Episode 4, “Those Who Aim For Tomorrow…”, note that she’s an exceptional rower who will surely be a Prima soon. So Aika has no special talents, and her parents, the owners of Himeya, have started her out in such an advantageous position that she doesn’t need to be hardworking or persistent, though she’s convinced herself that she is since she’s able to keep going every time she has one of her borderline psychotic drama queen episodes where she breaks down in tears over some bizarre idea she’s taken into her head. (The astronomical phenomenon one is particularly hilarious.) When she makes Prima, her parents step in again and give her a position as branch manager of a Himeya office that we’ve never seen any evidence she’s at all qualified for. Then again, given that she seems more “competent” than “exceptional” when it comes to rowing and interacting with customers, maybe the manager position was the best thing for her.

All three trainee Undine are a lot like their mentors, but with subtle yet important differences. Akari has the same warm presence and generous spirit as Alicia, but trades Alicia’s glamorous image, which partially disguises Alicia’s insecurities, for an easy confidence around people that lets her relate to almost anyone. Alice is just as weird as Athena, but can accomplish basic daily tasks without hurting herself. She and Athena also share a certain passivity when it comes to getting what they want, but Alice seems to have done a better job overcoming it by the end of the series. Unlike Athena, who wistfully expressed her regret that she, Alicia, and Akira spend so little time together nowadays back in Episode 11 of The Animation, Alice has gone out of her way to seize as much time with her friends as she can. Aika and Akira share their status as the “normie” of their respective peer groups; neither of them have the natural charisma or overwhelming talent of the people they’re surrounded by. But Akira, as far as we know, was a perfectly ordinary person who came into Himeya and attained her top ranked status by hard work and determination. She has the down-to-earth wisdom to prove it, too. When other Undine were gossiping about her behind her back, she shrugged it off. She knew Aika was only setting herself up for disappointment by tying her sense of self-worth so closely to Alicia. Her teaching philosophy is harsher than it needs to be, and this backfires on her a few times, but it reflects her experience and how she sees the world—as a harsh place that nonetheless taught her a lot and let her rise to the top of her field. Aika was a rich kid with no special talent who decided to be an Undine because she couldn’t stop fangirling over Alicia, got to train under Himeya’s top Prima as a matter of course, took forever to learn anything or show any gratitude for it, only made Prima before Akari because Alicia was having trouble letting go, and then was elevated into management by her parents the second the ink was dry on her Prima license. Aika is like a dark reflection of Akira, both ordinary aside from a strong desire to be Undine, both ended up at the top of the field, but one getting there by effort and determination and the other getting there by rich parents and the unearned kindness of her mentor and her friends.

I expected to like Aika more after watching the show again, but in the end it was Akira I liked a lot more. So much of the way Akira is framed in the early parts of the series is filtered through Aika’s point of view, so until around Episode 24 of The Natural, the view of her we’re given is largely negative. But if you look at what Akira does both on and off screen without filtering it through Aika’s point of view, it’s clear she’s a good person and a great Undine who’s a bit rough around the edges, and whose roughness rubs the spoiled Aika the wrong way, especially since she’s already disappointed Akira isn’t Alicia. That Akira can stand to be constantly compared unfavorably to her old friend and sometime rival by her ignoramus of an apprentice is another testament to her strength of character. Both Akari and Alice seem to like Akira, aside from the respect they have for her as an Undine: in The Natural Episode 15, Akari and Akira share a nice lunch after they run into each other by chance, and in The Natural Episode 24, Alice remarks with unusual sincerity that it must have been disappointing for some customers whose appointment was canceled to miss out on their chance to ride in Akira’s gondola, which moves Akira to pat her head fondly. Alice doesn’t have the easiest time getting to like people.

It’s a Coming of Age Story, Man

The theme of growing up and coming into your own pervades Aria: The Origination. A wistfulness which is both nostalgic and forward-looking suffuses many of the episodes. The three main heroines are coming in sight of the end of a long, significant period in their lives, and knowing that, they spend a lot of time looking forward to what waits for them just ahead, but also spare some time to look back on what they’re leaving behind. The first time I watched The Origination, in 2011, I was going through some life changes myself that meant I could identify with that feeling. Since then, I’ve gone through even more life changes, and that feeling where you’re at the end of a phase of your life, taking stock of what you’re finishing and wondering how you’re going to move forward, rings even more true.

Episodes like “That Imminent Spring Breeze…”, “That Keepsake Clover…”, and “In That Gently Passing Time…” that depend on this wistful atmosphere attain a gravity that they wouldn’t have if they were merely flashbacks, but it’s best used in Episode 4, “Those Who Aim for Tomorrow…”. Akari, feeling a bit anxious about her rowing skills, goes to work the traghetto on Alicia’s advice. The traghetto is a cheap ferry boat that Neo Venezian locals ride to get around the city. Apprentice Undine, usually Singles, row it in their time off to practice and make some extra money. Akari meets three other Undine whose path has been much different than hers: Atora and Anzu from Orange Planet, and Ayumi from Himeya. Atora and Anzu are both struggling to attain promotion to Prima, while Ayumi has decided that the Prima lifestyle isn’t for her, and she prefers the down-to-earth lifestyle of a traghetto rower. Atora and Anzu go through a lot of emotions in this episode: they lash out at their instructor, who won’t pass them up to Prima; they rage against the system; they consider quitting and becoming permanent traghetto rowers like Ayumi. But Ayumi talks them out of it, telling them she’s doing it because she wants to do it, but they really still want to be Prima, so they shouldn’t give up. The three also confirm that Akari is a great rower and that for her, becoming a Prima is practically inevitable.

“Those Who Aim for Tomorrow…” is so successful because it goes outside our heroines’ little bubble and shows us the challenges that other Single Undine, ones who weren’t blessed with the best mentors in the world of Undine, faced on their path to being Primas. It illustrates what Undine who find themselves unhappy with the system can do. It expands the world, but it also shows us that Akari’s path isn’t the only path. While Akari may have been a natural who flourished under Alicia’s instruction, there are other trainees who struggle, fall down, and either drop off or come back to try again. It gets across the fear you feel when you’ve set yourself on a certain path, lost a lot of time and work to a goal, and now aren’t sure that goal is achievable. This isn’t a feeling any of our main heroines would have—they’re too talented, or have parents too rich, to fail like this—so the show introduced these new characters to expand on its theme of coming to the end of a major phase in your life, by showing what happens when bringing that phase to an end turns out to be more difficult than you thought.

Leaving Aria Behind…

Speaking of phases ending, I don’t know if I’m ever going to watch Aria again after this. I don’t know if I’m ever again going to feel moved to revisit this series, with its beautiful moments and its mediocre moments and its brilliantly genuine writing and its sentimentally boring writing. When I finished Aria: The Origination for the first time in June of 2011, I wrote in the notes I was keeping, “I don’t know how to go on after this without that weekly peek into a better world”. But I think I do now.

Don’t get me wrong, I love those characters (except for Aika) and that world (except for Cait Sith). The peacefulness, the natural beauty, the appreciation for a simple life, those are as potent as ever, and in some ways I needed this series in 2018 even more than I did in 2011. But living in that world doesn’t fix everything. The beauty of Neo-Venezia comes as much from the charming personalities of the Undine as it does from the architecture and the canals and the trees and the roasted potato stands. But to become an Undine, young girls compete fiercely for the chance to spend years in training, only to possibly flunk out at the Prima level due to the whims of instructors. They become apprentices at young ages—Alice at 14, Akari at 15—and drop out of school, so being an Undine is the only set of skills they have, and the world of Neo-Venezia is still capitalist, so changing jobs isn’t necessarily easy. Alicia is lucky enough to get a position with the Gondola Association, but she’s one of the most celebrated Prima ever. And not all Undine are as naturally personable as Akari; being an Undine is a form of emotional labor, like being a cast member at a Disney park, where the Undine’s vibe is an essential part of the experience for the customer. For someone like Alice, who is shy and quiet, being chipper and energetic all the time must be exhausting. So a lot of hard work goes into creating the experience of Neo-Venezia, and there are winners and losers, and some people get hurt. It may be utopian, but it’s not perfect.

But more than that, I’m never sure nowadays if I’m ever going to revisit anything. There’s so much anime to watch nowadays, so many books and comics to read, so many games to play, that coming back to any one of them almost feels like a waste. On the other hand, 90% of them are crap. Aria, despite its flaws, is a masterpiece—I’m more sure of that now than I ever have been. It succeeds too well at something too risky and too original to be anything else. And perhaps, even with the incredible preponderance of stories out there today to experience, it’s worth making time to return to the masterpieces every so often. To reaffirm that they are masterpieces, if nothing else—or perhaps to return to something familiar and friendly, warm and comforting, yet at the same time challenging and deep, like a city built on another planet to preserve the history of a world that can’t be bothered to remember where it came from.

That Moving Saggy Part in the Middle: Part Two of an “Aria” Retrospective

Part One of the Aria retrospective, if you need to catch up

---

In my life, I have watched the entire Aria saga through multiple times—at least three that I can remember. And every single time I did, I would burn straight through Aria: The Animation, get through the first three or four episodes of Aria: The Natural, and then just suddenly lose all will to watch the show. I would put off moving on to the next episode for weeks. I would sometimes watch other shows in the interim. I would consider ending my run early. And I had no idea why. Those first few episodes of The Natural were good, I thought. I loved them, I thought. They were just as good as anything in The Animation, I thought.

Conceptually, those first few episodes of Aria: The Natural are amazing. Carnevale, leading into a dance through a darkened city following a mysterious figure in a cloak. A treasure hunt where the real treasure is Neo-Venezia and its people. A luxurious afternoon coffee in the piazza. A night watching a meteor shower atop the roofs of the city. So I was always mystified why I had such a hard time getting past them, when the enthusiasm they created should have carried me through the next few. Watching the show again, I finally understood why it was that I always had such a hard time making it past Episode 6 or so: much more than the other two series, The Natural has episodes that are badly paced, overstretched, and boring.

The Saggy Middle of the Saggy Middle

I always used to blame Episode 5, another two-parter which I think of as “the Alicia duology” since both stories focus on Akari and Alicia spending time together. But this time, I enjoyed Episode 5. At least, I enjoyed the second story, “The Discoveries on That Spring Day…”, which follows Akari and Alicia on a picnic into the inlands, where they spend a day discovering old train tracks, an abandoned train car, and cherry trees in full bloom. It’s a nice little story that reminds me of exploring the mountains near my house when I was a kid, where there were also abandoned train tracks.

No, the first bad episode of Aria: The Natural is actually Episode 7, “To the Kingdom of Cats…”, which illustrates the biggest storytelling vice of Aria: The Natural: dragging a story out way longer than the material can actually sustain. “To the Kingdom of Cats…” is based on a manga story that was one of the earliest hints in the manga towards the magical ghost cat subplot. Aika and Akari see President Aria going somewhere by himself in his little boat, so they decide to follow him. They end up stuck in a loop in a mysterious abandoned canal where they go through a gate and come out into the same room they just left. This continues until President Aria comes out and helps them get free. That’s it. Episode 7 stretches this story out to 22 minutes. It achieves this mainly by showing Akari and Aika stuck in the loop for what feels like fifteen solid minutes. Whether it’s actually that long, it becomes so boring that it feels much longer.

Looking back at my notes, though, I still cut “To the Kingdom of Cats…” some slack at the time. I wrote that it was “Kinda boring but okay.” I became much less forgiving of this flaw as the show continued to do it. Episode 11, “That Precious Sparkle…” has a real story but mercilessly pads itself, adding in pans and tracking shots that feel pointless even in light of the new definition of “having a point” you have to adopt when watching Aria. On the other hand, Episode 11 has one of the stronger messages of all the episodes of Aria, addressing Neo-Venezia’s own history independent of Venice on Earth that it was built as a replica of, and whether that history has value of its own. So I still cut it some slack as well.

Episodes 16, “Parting with that Gondola…”, and 17, “After That Rainy Night…”, received no such regard.

By this point the show had already started to become a bit of a slog. And Episode 16 follows on Episode 15, “At the Center of That Squared Circle…”, my personal pick for worst episode of any Aria, bar none, so my charitable feelings towards the show were running low. Then it decided to spend two entire episodes showing Akari say goodbye to her gondola, which has become old and needs to be replaced. Yes, two entire episodes devoted to bidding farewell to a hunk of floating wood.

In hindsight, it’s a little bit genius. For all its faults, which I’m going to continue enumerating at great length, Aria: The Natural masters themes and messages. It chooses more complex and more unique messages than the other two Aria shows do, and it symbolizes those themes in interesting ways that tie seamlessly into the world of Neo-Venezia. Episode 11 uses art snobs’ attitudes towards Neo-Venezian glassmaking to explore the city’s odd relationship with the city it was built as a replica of, and Episodes 16 and 17 use Akari’s old, beat up gondola as a symbol for how much she’s been through since coming to Aqua, and how much her life has been defined by it.

But as Episodes 16 and 17 illustrate, the show doesn’t always do a good job pacing those stories. They become too heavy, drive the same points in too many times; and they become too overwrought, trying to pack in too many feelings, which in the end becomes emotionally fatiguing and can even make what should be moving laughable. Through flashbacks, these two episodes adapt most of the stories from the early parts of the manga when it was called Aqua that weren’t adapted in Aria: The Animation. Putting this material so late in the series has an odd effect. It loses its original impact because Akari is experiencing all these early, awkward moments as memories that she’s now so far away from that they’ve become fond, even though they weren’t all pleasant at the time. So we as the audience experience these events as Akari does now: as bygone memories, a little wistful, things that shaped who Akari is today. Except when we don’t: having never been aware that any of these things happened, we have little context for them. We don’t know if they happened the day before Episode 1 of Aria: The Animation, or the year before. For me, some scenes survived this disconnect. Watching Akari struggle to row in front of Alicia and embarrass herself rowing backwards, I felt about it as current-day Akari did: a little nostalgic, recalling the rough beginnings that often go with new jobs and new lives. Watching her test to become a Single, I didn’t feel much at all.

By Episode 17 they’re mostly out of stuff from Aqua to adapt, so they start making up original material, and even bring in Alicia’s memories of training with that gondola herself back in the day. Then they finish on what feels like a solid ten minutes of Akari lying in the gondola while emotional music plays (a song called “Amefuribana”) and the exact same clips that we just saw in the first part of the episode repeat, this time cut up in different ways to coincide better with the music. Some of this is artfully edited—there’s a shot I like where they show Alicia cleaning off the gondola with a hose and then fade into Akari doing the same later—but it doesn’t change that it’s a clipshow of material we just saw earlier in the same episode. Not only does this seem either lazy or desperate, it also did weird things to my emotional investment in the situation. Showing a scene more than once is usually a heavy-handed way to emphasize how important that scene is. After two whole episodes of weighty sadness, melancholy, and nostalgia around this gondola, I had no more to give. I was tapped. Repeating these clips, in effect telling me “This is important, pay attention, you should feel sad about this” tipped me over from “no more feelings to feel” to annoyance. The show tried to milk that scenario for just a little bit more emotion than it was actually good for, and in the end, when they needed another five minutes of footage and decided to repeat some from earlier in the same episode, it accidentally brought everything crashing down. At that point in the show, when it had already become a bit of a slog, it couldn’t recover easily from that. And it never really did in my eyes. It started to make amends in its last three episodes, but it wasn’t until Aria: The Origination that I started to really enjoy it again.

Four boring episodes out of twenty-six shouldn’t be a big deal. But the truth is these four weren’t the only boring ones. At least half the episodes of Aria: The Natural are boring on some level. These four were the worst, because they had the most boring story content and were the most excessively dragged out. But sadly, even episodes with great story concepts were made boring, because the animation reaches new lows in this series.

Aria depends heavily on its art and music to convey emotions. There’s also emotion to be had from the characters’ stories, but neither Aria: The Animation nor Aria: The Natural do a great job of getting at it; they both have a ton of episodes that rely on art, music, and story concept with a few episodes that rely on character sprinkled in. The character-based episodes are consistently the best, and this is partially because the staff manipulated things to be that way. The terrible animation, at its worst, is too obvious to miss. There are large sections of some episodes that feel like picture dramas, where we see a still image with a lens flare on it to try and make it look more dynamic and the characters talk over it, but don’t appear anywhere in the shot. When the characters do appear, they don’t move, not even their mouths, they just stand in one pose while the camera slowly pans over them, while the dialogue is delivered in voiceovers. I can’t recall a single time in the character-based episodes—like Episode 6, “The Smile Reflected in That Mirror…”; Episode 13, “Those Really Self-Imposed Rules…”; or Episode 18, “That New Me…”—where the animation degenerated to this extent. But terrible animation completely destroyed Episode 2, “Chasing That Treasure…”, whose finale hinges on the beauty of Neo-Venezia being the real treasure. Episode 23, “That Sea, Love, and Heart…”, which has some nice things to say about how society perceives love and relationships, also made me start looking at my watch towards the end because the bad animation made its pivotal scene feel so drawn out.

In this episode, Akari meets an older man and his wife who’ve come to Neo-Venezia on vacation after years of the husband being unable to get away from work long enough for the trip. He wants to do a ceremony called the Marriage to the Sea to reaffirm his love for his wife. He’s rebuffed, but Akari levies her group of friends and acquaintances to put together a ceremony for him so he can tell his wife that he still loves her. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen another anime do a serious story about an older couple’s love like this. It ends with Akari writing Ai a line I really liked, arguing against the ideas of true love and soul mates: “Maybe every encounter is a miracle, and love is really something you have to nurture.” The final scene, which should be a beautiful affirmation of an older couple’s continuing love against the backdrop of a beautiful orange sunset on the ocean, becomes a bunch of drowse-inducing pans over still images in which none of the characters are visible. Voices come out of nowhere and talk over these still images, but we don’t see the people they belong to, or if we do it’s from far away and they don’t move or change expressions at all. The episode, despite its unique message, is all but ruined by this. It especially hurts the squad of minor characters that the main six Undine recruit to fill out the celebration; we never see them, so they don’t add any visual weight, and we only hear their voices as disembodied speech from the ether.

Better animation would probably improve a huge number of the episodes I didn’t enjoy in Aria: The Natural. Some would still have story problems, but the series wouldn’t have felt like such a slog for so long if some of these plot-heavy, character-light episodes that proliferated at least had some pretty stuff to look at.

Aika Is a Borderline Psychotic Drama Queen and Other Odd Discoveries

Throughout Aria: The Animation and into the first 17 episodes of Aria: The Natural, the only one among our three heroines who really has a character arc is Alice. Almost every episode I think of as “character-focused” is about Alice, oftentimes with Athena as a strong supporting character. We’ll talk more about her arc when we discuss Aria: The Origination, but it’s by far the most full and interesting arc of any character in the series.

Akari never has a character arc, because she follows what this video about characters without arcs calls the “Flat Arc”. Akari starts the series with certain fundamental beliefs, and never changes those beliefs throughout the series. Instead, she changes other people by exposing them to her beliefs and the unique abilities those convictions give her. In Episode 10, “That Heartwarming Town and Its People…”, Akari inspires Aika and Alice to avoid judging others by their appearances, and shows them how powerful her ability to make friends with everyone is. She helps mend fences between a child and his teacher who quit her job to get married in Episode 4, “That Neo-Venezia Colored Heart…”, and helps a glassmaker heal the chip on his shoulder in Episode 11, “That Precious Sparkle…” Throughout the entire series, Akari helps Akatsuki become a better person. He starts out as the biggest jerk in the whole show and slowly becomes a decent human with each time he meets Akari. Though she and Alicia are compared and portrayed as similar throughout the series, Akari seems to inspire others to be better people, whereas Alicia only seems to inspire others in their pants. Everyone who admires Alicia talks about their admiration in physical terms: Alicia is beautiful, Alicia is graceful, Alicia is an untouchable ideal. When people appreciate Akari at all, they appreciate her because she made them kinder or more open or showed them a new way of looking at the world that made it seem brighter and friendlier. That’s also why only Akari could be Alicia’s apprentice. Akari is humble, but not obsequious. She treats everyone like a close friend. While she admires Alicia’s skill and respects her as a veteran Undine, Alicia is a person to Akari, not a physical embodiment of an untouchable ideal. Aika could never have been Alicia’s apprentice, because she would have been so blinded by her admiration of Alicia that she wouldn’t have been able to learn. She would have constantly been chasing the picture in her head of what Alicia is, an impossible image of what an Undine should be, and ignoring the reality that she can never be that, nor does she have to be to be good at what she does.

Unfortunately, the other parts of Aika’s character arc, which really doesn’t begin until the later parts of Aria: The Natural, don’t quite work. Everything the writers try to say about her character is contradicted by evidence in the show, so none of her character beats come off the way they’re supposed to. In the first story of Episode 19, “That Crybaby…”, Aika has come down with a fever, so she misses practice and leaves Akari and Alice on their own. She expects this to be a huge problem, because she thinks Akari and Alice are complete idiots who can’t find their own feet without her. After a few days in bed, she’s feeling better and getting bored, so she sneaks out to go shopping, eat ice cream, and spy on her friends, who are doing just fine without her. Seeing this, Aika has what appears to be a full-blown existential crisis, runs back to her room, and hides under the covers crying because she thinks her existence is meaningless since her friends don’t need her to boss them around. When Akari and Alice come by to tell her they miss her and bring pudding, Aika remembers that life is worth living and immediately rebounds, and the crisis is over.

Aika’s character traits are supposed to be “serious, diligent, hardworking, and reliable”, but we repeatedly see her lose her mind over tiny incidents. In Episode 18, “That New Me…”, she runs away from a barbecue crying because her hair got burnt and now she looks ugly in front of Alicia, and then screams at Akira that she hates her because Akira isn’t sympathetic to her reaction. In the second half of Episode 19, “That Young Girl’s Heart…”, she’s so depressed that she can’t function in her day to day life, because Al, her crush, hasn’t seen the new short hairstyle she adopted after her long hair burned in Episode 18. This doesn’t make her come off as serious or reliable. She’s more concerned about her hair, Alicia thinking she’s pretty, and showing off for the guy she has a crush on than building up her skills as an Undine. Her perception of Akari’s and Alice’s incompetence that we see at the start of “That Young Girl’s Heart…” is completely skewed, to the point where I’d call Aika an unreliable narrator. There’s another episode during The Origination that further erodes Aika’s image as “serious, hardworking, and reliable” that we’ll discuss when we get to it.

The Natural also adds some weird and ultimately meaningless coincidences to Akira’s and Alicia’s pasts in what I consider the worst episode of any Aria series, Episode 15, “At the Center of That Squared Circle”. In this episode, Akari is enjoying a day off when she happens to run into Akira. There’s a scene between them that I liked a lot, but soon Akatsuki, Al, and Woody show up and the whole thing somehow turns into them all reminiscing about a time when they were children. It turns out that Akira and Alicia were on a field trip to Ukijima when they were young and happened to run into Akatsuki and Woody, who Al was babysitting at the park. Akira and Akatsuki competed at a bunch of challenges and Akira came out on top, leading Akatsuki to spend years thinking he’d been bested by the manliest boy ever. At the end he discovers that it was Akira and that she was a girl. Akari muses how wonderful and mysterious it is that they all met before.

While there are plenty of episodes, especially of The Natural, which are boring or oddly structured, this is the only one I’ll call genuinely terrible. It stomps on its own message: discovering that, by some insane coincidence, Akatsuki, Woody, Al, Akira, and Alicia all spent an afternoon together when they were children doesn’t make the world seem wide and wondrous, it makes it seem small and incestuous. The mere fact that Akatsuki, Al, and Woody all knew each other as children already felt like a huge coincidence since Akari meets them all by chance and then discovers later that they know each other. I also didn’t like the reveal that Alicia and Akira knew each other as children, for the same reason: two childhood friends happening to become two of the greatest Undine of their age makes the world feel narrower and poorer. Are there really so few people in Neo-Venezia that it can just so turn out that all of these people Akari randomly met happened to already know each other from the past? And these existing relationships don’t add anything to any of these characters. Akira and Alicia’s relationship was already well established (and already felt uncomfortably coincidental) by their time as trainees together. Akatsuki, Woody, and Al have no relationships. Even when we see them all together, usually in the festival episodes, we don’t see them interact in any meaningful way. It feels like it was just a convenience so there didn’t need to be a scene where they meet each other—but there already didn’t need to be a scene like that, because they never really talk.

The Cat God

I mentioned last time how much I ended up disliking the supernatural material. The Natural doubles down on ghost cat material and even crafts an odd sort of story arc around Akari’s encounters with Cait Sith, a seven-foot-tall cat god who seems to take a liking to her early on. He first appears in Episode 1, hidden under a robe and mask and playing the part of Casanova for Carnevale. The finale of this episode is a self indulgent-feeling five-minute sequence of Akari and Ai following Cait Sith and his entourage while singing, dancing, and clicking canastas. At the end, he takes off his mask and reveals who he is, fleetingly, from a distance. The entire sequence sums up my feelings about the Cait Sith material in The Natural: it’s artistically beautiful, and it’s well animated, it’s atmospheric, and it adds variety to the show by letting us see things we’d never see in regular old Neo-Venezia, and it breaks the world and it adds nothing to the story and I hate it and I hate that I don’t completely hate it.

The show never attempts to explain what Cait Sith is, beyond Alicia quickly explaining the myth to Akari that he’s a cat god from Manhome. I’ve seen theories that he’s a genetically engineered supercat, which fits into the world, since the Martian cats like President Aria can understand human language, meaning they must be genetically engineered. But late in the series, he saves Akari from a vengeful ghost. In the very next episode he’s seen conducting a magical sky train. And even back in Episode 4 of Aria: The Animation, a ghost cat taking human form handed Akari a letter. Attempts to explain these phenomena within a hard sci-fi, no-magic world get more and more strained, to the point where it’s meaningless to pretend anymore that Aria is a no-magic world. Given that, why overcomplicate things? Cait Sith is a magical cat god, and that’s the end of it.

I tried to justify the magical cat god material as part of Akari’s character arc, since she’s the only one who ever sees him. (Everyone else just accepts that he exists without question, even though I know I’d have some questions if my friend told me she’d seen a magical cat god, let alone been saved from a ghost by him.) But Akari doesn’t really have a character arc. She changes the people around her; she herself does not change. The Cait Sith episodes don’t provide her with one, either. She seems entirely unchanged by her encounters with the giant magical cat, other than the odd quasi-romantic attraction to him she develops in the last couple episodes of the storyline. If we wanted to we could interpret Cait Sith as some kind of out-there symbolism—as Akari’s childhood, as Akari’s sexual awakening, as a sign of Akari’s incipient mental illness, as Jesus, as Satan tempting Akari who symbolizes Jesus—but no matter which symbolic interpretation I tried on, it didn’t add anything to the story that connected to anything else in Aria at all. No matter how I interpreted Cait Sith as part of Akari’s character arc, he was either redundant or completely from left field. In the end, nothing about his presence in the show hangs together. He adds very little, and he subtracts a sense of realism.

Moving into The Origination

The Natural finally started to capture my interest again in the last few episodes. Once we moved past the cat god material we finally got back to stories about the characters and their lives. Three of my top episodes of Aria: The Natural are “Those Undine of Tomorrow…”, “The Fruits of That Encounter…”, and “That White, Kind City…”, which all come in here at the very end of the series. All three show how the main trio are advancing as Undine, setting up what’s to come in The Origination, but “Those Undine of Tomorrow…” and “That White, Kind City…” both do it under the simplest auspices. “Those Undine of Tomorrow…” just shows the main trio sitting around speculating about the future, punctuated by Akira getting mad at Aika for trying to inherit Alicia’s special Undine alias instead of creating her own identity. Even though “That New Me…” does this conflict more explosively, it’s handled with a lot more symbolic potency in “Those Undine of Tomorrow…”. An Undine’s alias is custom-made for her by her mentor, and characterizes her style and the experience a customer will have with her. It’s closely linked to her identity as an Undine. For the main trio, being an Undine is a core part of their personal identities, so the aliases they choose clearly express their personal identities and how they see themselves. So when Akira criticizes Aika for trying to take on Alicia’s alias, she’s much more pointedly advising Aika not to couple her own identity to Alicia; otherwise Aika is setting herself up for constant self-loathing and dissatisfaction when she fails to live up to her vision of Alicia.

“That White, Kind City…” is, in some ways, a tempest in a teapot. Alicia pulls off a classic mentor maneuver, answering Akari’s straightforward question about what she values in her job and what motivates her with a long, meandering stunt and a Zen koan. On the other hand, with a show that wears its themes on its sleeve like Aria, a little subtlety can be very refreshing. Ending the series on such a low-key story, where characters other than Akari and Alicia appear only briefly, seems a bit odd, but it works. It’s a fun, sweet episode, the beautiful imagery and focus on the Akari / Alicia relationship of “The Discoveries on That Spring Day…” improved by a strong plot thread and theme.

As we’ll discuss next time, Aria: The Origination is much more subtle, low-key, and focused on character and relationships than The Natural, and these last few episodes start moving us in that direction. They are all the better for it.

My Biggest Compliment for The Natural

Aria: The Natural is inferior to the other shows in story, character, and animation, but it manages to have my favorite soundtrack of all three shows. Since the soundtracks of all three shows are brilliant, this doesn’t quite absolve it of its failings, but it’s a definite point in its favor.

The Natural has the most varied and interesting background music, but it also racks up huge points because one of its endings, “Natsumachi”, is quite possibly my favorite anime song of all time. I have no ear for music, so it’s hard to really explain why, but over the years this song has almost never failed to make me think nostalgically of summer evenings by the beach and lavender sunset skies over the ocean with the stars just becoming visible. Oddly, the only real memories I have of a scenario like that have some unpleasant aspect to them, so the song is making me feel nostalgic for some synthesized thing that’s never actually happened to me. That’s pretty powerful.

The three Aria openings, “Undine”, “Euforia”, and “Spirale”, are almost identical songs in a lot of ways, but “Euforia”, the opening for The Natural, succeeds most at being that song. The Natural does, however, have my least favorite ending theme, “Smile Again”, for its second half. “Smile Again” is far from bad, but to my ears it’s merely pleasant, where the other endings, “Rainbow”, “Kin no Nami, Sen no Nami”, and the aforementioned “Natsumachi”, achieve something more stirring. If you translate the lyrics, all four endings are pretty much the usual anime song pablum about romantic yearning and the blue sky, so it’s hard for me to describe what separates them for me. This is where words fail me, and I have to throw up my hands and admit that that’s how I felt about it, but it really is just a feeling.

Conclusion

Aria: The Natural has some of the best material in the Aria series, along with most of the worst material. There are times when it’s boring, and times when it goes in directions that undermine its own world. There are also times when it’s beautiful, and times when it nails a feeling or a theme perfectly. I understand now why I always felt so conflicted about it in the past. It has good ideas and executes some of them very well, and all of them competently, but it feels like it’s spinning its wheels and filling up space a lot of the time, which grew frustrating at times. It may have been better served by a thirteen-episode run, doing away with the cat god story and some of the other filler, to concentrate the good parts and leave behind the less good parts. But in the end it’s part of the Aria saga, and its length, as much as it burned me out towards the end, served some purpose: it bridged the gap from Aria: The Animation, where our three heroines have just gotten into the swing of things and still have a lot of growing and maturing to do, to Aria: The Origination, where they’ve matured a lot, and are now well on the way to becoming Primas.