The End of the World

[Categories: Manga Reviews, OAVs, Movies and Full Series]

Love Hina manga

Posted by Martin  [Tags: realistic fiction, Self-indulgent nostalgia]

Everyone has a title or two that, against our better taste or judgement, we can’t bring ourselves to dislike. Whether it’s that derivative parade of shiny mecha, overlong Shonen Jump cash cow or high tech girls-with-guns offering, we all have one that we hate to love. I can even name a title from each one of those example categories: I’ve followed the early episodes of Naruto and will continue to do so until the DVD release catches up with the filler arcs, Bubblegum Crisis is a classic and I can’t wait for Macross Frontier either, even if it turns out to suck; nevertheless, I’d like to think that my collection is a worthy collection of artistic and intelligent entertainment…more or less.

Back when I was only just getting into manga, shortly after my in-at-the-deep-end introduction to anime proper (another story), Tokyopop were only just beginning to get a reliable and varied stock on UK shelves; the almighty Death Note had yet to arrive on our shores in paper form and I was still finding my feet (even moreso than now!) as a fan. I also had the brain-melting grind of university with the memories of all-night study sessions, coursework deadlines and frantically legging it to the bus stop to get to the exam room on time fresh in my mind. Maybe this is a valid excuse for reading every volume of the Love Hina manga from cover to cover…read on and I’ll let you weigh up the evidence for yourself.

At the time I wasn’t fully aware of the likes of Tenshi and the harem genre; maybe I just felt that I could relate to the premise of a shy, nerdy, flat-broke student suffering from problems associated with girls(!) and studying for uni. With the anime’s final volume having just been released in the UK, it was one of the new talked-about UK releases at the time too. Oddly, I didn’t watch the DVDs, and still haven’t - for reasons I can’t remember now, I started collecting the manga volumes instead. Maybe they were just cheaper or something.

The series was not without its flaws of course - stereotypical character profiles aside, the plot was stretched to breaking-point with countless teasing “will they/won’t they?” incidents, near-misses and filler segments that padded out what could have used half as many trees to reach its conclusion. Corner-cutting such as re-used backgrounds cropped up time and time again (although the author’s explanations for doing so are reproduced as an extra feature in the last volume) and certain gags, invariably involving scantily-clad females, an embarrassing misunderstanding and the male suffering some form of physical abuse as are result, were recycled ad nauseam. With these in mind, plus the fact that formulaic romcom fluff never has been my thing, I still can’t bring myself to dislike it.

The reason why I sat through so much filler and over-used humour is that, deep down, Love Hina has a great deal of warmth, a sense of fun and an addictive concept that states that with bloody-minded perseverence and a bit of dumb luck, even the clumsiest and most average of us can achieve our dreams. Leaving the romance and comedy aspects aside for a minute, it’s a heartwarming story of a childhood promise that our hapless hero Keitaro has carried around with him for so long that he can’t remember the face of the girl he made the promise to; the whole series is all about the prospect of resolving that issue that’s been nagging at him for so long. There’s a lot of hijinks going on in the meantime, of course, but the overall driving force behind everything that Kei-kun does is to reach that distant (and, it has to be said, unlikely) goal of getting to Tokyo and meeting that special ‘promise girl’ of his youth.

Ah yes, good old Keitaro. He’s repeatedly kicked, punched, abused by the army of females he lives with and forced to the brink of a nervous breakdown by intense studying (jeez, Japanese schoolkids have it rough). Although the girls perceive him as a feeble, perverted loser, we the reader can see that he’s a fundamentally good-natured guy with honest intentions: the simple fact is, he’s misunderstood but crucially never gives up on the promise he made. It’s single-mindedness that borders on stupidity - I mean, how many times would it have been more prudent for him to attend a local college without all that hard graft, and spare himself the pain of being knocked skywards just for taking a bath?

This brings me onto my only significant criticism of the series, apart from the repetitive gags: the somewhat simplistic and male-centric perspective (I wouldn’t go as far as calling it borderline sexist - it’s too harmless to qualify). This is a manga geared towards a young male readership for whom hormones and girls are still an exciting novelty, which adds to the whole formulaic argument thanks to cramming fan service into as many frames as possible. I’ll give Ken Akamatsu credit where it’s due in this department though - he sure knows how to design and draw a varied array of cute girls. After all, if you’re going to surround your (male) protagonist with a myriad of attractive available females, you might as well make them interesting.

And they really are varied and interesting. You can argue all you like about how he’s created a cute lass for every taste, and you’d be stating the truth; nevertheless, you can’t deny him the kudos for succeeding. The trick was, in addition to having every conceivable personality type and quirk, they’ll be at least something to endear each one to the reader. ‘Favourite Love Hina Girl’ polls were rife across anime message boards and forums (fora?) and during the course of the series, as with Lucky Star more recently, you got to know them as characters rather than cut-out archetypes and grew attached to them too. Initially there was the question of “which one will Keitaro eventually end up dating?” but as time went on the series actually began to drift away from the harem premise as a love triangle began to emerge, then the issues of the one-on-one fledgling relationship later on.

I can’t just write Love Hina off as a harem comedy because it didn’t just set up a situation and let the reader guess for a while as to whose arms Keitaro would land in: it also followed a bunch of likable young people through a pivotal time of their lives and actually worked towards a satisfying resolution. The epilogue chapter makes a big jump forward but looking back on the series as a whole they did actually grow up and change - it’s a little detail commonly referred to as ‘character development’…remember that, people. It’s important.

Shinobu in particular really grows and develops (I’m on about her personality, you filthy perv). When we first meet her she’s a quivering schoolgirl who’s dealing with family issues and painful shyness; being younger than the others, she endures a more marked growing-up process during the course of the series. Motoko too faces up to her own problems (with the help of the rest of the Hinata household of course), offering another enjoyable and occasionally moving side-story as she (sometimes comically) comes to terms with her femininity and, more seriously, her own family-related hang-ups. Kitsune doesn’t change a great deal, but that’s all in keeping with her laid-back and stubborn, devil-may-care persona; in a way, she’s more of a man than Keitaro - the amusing best friend who drinks, gambles, is embarrasing in public and won’t change. Ever. Su is an odd one but is the perfect comic relief character: always on hand to spice up the mix with some bizarre mechanical creation that, like Tama-chan the turtle, sets the series just outside the fringes of realism.

While the prospect of Keitaro ending up with any one (or none) of the girls is dangled in front of the reader’s nose at numerous points, it’s pretty clear that he’s only really suited to the delighfully clumsy Mutsumi, who doesn’t harbour an ounce of bad nature, or more specifically the fiery tsundere Naru. Quite honestly, a decent resolution could have come from either scenario but it was an open secret from the outset that Naru and Keitaro would end up together in the end - they’re so mismatched that they’re ironically perfectly suited. In an act of fan service on an epic scale, the resolution arrives - with a truly happy ‘warm fuzzy feeling’ ending and a predictable parting shot that’s perfectly in keeping with the rest of the series, for better or for worse. Having read through fourteen volumes to get there and becoming sentimentally attached to every one of them, the final chapter feels like Akamatsu’s way of thanking the fans for their loyalty; for sure, this ending is placating the readers but when it’s harmless, escapist fun like this, who the heck cares?

And therein lies the greatest strength, which is in a way the inevitable limitation, of Love Hina. For some it’s humorous and wacked-out portrayal of real life; for the older and more jaded among us it’s more of a throwback to the good old days of student life when the future was the future and the present was fun. Either way it’s good old fashioned escapism; wrapped up in cheeky humour, cute artwork, a cast of characters who you can really root for and all the other stuff that makes for an enduring rom-com. This is far from original by any stretch of the imagination but it’s still an enjoyable ride that I will always look upon fondly.

[Filed under Manga Reviews, OAVs, Movies and Full Series]  [Tags: realistic fiction, Self-indulgent nostalgia]

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