Why I Love "Love Hina"  

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Plot Synopsis

Keitaro Urashima is a twenty-year-old guy who made a promise to some girl when he was five that he would go to Tokyo University (Japan's equivalent of Oxford or Stanford) with her because any couple who does so will live happily ever after. He might've passed his entrance test two years ago, but he's an idiot. His parents kick him out of the house, but luckily for him he doesn't have to get a job because his grandmother makes him the new landlord of the Hinata House, an all-girl boarding house. Basically as things go, the residents beat the crap out of him but then start to like him.

Review

Every so often, after suffering through a certain amount of Gatekeepers Full Throttles, Geneshafts, and Dragonball GTs, I start to wonder, "Why the hell do I even keep watching this stuff?" But then, something will come along and, in its beauty, reaffirm the reason why I watch anime/read manga. Recently I've had the pleasure of partaking of two of these: Chobits, and Love Hina.

The manga of Love Hina was the basis for the anime, and plot-wise it's more or less the same. That is, the main plot is the same. A lot of the anime episodes were actually completely made-up, and were not present at all in the manga, or else there was some episode sort of like it, but not exactly the same. I'm not saying this to berate the anime's episodes, since most of them were pretty good, but I really enjoyed the plotlines in the manga better. A lot of critics on other websites seem not to like Love Hina too much, and I think that's probably the reason. Most of the anime episodes were kind of pointless, but the vast majority of the manga's are devoted to what makes this the shounen equivalent of Fruits Basket: characters, more specifically the girls.

For those unfamiliar with the manga I'll run down a few of characters. Of course we've got Keitaro, our standard loser/nerd. But in the anime, that was just what he was. In the manga, Keitaro grows a lot from the moment he enters Hinata House to the final scene. In the Tenchi Muyo TV series, Tenchi goes through a lot of crap, but even afterwards he's still just a nerd who's gone through a lot of crap. Keitaro, on the other hand, becomes a loser who's sorta cool but still a loser.

Naru Narusegawa is Keitaro's love interest, which is another area this differs from similar shows: Keitaro actually picks a girl. Naru is an extremely interesting character; she gets mad and beats the crap out of Keitaro all the time, but she's also insecure and selfish. But instead of just being insecure and selfish and making Keitaro's life miserable, she actually realizes what she's doing. In the anime, on the other hand, she didn't seem to realize anything.

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There's way too many characters to list all of, but each one has their own unique struggle. They don't all fall in love with Keitaro at once, and once they do, they all have a well-defined reason for it. Some other major characters are: Motoko, a butch swordswoman; Su, an insane inventor eats-a-lot girl from a country suspiciously like India; Shinobu, a shy Martha Stewart-in-training; Kitsune, a drunk slacker; Mutsumi, a ditzy fellow Tokyo U failure; Haruka, Keitaro's aunt; Seta, Naru's old tutor and some kind of cross between James Bond and Indiana Jones; and Kanako, Keitaro's "adopted sister." There're also numerous minor characters (for more on them see the notes). Kanako used to be in the notes too, but I realized that her entire existence was one of the only problems I had with the manga of Love Hina. She just shows up, after Keitaro's been living at Hinata House for three years, and somehow no one has ever heard about her. You'd think he'd have said something like "Wow, you don't like sweets, that's just like my sister!" at some point, but she just shows up, which is extremely contrived. She's also, to put it bluntly, an annoying, pointless, whorish, incestuous bitch (yeah, she's in love with Keitaro too) who never gets the comeuppance she so richly deserves, even though all the other characters seem to have to pay at some point for whatever wrongs they commit (even Motoko). She basically added nothing to anything, and veered dangerously close to being Love Hina's Black Star dragon balls (used in Dragon Ball GT to drag the plot on past its prime). A lot of Tenchi Muyo fans hate Sakuya from Tenchi in Tokyo, but in my opinion it's Love Hina fans who should be complaining about Kanako.

So being that the plotlines in the manga were more devoted to the characters, of course the characterization is better too. The gradual buildup in Keitaro and Naru's relationship was a lot more natural in the manga, and there was an ungodly amount of subplots that really expanded the other characters beyond their archetypes (except Kanako, of course). A couple of these did make it into the anime, but it seemed like only the ones about Motoko and Su (and not even the good ones about Motoko; mostly new ones). Shinobu just stayed the sweet princess, and Kitsune the drunk (She didn't get a whole lot of screen time even in the manga, but more than the anime.) The creators of the anime even went so far as to make up a completely new character: Kentaro Sakata, who doesn't even exist in the manga. He's Keitaro's rich, handsome rival for Naru's affections, like Mendou in Urusei Yatsura. Since he wasn't even in the manga, he doesn't really do anything for the anime storyline.

Of course, all the great characterization is hidden under the veneer of the standard hot springs series, with fanservice and craziness. The style of the craziness really endeared itself to me, being more like Excel Saga or FLCL than Tenchi Muyo. There are even a few parodies and a lot of references, showing that the author watches a lot of anime and plays a lot of video games.

Finally, the anime has music, and it's good music, which is always a bonus, but the art in the manga is far superior. The characters in the anime are all kind of chubby (the taller they are, the worse it gets) and have this weird look like their eyes are drawn on the outside of a balloon. The manga girls are probably the best-looking bunch I've ever seen, though towards the end there were so many girls that some of them looked too similar to another, and even Keitaro was better-looking than your usual harem loser (the generic-looking Kaoru Hanabishi from the generic series Ai Yori Aoshi comes to mind). Love Hina never seems to get a break when it comes to adaptation. The anime had the most horrifying dub I've ever seen in the history of dubs, and the manga has a slipshod translation that often changes things, puts dialogue in the wrong bubbles, misspells both Japanese words and garden-variety English words (more on that in the notes), and uses unnecessary idioms and media references to coax in a more mainstream audience. Obviously it's not totally impossible to adapt something very "Japanese"; Excel Saga was adapted brilliantly, and Tenchi Muyo, Jubei-chan the Ninja Girl, and FLCL were all done better than either the anime or manga of Love Hina, if not as well as Excel Saga.

This part is fan griping and contains spoilers, so skip the next two paragraphs if you don't want those. Another problem I had with this manga aside from Kanako was that the ending was too easy to figure out. Not too far into it you can figure out pretty easily that Keitaro is going to end up with Naru no matter what happens. In volume seven, when Naru thinks Mutsumi is Keitaro's promise girl, Keitaro's liking of Naru is at an early enough stage that you actually think he might give up on Naru and go with Mutsumi, but he doesn't. Naru's next big competitor is Kanako, but no one could possibly believe he would actually choose her, since he obviously doesn't love her and by now is obviously set on Naru. This takes any impact out of Motoko falling in love with him or the entire harem trying to entice him on Molmol, or Naru's insecurity about their relationship, because you know that Keitaro is so stubbornly set on Naru that no matter how bad their relationship is or how many other girls want him, he's going with Naru.

Also, Shinobu is never developed into the major competitor she could have been. Of all the girls who like Keitaro, only Naru, Motoko, Mutsumi, and Shinobu are actual contenders. But Keitaro (and Ken Akamatsu himself) always seems to discount Shinobu because she's only fourteen--forgetting that it may be twenty and fourteen now, but in four years (the time of the epilogue) it'll be twenty-four and eighteen, no hindrance to a relationship. Maybe Yukito and Sakura are doomed, but Keitaro and Shinobu could have had a future--if only it had been developed more. Anyway, these little problems are what dropped the score.

The adaptation issues aside, I recommend this manga to practically everybody. Or at least, everyone who can appreciate great characterization and doesn't mind/likes craziness and fanservice (and let me warn you, there is a TON of both; if you thought the anime had a lot of fanservice, prepare for a brain aneurysm). I'm an equal-opportunity watcher (that might be kinda hard to believe, but it's true) but Love Hina was so excellently tuned to everything I like that I'll have a hard time reading/watching anything else now that it's over.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Extra Notes

Fourteen volume manga available from Tokyopop. In the anime, the Christmas storyline from volume 6/7 was made into the Christmas movie (and substantially changed). The Spring Special was volume 8, the Pararakelse part. Everything from volume nine to volume fourteen was substantially edited and made into the Love Hina Again OVA series, which I've heard is basically crap in comparison with those volumes.

Characters I didn't mention: Nyamo, Shinobu's doppelganger; Tsuruko, Motoko's deranged sister; and Ema, who only appears in the final two chapters. All of these characters are somewhat important.

A lot of things about this manga were done somewhere else, but integrated (in my opinion) masterfully. When you're doing a genre as done-out as the harem show, you can either rip off your predecessors and throw out something totally generic or you can be inspired by them and make something original out of a tried-and-true formula. Being a dorm manager was (I think) first done in Maison Ikkoku, a romance manga from Rumiko Takahashi, author of Ranma 1/2 and Inuyasha. The idea for putting someone ostentatiously traditional Japanese in a modern setting (Motoko) is actually from Lupin the Third (Goemon). Su's entire character is a big, fat, jelly-like mass of stereotypes from tons of places. Anything from Tenchi Muyo is fairly obvious so figure it out yourself.

Whoever wrote the adaptation seems to have no idea of the difference between "your" and "you're." One is like "This is yours" and one is short for "you are", but the adaptor used them interchangeably. They also misspelled countless words. Once the name "Kaolla Su" (Su's full name) was shown written, but "Kaolla" was spelled "Koala." Wow, I knew Su was good, but I didn't know she could change into a marsupial at will. They also had a real obsession with saying things like "Can't you act your age and not your shoe size?" over and over, and they used extremely bizarre onomatopoeia. I can understand "Urm" instead of "Er" or "Uh", and I know a scream is written "Kyah!" in Japanese, but why "Eww" for "Ooh"? Isn't that like "Eww, gross!" Finally, once when Seta's car crashed for like the 1000000000th time in the series, Keitaro yelled "It's like a scene from Grand Theft Auto!" Even though, not only had he seen it about 1000000000 times when it apparently wasn't like a scene from Grand Theft Auto, it was also not like a scene from Grand Theft Auto that time. That didn't make sense. Anyway, for all I know that was in the original version, but the contrived way it was shoved in makes me think not. This is just a handful of examples. Tokyopop was a lot better about things like this in Psychic Academy, Marmalade Boy, Fruits Basket, and Ai Yori Aoshi, but if they had the chance to do Love Hina again I bet they would've done it the same (they did Initial D even worse).

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About the Author

Sean Craydim is the author of five novels and over twenty essays. He enjoys tea.