To Love-Ru Video Update #1: So I Read 250+ Chapters of Manga

Hello everyone!

Today's post is going to be a bit different from my usual updates, as it's going to be the first video specific update! As I promised when I mentioned switching to videos being released as-done rather than (mostly-)monthly, I'm going to be making posts whenever major milestones in the production of a new video are reached as a way of signaling "I'm alive," and also giving y'all something to feast on while I'm in the mines.

In the last post, I mentioned that my next video was likely going to be on the To Love-Ru franchise, since people have been asking for something other than visual novels. And frankly, I needed a break from the heavy subjects I'd been talking about in my past videos because it was starting to get to me. Even more so now that I'm actually starting to take my mental health seriously and deal with things I've been ignoring for years, and since the state of the world is just a liiiitle anxiety inducing.

So, something like a goofy ecchi comedy series such as To Love-Ru seemed like a good break. It's long but not absurdly long (36 volumes), it's a change of pace from my usual shtick, and it was a good excuse to talk about things I've wanted to talk about for a long while with contexts that do not make me want to be miserable in a corner about the terrors of the world. Also, I rather enjoy cute women, and this series has many cute women.

While I was initially a bit doubtful I'd actually be able to make a video out of the manga, like always, that worry faded pretty quickly into reading the original series. To Love-Ru is, to be frank, the best harem ecchi series I've gone through out of the handful that I have, and it all has to do with what I want to hone in on for this video: the incredible honesty and kindness of it.

These are two virtues that I've learned very much to value in the last 5 to 7 years or so of my life, especially as someone who grew up in a household environment that constantly necessitated putting on some sort of farce of being the adult in the room, the mature one, the better sibling. I rarely got chances to be honest about my feelings, desires and needs, and kindness was often a 'only for me and not for thee' sort of thing. Gotta be the good girl who's sweet to everyone, but damn if anyone else has to follow that sort of absurd virtuosity, and I have to say that - being allowed no other emotion - does some serious things to the value and meaning of kindness in your head.

Suffice to say, this has been hard to dismantle internally, because most people just assume someone who's constantly kind and immensely patient is a good well-trained person, and not someone struggling intensely with trauma. The year and a half in particular, since I moved out from a situation that required pretending this way, has taught me a lot that it's fine to be pissed off, sad, unhappy, bratty, etc, sometimes. Being able to display those emotions around someone, within reason, can be a form of intimacy. And beyond that, it's important to be honest with yourself so you aren't mentally eating yourself alive.

I go off on this tangent because To Love-Ru is, I think, a series which is utterly shameless in its honesty in every facet. It wears what it is on its sleeve: it's an ecchi romcom harem staring a lovable and kind protagonist who has an absurd affinity for winning over girls hearts, and gets into a ridiculous love decahedron (we're past triangles baby) where he can't confess his love to any one of them. Also, he has a ridiculous ability to end up between every single one of their body parts without intending to, and no one can stay mad at him for long because he's just too darn cute.

Saki Hasemi and Kentaro Yabuki have said in the past that they wanted the protagonist - Rito - to be a likeable person, because a harem with a jackass protagonist is more or less insufferable. In other words, they wanted someone who was kind, and I feel that this is incredibly important to To Love-Ru working as a series. If Rito was an asshole seeking out women for their bodies, it'd be hard to forgive him when he grabs a boob or a butt - but a genuinely sweet dude who just has a bad habit of tripping, falling between a girls legs, backing out as fast as he can, and profusely apologizing with a blushing face and a stutter? That's kind of an adorable character trait, not gonna lie.

Saki and Kentaro, from the bottom of their hearts it seems, just really love hot women and silly romances, but they also generally seem to love people and love to see them happy. The series feels almost utopian in how joyful it is, and how much power it gives women over... practically everything that happens? It's this sweet world where women have the power to smash annoying perverts at will, where they can be intergalactic geniuses and no one can really contest them, and where they hold pretty much all the control over any given sexual antics. What Rito does by sheer embarrassed accident, others like the clueless alien princess Lala and the all too flirtatious Momioka do intentionally - but again, not with any intent to harm, and never going as far as to make anyone feel truly bad. It's in good fun, and the series is written wittily enough to give you an implicit understanding of the casts true boundaries.

Obviously, this series was printed in Jump, and it has a target audience of guys who just think boobs are hot. More power to them, that was once me, and now I'm a gal who thinks boobs are rockin'. But at no point did I feel put off or uncomfortable with how sexualized the manga is because there's almost sort of a power fantasy element to it as a woman who grew up pretty sexually repressed (and still struggles).

It's fun to imagine a world where the social stakes have been lowered, where you can chat with the girlies about how hot this one guy you're all mutually crushing on is and how cute he looks when he gets a face full of boob by accident for the 10000th time due to a convoluted Rube Goldberg setup (often set up by another woman!), and you know there isn't any serious stakes to it. It's a reprieve from a world with constant drama and threat, where sex is not this terrifying thing but genuinely fun (for the most part).

Because of all this, at some point, you sort of just zone out the constant ecchi and get lost in everything else the manga has, until something zaps your brain particularly well. It's still there, it's always there and there was enough of it to get the import and export of the series banned in Australia, and my god is a lot of it incredible, but it's always fun and silly and doesn't interrupt the genuinely emotional core. The characters all feel wonderfully developed, particularly in Darkness (the second cour), the romances are believable, and there's so much love and kindness and respect for its cast.

You have characters who are basically plural, you have a trans'd version of Rito that everyone unabashedly adores and eggs on, you have girls who are poly and girls who are mono, you have very blatant immigrant metaphors with the whole 'aliens among humans' thing, and so forth, and none of these people are treated like jokes or 'wrong.' In fact, all of them get immense depth by the end. When I say To Love-Ru has kindness at its core, this is what I mean: there's damn near no mean bone in the series body, which makes it a lot easier to fall in love with the cast and the creators honest love for what they're making. It is shameless, honest, kind fun with a lewd spirit, and I am all for that.

All of this is to say that, I'm pretty fond of To Love-Ru as a manga. I'm incredibly excited to see how the anime adapts this, as well as to go through some side material I rarely see people talk about. Books are free of tariffs in Brazil, so I've taken the liberty of importing the light novel for Darkness. And, with my Vita up and running again, I might give the dating sim spin off a shot... and with my DS around, maybe the weird thing that got released for that? I dunno much about the To Love-Ru DS game, but it seems entertaining.

If you've read this series in the past and have any thoughts on it, I'd love to hear. Everyone I've talked to about this project has had some sort of different memory of the series, and it's honestly made me even more excited to make this video knowing that it's going to dig up some nostalgic feelings for people - and maybe get a few new people interested in the series!

Anyways, I'm going back to the mines. See y'all later. o/