To Love-Ru Video Update #2: So I Also Watched 64 Episodes of Anime, and a Bunch of OVAs

Hello again everyone!

Just under 2 weeks ago, I posted about having finished the To Love-Ru manga for my upcoming video on the whole series -- well, at least the original manga, Darkness, the anime adaptations, and the light novels. If I went over everything this video would never exit production, and while I've said I want to start taking more of my time with videos, I don't want to take that much time. Not least because what I've already seen has left me with a lot to say.

I was debating if I wanted to make a post after having finished the original series adaptations and another after the Darkness adaptations, or just wait until I finished both. I'm kind of glad I opted to wait, honestly, because though it meant this post took a while to get done (I promise it did not take me two weeks to watch a few anime, I wrote over 6k words into the script!), watching the whole anime franchise had made me realize something.

To Love-Ru's adaptations are bizarre. Please bare with me.

For some context, To Love-Ru's adaptations did not run in consecutive anime seasons. Studio Xebec took seven years (nine if you count the Darkness 2nd OVAs) to adapt some indeterminable amount of the source material. The original manga was "adapted" into a 26-episode anime in 2008 and a 12 episode anime in 2010, and Darkness was about 60% adapted with a 12-episode season in 2012 and another in 2015. However, you'll notice I put sarcastic quotation marks around "adapted" with the original series, and I say the amount adapted is "indeterminable," because the 2008 To Love-Ru anime is one of the most unruly things I have ever seen.

Rather than directly adapt the manga, Xebec took the liberty of creating what amounts to 1 hour of To Love-Ru (the manga), and 8 hours of fan fiction that ranges from entertaining to downright atrocious. And unfortunately, most of it is atrocious, because Xebec's writing staff fundamentally misunderstand what makes To Love-Ru such a good manga, and so unique among other Shounen Jump series.

In my last post, I talked about how To Love-Ru has a borderline utopian vision of the world through how sweet it is to its cast, how much it promotes positive and accepting messages, how its protagonist is a genuinely good guy who's allowed to feel emotions you may not expect in a "shounen" series, and how the series constantly dedicates time to everyone besides its protagonist (Rito) in order to ensure things aren't centered around him. And while I didn't say this in the post, I also praise it in the script for not being plot-centric, and instead allowing its characters to breathe through the almost vignette-esque sitcom chapter format.

In my work on this video, I've read a bunch of people complain about these exact things. Some people (who I presume bounced onto TLR after seeing it was part of Jump and assumed it was like One Piece or Naruto) have complained the series is too relaxed and lacks tension, that it has too little story, and Rito isn't cool enough because he's a dumb little wimp that can't confess and you know if I was Shinji I would have asked Asuka out and blah blah BLAH.

For some reason, Xebec seemed to take these types of opinions incredibly seriously. To Love-Ru 2008 attempts to add tension into the story by painting the galaxy not as peaceful and under control thanks to Lala's father, but still raging with wars that Rito will have to participate in should he become Lala's husband. Lala's father is not a little gremlin pervert scamp who immediately understands that Rito is a good person, but a disgustingly unlikeable piece of shit dad who treats his daughter like a spoiled child for daring to want agency in her life, because the series needed a villain.

And Rito? Not only does he get to be a hero way more often in the series (and not through being a tender emotional person like in the manga), but the whole fucking anime centers around him. I'm not one to Bechdel Test things, but I feel like it says something that the manga can almost constantly pass it with flying colors while I genuinely cannot think of an example of the same in the anime. I'm sure it exists, but the show is constantly showing Rito as the most important thing in the world at the cost of literally any development for the women in the show. Hell, the tertiary (quarternary really!) school friend character Saruyama gets more than most of the women. It's insulting.

I think what's most frustrating for me however on a purely structural and developmental level, is that I actually like Xebec's decision not to simply retell the manga on paper. Motto (the second season) proves that To Love-Ru's format certainly works fine in anime in the same way something like Yuru Yuri does, but I'm all for a more story-centric To Love-Ru. I'm also all for totally original plot ideas, because the characters are rich with potential that don't always get realized.

But Xebec constantly takes the cheapest routes possible, and that is nowhere more evident in the humor of TLR 2008 - or the lack thereof, really. I cannot express the sheer frustration and annoyance I felt when Run and Ren (a dual personality/gender-shifting alien in one body) appeared, and the show decided to do exactly what the manga didn't: it turned them into a transphobic punchline. Again. And again. And again. It also takes Yui Kotegawa (the strict school ethics committee leader) and makes her into a... wannabe fascist? It's just these bizarre choices that go against the happy, fun, caring world the original manga represents, and it can do none of them well.

This is to say nothing of how genuinely unpleasing this show is most of the time, aesthetically. I love and will defend mid/late-2000s digipaint anime to my grave, because it can look gorgeous and I find something charming about the weirdly lo-fi look of the shows, even in HD. But TLR 2008 is everything people hate about it. It's wildly inconsistent in quality, the colors are depressing and washed out, and the mastering is atrocious - even the best rips have distracting aliasing and interlacing issues.

And more than that, the art style is just so... unpleasing. The original series was cutesy, bubbly and happy; there was a softness to it that made it resemble a shoujo manga more than a shounen manga, I suppose is the best way to put it. Even if we put the drab colors and inconsistent animation quality aside, TLR 2008 at its best is jagged, rough, unpleasant. It's unbefitting of a series as full of heart as TLR.

So, where do we go from here?

Apparently, I was not the only one who felt very critically about To Love-Ru 2008. Reviews at the time were mixed as far as I could tell, both from anime viewers and critics, and fans were especially harsh on it to my knowledge. And Xebec started listening to the naysayers even before they began work on the second season, as a series of OVAs bundled in with TLR tankoubans between mid-2009 to mid-2010 show a massive swing in the production ethos.

For starters, as you can see from the image, the art style is way cuter. While the colors don't exactly pop like they would in Motto and Darkness, everyone and everything is drawn in a way that much more closely aligns with moe anime and Kentaro Yabuki's original art. Being OVAs as well with presumably much more time in the oven, the production quality is also way more consistent. There's very few meduka meguca moments here.

Perhaps the most stark shift however, for those familiar with To Love-Ru going into them, is how incredibly close they adhere to the original manga. With exception of the third OVA episode (which is an animated gravure shoot disguised as a beach episode), every storyline follows closely to some fan favorite from the manga. And what few changes there are, are really smart -- with exception to a bad transphobic gag involving Run and Ren.

This general ethos - make it cuter, make it accurate - was fully realized for better and worse in Motto To Love-Ru. Gone are the original stories, and gone is the attempt at a coherent plot: what you get is what you probably wanted if you were a bummed out TLR fan in 2010. It's nothing but straight adaptations of plots from the original manga, which I kinda love and hate at the same time.

On one hand, Motto is infinitely more watchable and entertaining than TLR 2008. Seeing Kentaro and Saki's ridiculous plot ideas brought to the little screen breathes new life into them, even for someone like me who's poured over the pages to admire the art and take plenty of notes for my video. I could easily see this being a show I'd throw into a 'background television' rotation if I ever stop being lazy about setting up a proper home media server, and it's something I'll happily recommend to friends looking for a good, wholesome, relaxing show (assuming these hypothetical friends are also massive pervs like I am).

On the other hand, I did say there were good original episodes in To Love-Ru 2008. Pretty much anything centering Zastin was a blast just because the dude is crazy charming, and they got Dio Fucking Brando to voice him. There were also a lot of legit good gags and even entire good episodes, despite the whole package making me so bored that I started zoning out and thinking about fanfic ideas by half way through.

I understand Xebec's apprehension to try anything original after the bomb that was TLR 2008. But I also find it sad that they took naysayers this seriously, and gave up all prospects of ever making an original To Love-Ru thing again. They didn't need to quit, they needed to critically re-evaluate what they were doing. But I guess in an industry as competitive and brutal as entertainment, the easiest road is the only good road.

The fact there isn't really anything new to Motto makes it hard for me to even write about it without diving into things I said about the original series, and this extends to Darkness as well. It probably says a lot that the first thing that comes to my mind about my Darkness watch is how the English fansubs make incredible unintentional comedy out of how directly they translate the term "toransu" (trans) for characters with transformation powers. I probably would have reworded every sentence involving it to avoid writing things like "don't use trans for strange things," or "so that light was trans," but then we would have missed out on some great comedy.

Okay, no, that's unfair to zero-in on. Like, actually really unfair. Darkness is as much of a straight adaptation as Motto is, which is a bit disappointing, but it's also a goddamned gorgeous show. The style of Motto is even further refined here, and the direction is a massive step up from what felt like more or less copying the manga panel-by-panel (with necessary liberties, thankfully). There's a number of extremely creative shots, and Xebec's staff show the talent and expertise needed to avoid making even simple talking scenes boring by carefully using more than shot-reverse shot.

Darkness being much more action and plot-heavy also seems to simply work better for Xebec's staff than the skit-centric structure of the Motto (maybe Doga Kobo should have done the original series). Both seasons are exceedingly well-paced, and the action scenes in particular show an incredible amount of skill in making fluid, exciting combat... which is a bit of a strong contrast to the ecchi, which does tend to feel like shot-for-shot remakes of manga panels.

I really love the Darkness anime, and I would happily recommend it to anyone who is allergic to manga. But I did start to feel towards the end of it, that I'm not sure why I would suggest it over the manga other than convenience for those who prefer anime. Certainly, it's not worse, but Kentaro's art is still absolutely gorgeous to this day, there's plenty of bonus chapters containing great character development that aren't adapted, and it's unfinished as the last third of the series still isn't adapted. I'm not sure who would prefer this to be their TLRD experience besides those unable to read manga.

But more than that, I think the Darkness anime really made clear to me something that I was already feeling throughout Motto and all the OVAs: they really turn up the ecchi factor. Not in the sense of being more ecchi than the manga (actually they're often pretty tame compared to the goddamned labial reflections in Rito's eyes), but because anime simply takes longer to go through material than manga does to read. Which means every ecchi panel with a bunch of dialogue has to be adapted into an ecchi scene.

Something I liked about the manga is that you can basically just breeze past the ecchi like anything else. It's an absurdly lewd series, and it will regularly stun you with how far it goes, but I don't think the series ever abruptly stopped me with ecchi more than it abruptly stopped me with action. It didn't.

The pacing is extremely smooth and consistent, which gave me sort of a trance while reading: lewdness exists, sure, but I'm not gonna lock up every time I see a boob. In a way, I found that comforting. I hate how we treat women's bodies as these particularly special things, where as men don't get nearly the same treatment, so I love how To Love-Ru is so utterly saturated that it basically forces you to stop taking every bit of ecchi so seriously, and accept that women can be undressed too.

That is not really the case with the anime adaptations of To Love-Ru. The series will make you watch the camera slowly pan from thighs to lips whenever a girl falls, and it will make you notice every fine detail of a shower scene. It does not care what age or gender you are; it will make you glaze your eyes up and down like a 15 year old boy who just discovered what a nudie mag is.

I don't hate this, personally, because women are hot and I enjoy looking at women. I'll happily look at myself in a mirror with glee and excitement. But I'm kind of split on being forced to look how another person wants me to, because sometimes I just want to see the women shower without anything being made out of it unless I do, because for Christs sake I am a grown woman on estradiol who watched her very own breasts inflate, I do not need someone else to constantly prod me "women are hot, women are hot, huh, women are hot, huh?!"

...Women are hot though.

me and my Woke Dog

At the end of the day, watching all of To Love-Ru's anime back-to-back is an interesting adventure if you're as into art production and story structure as I am. You can watch as Xebec slowly shifts from being wholly original with no idea what the soul of their source material is (2008), to struggling for a bit of originality (2008 OVAs), to fully giving in to the source material (Motto), to finally sticking very faithful while making necessary changes for a good anime (Darkness). For me, that shit's like a thing I probably can't put the name of here for fear of our great censor overloads condemning me for daring to make a sussy pharmaceutical reference. I might be slightly deranged though.

If my original post on To Love-Ru made you think about getting into the series, then I can strongly recommend the manga. But if you don't like reading manga, I can strongly recommend reading a summary of the first ten volumes, and jumping straight to the 2008 OVAs and going from there. The original series though, it's just... bad. So bad in fact that it actually made me realize what I love so much about the original series all over again.

In a way, I have it to thank for the script turning out as well as it has so far. But it also ate nine hours of my life I am never getting back, and I think at least two of my headmates are upset at me for sitting them in front of a computer monitor while I sat in a little brain corner and took notes on the parts of TLR 2008 that were "interesting bad" and not "please god I am dying of boredom" bad.

...Okay, I promise the next update will actually be the script. My current plan is to get that more or less finished next week, blitz through the two light novels after, make revisions where needed to the script, and then start on video editing. Here's hoping this video will be done sooner than later so we can start talking about BL games. I've been seeing too many women in compromised situations lately, and I need hot men to balance it out.

See y'all later! o/