Love Hina is a special anime and manga to me. Along with Full Metal Panic! It was one of the shows that reintroduced me to anime back in the year 2002. That's like 22 years ago, so I think this qualifies as an aged anime!
Love Hina is an anime about Keitaro Urushima, a young man, who becomes the landlord for the Hinata Inn when his grandmother leaves him in charge when she decides to travel the world. The hotsprings inn is now an all girls dormitory and of course it becomes a romantic comedy as the girls don't take to him at first and he constantly finds himself in compromising situations. Keitaro is trying to get into Tokyo University and it turns out that his main love interest, Naru Narusagawa, is also studying for the entrance exam to enter Tokyo University. This budding romance is complicated by the fact that all the girls think Keitaro is already a Tokyo University student and that Naru might be that childhood friend that he knew from long ago. The other girls living at the inn also add their personal situations and other love triangles to the mix.
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| Love Hina manga volumes. They've been packed tightly on a shelf so they've aged less than some manga I have. |
This anime was adapted from Ken Akamatsu's still running manga at the time and I think it is actually his best work. His followup manga, Negima, a Harry Potter-like magical academy, was good but not as fun and vibrant. The manga ran for a total of 14 tankobon volumes and was my first experience with how long these series run. I thought it was long at the time, but now I know it wasn't that long compared to many others. The anime ran for 24 episodes and there were a few OVAs, but the show never reached the ending of the manga. This is a super popular manga that has like 20,000,000 copies printed as of 2022.
Love Hina is also somewhat controversial as it is the archetypal harem anime with a somewhat helpless male lead and a violent tsundere female lead in Naru with her "Naru Punch". There is of course all of the compromising situations that Keitaro finds himself in constantly. You can either treat it as lewd humour or just dislike it. The show is slapstick with crazy sword skills, super science, flying hotsprings turtles, secret bases, and even magic. I just found the series fun and ended up with the DVDs and all the manga. I actually haven't reread or watched the series in over a decade now and maybe it is time for a revisit to see if I still like it as much as I did back then.
The anime did introduce me to places like Kyoto when Naru ran away, hotsprings inns, and the whole concept of ronin who are student's studying to try to get into university again after failing the exams the first time. This was also the first manga I ever bought, so yeah, it does hold a bit of a special place in my anime universe.
So here are the main characters from the show and you'll recognize a lot of the archetypes. Naru is a favourite character followed by Mitsune or Mutsumi.
Keitaro Urashima. Socially awkward and optimistic protagonist who is trying to fulfill a childhood promise. In the show he has lots of accidental peeping incidents and cartoon violence done to him.
Naru Narusegawa. Is she the girl of Keitaro's promise? She is smart, diligent, and a bit of a mess. Her relationship with Keitaro is like a seesaw as one moment they're bickering and the next they're blushing. She is also a classic tsundere character with a harsh personality that softens over time (an extended time in this case!).
Shinobu Maehara. Young girl who is a cute chef in training with a crush on Keitaro.
Motoko Aoyama. She is a sword master with magical sword skills who is intensely shy around men.
Kaolla Su. A pint-sized inventor from a mysterious tropical country. Her hobbies include building robots, speaking "turtlese," and turning the Hinata Inn into a jungle gym.
Mitsune "Kitsune" Konno. One of the older female residents and local party animal / drunk. She is mischievous and money-grubbing.
Mutsumi Otohime. She is the epitome of spacey and endearing who has near-death experiences regularly. How is she involved with Keitaro's childhood promise?
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| The Love Hina Perfect Collection of DVDs. Packaging is compact, but nothing to write home about. Still it is more substantial than some sets we get these days. |
Naru Narusagawa Swimsuit FigureThis was one of my earliest 1/8 scale figures that I bought back in November 2005. It was made by Max Factory and it is a pretty good sculpt of Naru on the slender side. It shows her in her island bikini made of leaves when they were stranded. I didn't know island/beach episodes at the time were standard tropes.
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| Naru Max Factory 2005. Her hair is slightly translucent, her antenna hair doesn't stick up too far, and she could be posed in just a bikini bottom or shorts. I chose shorts. |
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| Naru Max Factory 2005. |
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| All the Love Hina girls in gashapon figure form. I'm not even sure where this set came from originally in the mid-2000s. They aren't the highest quality so they were probably 200 yen figures at the time. These figures have been packed away for some time and I unpacked them for this article. |
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| Another view. Naru (blue bikini) and Mutsumi (orange bikini) are the girls in the centre. |
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