12 moments in Anime #3: I still love this series

A title like that could mean any­thing. It could be a deluded Haruhi fan, declar­ing any­one who didn’t like End­less Eight not a true fan. It could be an old­fag return­ing to their favour­ite 1980’s series for the 6^th time as the latest sea­son of anime dis­ap­points him yet again. What I am refer­ring to, how­ever, is my gate­way to anime series: Love Hina. No wait, don’t leave! I have a genu­ine point to make with this post, don’t leave at the first sight of a harem, please!

Again, this post requires a bit of back­story. As I’ve said before, I’m a mem­ber of the You­tube Gen­er­a­tion of anime fans so I’m still very new to all this. The first anime DVD I ever bought, a Noein full series box­set, was as recent as 2008. Now I loved Noein when I first watched it. I mean, I really loved it. We’re talk­ing top 10 mater­ial here, along­side the likes of Samurai Champloo and Kaiba. How­ever upon rewatch­ing the series, my opin­ion of the series plummeted. It was still an excel­lent series but it was only upon second view­ing did I spot all these flaws I hadn’t noticed the first time around. Buy­ing and re-watching Noein had deval­ued the series ter­ribly in my mind.

The Noein exper­i­ence took its toll on both my view­ing habits and my buy­ing habits. Re-watching became some­thing I was afraid to do, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing Noein was the first series I’d ever re-watched. This, obvi­ously, put a com­plete end to me buy­ing any more anime. What’s the point in buy­ing if you didn’t want to re-watch? I was afraid of re-watching my favour­ites in case it tampered with my beau­ti­ful memor­ies of the series.

Towards the lat­ter half of this year though I finally went back to buy­ing anime DVD’s and re-watching my favour­ites. I don’t think I can accur­ately describe the wave of relief that spread over me when I watched Cow­boy Bebop and Mushishi again. They were both just as good as I remembered them. Cro­martie High School, a pur­chase I was very wary about, was just as funny as I remembered. But none of these were quite as reward­ing as re-watching Love Hina.

Love Hina was the first anime I watched online and I con­sider it my gate­way to anime, so obvi­ously it holds huge nos­tal­gic value for me. But as I encountered more reviews and opin­ions of the series, it became increas­ingly clear how Love Hina was held in con­tempt by most of anime fan­dom. Love Hina was the most gen­eric of gen­eric harems and it was because if it that moun­tains of copycat series had been cre­ated over the next few years (it’s died down in recent years though, with moe tak­ing over now). Re-watching Mushishi and Cow­boy Bebop was hardly a wor­ry­ing scen­ario. Both of these are highly rated series so a more anime-experienced me was still going to enjoy these series. But re-watching Love Hina now know­ing how gen­eric and how steeped in anime cliché’s it is, maybe it would have been bet­ter to leave the series untar­nished in my mind forever.

But one day my sis­ter loaned Love Hina volume 1 DVD from the lib­rary and, against my bet­ter judge­ment, I watched the thing. And you know what? I fuck­ing adore Love Hina. There’s an hon­esty to Keit­aro that’s so endear­ing, and a romance that’s so believ­able, I’ve never seen any other series rep­lic­ate this feel­ing (well, except Chob­its). So screw you guys and screw my usu­ally elit­ist taste in anime. Love Hina sits right up as one of my favour­ite series of all time.