I admit that Love Hina actually was quite funny and entertaining to me when I read it as it was one of the first manga I ever read. However by the third, definitely the fourth harem/ecchi story modeled to be like Love Hina, I started finding myself really bored with the humor and story telling and becoming unable to completely read through them. On a personal level I feel harem-ecchi-commedy or just ecchi humor isn't something that can't make me laugh if it's incessantly waved in my face. It can still be really funny in the right circumstances, but stories based off it are really a dead horse to me at this point. Manga artists complain about people not buying their shit but honestly, they've brought this upon them selves by blowing up the market with mostly this shit. I can tell you right now if you don't like my ratings, I'm probably not the reviewer to follow because the way I feel about Love Hina isn't exclusive to it but rather the whole harem-ecchi-romance-comedy, hell even just ecchi genre. Even if it is the vast majority of what's out there, I don't view it very favorably or lightly for that matter.
I honestly don't even need to use character names to explain this now tired synopsis. Which is sad because Love Hina itself probably deserves more respect than I'm giving it but I refuse to give a toehold in my stance against what it has come to represent.
Dumbass with no real redeeming qualities under unusual circumstances is forced to co-habitat with all (mostly very weird) girls. Said dumbass shares a romantic memory with...we'll call her dumb bitch A at an age of where those in the memory are way too young to be taken seriously or shouldn't even be able to remember for that matter. Despite constant "accidental perverted situations" and "unintentional gropings," which yes, is fanservice, which yes, is all ecchi humor is, dumbass wins the hearts of all the girls, all of which are mostly very weird but are better matches for him than dumb bitch A. Except dumbass has a problem; dumb bitch A must resist her attraction to dumbass. Though failure to recognize this attraction has become a popular meme for some reason. Anyways! In the end dumbass ends up with dumb bitch A. Yay.
This should sound like an increasing number of series since each year Love Hina made its original run (1998-2001). Because of the boom Love Hina has caused, if someone told me this is what they thought of manga while I'd be irritated and try my best to get them to check out other things I actually like or just things that I think they may enjoy, I can't fault them. I really couldn't. Because this is mostly what manga has become and while there may be other series that contributed to the romance-harem-ecchi explosion, I cite Love Hina as the main culprit because it was one of the first I can remember that was especially successful. Actually Love Hina was very successful. Monstrously successful.
Review
Unsurprisingly, I have little to say. If you've never read this sort of thing, which I'd frankly be amazed at at this point even if manga is not your flavor with how over saturated manga has become with this genre mixture, there just isn't that much to say about it. The artwork is not that spectacular, in fact, sub par by today's standards which is a little surprising considering how lazy a lot of manga looks nowadays. But everyone has one expression which like the whole genre mixture Love Hina belongs to is funny at first, but gets boring really fast. They smile. They smile when they're angry, when they're happy, when they're embarrassed, when they're surprised, scared etc. Maybe even when they're hungry, I can't remember. They aren't drawn to represent movement very well despite there being a surprising amount of it in the story. Strangely however, unlike most series nowadays everyone (I think) has a different outfit that makes them different from each other..guess they get a point for that.
The comedy is the same thing. Lame-o accidentally does perverted things and gets hit/hurt by the mostly very weird girls sometimes doing very weird things. Literally that's it. The entire story is centric to that humor while every mostly very weird girl inexplicably falls for lame-o. Just like most manga out there..what a boring disaster this has become.
The characters are mostly two dimensional. From an outsider or mostly beginner's view to anime or manga, how weird they are can be appealing despite being fairly flat personalities. But the more stuff you read or watch, the more just like most anime and manga characters..they're usually just weird in one or two ways, and that weirdness is usually a set up to a repeating joke. In this case dumbass doing something perverted and getting hit or hurt for it.
Recommendation
What is there to say about this sort of thing? I don't want to recommend it to anyone. Ever. But not through its own fault, just what's happened to manga because of its popularity. It did do something quite different and like I said, it was really funny to me going from American humor to this. But over the years, this is mostly what manga has become, and the clownshoe has to drop. Still, I shall try my best to be impartial.
Recommended for: Well, if you've never read any manga before, and you've never seen any anime before, this may or may not be very funny to you. But more than likely that won't last. It didn't for me, I don't think it does for most people. But then again if it doesn't for most, why do they keep pushing this genre mixture so much? Either way, if you're an anime/manga virgin..might be worth checking out. If you've been watching/reading for a while, chances are the synopsis should've sounded pretty familiar to you and this would only be worth checking out to see what really caused the giant leap into harem-ecchi. Otherwise you've probably read or watched Love Hina by accident through reading or watching something else already.
Recommended Against: You're really gonna know if it's not for you through your stance in regard to my review as it's very polarizing. You either hate me and my review and think I'm very unreasonable or dare I say stupid. Or you agree. If you agree with me, don't bother checking it out. And yes, I'm aware I didn't bother with any pics this time. I already spent too much effort not making this entire post just a rant, probably unsucessfully at that, so no pictures. Fine, here's a fuckin' picture.
Fun Trivia
Despite all the bashing I have done on Love Hina, as I've stated earlier it was both sort of groundbreaking (I can't really recollect anything terribly ecchi based prior) and very successful which is does deserve to be remembered for. Wiki or google it, I don't feel much like talking about it. I will mention though that Tokyopop, whom I hate vehemently (but that's a story for another day), was surprised many times with how well received Love Hina was and had found itself understocked on translated copies many times.
