1533: Motto

As a suitable means of switching my brain off when I need it (which is quite frequently at the moment) I’ve been continuing to watch To Love-Ru and am now onto the second series, Motto To Love-Ru.

I was interested to discover that this second series is structured rather differently to the conventionally episodic first season, instead adopting the same approach as Ika Musume (aka Squid Girl) by making each individual episode up out of three short stories rather than one large story that kind of sort of ties into the overall narrative. That said, narrative coherence is not a huge priority in To Love-Ru, since there are a couple of points throughout the series where things just evidently happen “between episodes” without explanation — or perhaps they just happened where I didn’t notice. (Or, more likely, in the original manga, since it’s not at all unusual for anime adaptations of popular manga to simply skip over chapters at a time for brevity’s sake.)

The series remains enjoyably fluffy, however, despite the predictability of the protagonist Rito falling over at least once per episode either face-first into someone’s crotch or with his hands on someone’s boobs. Despite the occasional bout of fanservicey smuttiness — which gradually increases in frequency between the first series and the first set of OVAs, and then again between the OVAs and the Motto second season — the show remains consistently good-natured, with it generally being Rito as the one who is ridiculed and made to look an idiot rather than the rapidly expanding female side of the cast, most of whom tend to come off pretty well out of their various misadventures.

And as clichéd and tropey as a lot of those female cast members are, they all have their own appeal elements and twists on the usual formula. The stern, harsh class president Kotegawa, as you might expect, has her deredere side to go with all the tsuntsun, and predictably, it’s adorable. Meanwhile, teen idol Run-chan’s twist is that she turns into a boy when she sneezes — a side-effect of being an alien, naturally — while Oshizu is a ghost whose spirit has a tendency to evacuate her artificial body whenever she gets scared, such as when she sees a dog. (Naturally, one of the other characters has a dog, so this situation comes up quite a bit.) And then there’s Yami-chan, aka Golden Darkness, who is all the things I loved about Ell from My Girlfriend is the President and then some. Also, she has hair that can turn into weapons and punch people. Hnnnnng, as they say.

I’m not even going to pretend that To Love-Ru is anything more than fanservicey, switch-your-brain-off fluffy nonsense that is designed for pure entertainment value rather than attempting to say anything big or meaningful. It doesn’t have the clever Lovecraftian references of the rather similar (but later) Haiyore! Nyaruko-san, nor does it have the clever self-awareness of other comedy anime. It’s simple, it is, at times, sexy, and it is, at times, utterly stupid. And sometimes that’s exactly what you need from a piece of entertainment. And thus I make absolutely no apologies whatsoever for enjoying it; it’s a delightful accompaniment to my brain’s boot-up sequence while I’m having breakfast of a morning, and it’s likewise a pleasant accompaniment for the shutdown sequence of an evening before I go to bed.

Anyway. Once I’m done with To Love-Ru (the rest of Motto, followed by some OVAs, followed by the third and, currently, final season To Love-Ru Darkness) I will watch something a bit more intelligent, I promise. Maybe. Possibly.

Come on, I survived Clannad. I deserve this! 🙂