A case study of some romcom manga I find interesting to think about
Posted 2025-03-25 21:29 JSTOkay, that's kind of a tepid page title, but I can explain
I don't restrict myself to a single genre or even a set of genres in the stuff I consoom. Sure, there's a few genres I tend to avoid because such works rarely interest me, like sports stories in manga or isekai stories in light novels, but I'll read everything from the most lighthearted and innocent of gag manga to the grittiest of dark fantasies.
However, if there's one genre that can be unequivocally said to be my favorite, it would have to be romcoms. The overwhelming majority of light novel series I read nowadays are romcoms to varying degrees; heck, off the top of my head, the only ones I can think of that contain no romcom elements whatsoever are Nanatsuma and FSF. And while I read far less manga than I do LNs, plenty of those are romcoms too. There's even a new one I'm thinking of picking up, since I'm a very stupid man.
I've been following romcom manga for a jolly good time now, and I've noticed interesting shifts in their storytelling over the years. Or at least, in the ones I've been interested in. Is this a serious, rigorous analysis of trends in reader and creator taste? No. In all likelihood, what I'm witnessing probably isn't an evolution of storytelling, but a diversification, so the story I'm going to tell through this post likely has little basis in reality outside my own subjective perception. But I wouldn't know how to conduct a serious investigation like that, nor would I likely have the resources to do so anyway. That kind of stuff is probably the domain of honest-to-god academic research.
I'm also dealing exclusively with romcom manga on this page, and not romcoms in other media, like LNs or games. In my opinion, the difference in format kinda makes storytelling impossible to compare meaningfully, even within a single genre, and if I were to talk about romcom LNs and VNs I consider meaningful, I'd be here until the cows come home. As much as I'd love to ramble about Tsurekano and Roshidere and literally any August game, that will have to wait for another time. And to be clear, when I refer to the medium of a work, I'm specifically talking about the medium it was originally created in; for my purposes in discussions like this, adaptations are inherently subordinate to the source material. Probably every IP I'm going to mention on this page has at least one anime adaptation, but those are ultimately retellings of a story written for another medium.
Oh, and I'm also examining specifically harem romcoms, since single-heroine romcoms tend to be basically a completely different genre. Probably, uh, should've mentioned that earlier.
To LOVE-Ru and the comfort of the status quo
No serious discussion of romcom manga, especially harem romcom manga, can afford to exclude Yabuki Kentarou's To LOVE-Ru. Its title is a play on "toraburu," the Japanese transliteration of the English word "trouble," and sure enough, it's full of wacky, slapstick mayhem. The premise is that protagonist Yuuki Rito has a serious crush on Sairenji Haruna, a cute, demure girl at his school, but he can't muster up the courage to ask her out. However, one evening, his relaxing bath is interrupted by the sudden teleportation of a beautiful alien girl. Despite being princess of the galaxy, Lala Satalin Deviluke shows no shame at being naked together with an unfamiliar man, and in fact falls in love with Rito at first sight. She promptly declares him her fiance, determined to marry him someday. Rito is perturbed by all this, considering his crush on Haruna, and when Lala and her bodyguard move in with him, he finds himself having to fend off her relentless advances, the alien suitors and assassins that pursue her without end, and the lewd misadventures resulting from Lala's crazy inventions and his own spectacular pratfalls.
Of course, Lala and Haruna are hardly the only heroines in this series. From Rito's sister Mikan to the school prefect Kotegawa Yui to the intergalactic assassin Golden Darkness, there's a very diverse cast of cute girls in this series, each with a distinct personality and character, and over the course of the series's 18 volumes, Yabuki only adds more and more.
In fact, that's about all that changes over the course of the series. At the end of any given chapter or multi-chapter arc, you can be more or less assured that the status quo will remain the same as it was before. Lala will still be head-over-heels for Rito, Yami (Golden Darkness's nickname) will still insist he's her target, he'll still be unable to tell Haruna how he feels about her, and most of all, he'll still fail to stop himself from tripping and falling and landing with his face up some girl's skirt.
This creates an effect much like SpongeBob, in a way: no matter what happens during a SpongeBob episode, you can safely assume that by the time it's over, he'll still work at the Krusty Krab, attend boating school with Mrs. Puff, enjoy friendships with Patrick and Sandy, and grate on Squidward's nerves. Or, as BoJack Horseman so eloquently puts it in the first episode of the masterpiece of Netflix programming named after him:
It's not Ibsen, sure, but look, for a lot of people, life is just one long, hard kick in the urethra, and sometimes when you get home from a long day of getting kicked in the urethra, you just want to watch a show about good, likable people who love each other, where, you know, no matter what happens, at the end of 30 minutes, everything's gonna turn out okay. You know, because in real life--Did I already say the thing about the urethra?
Individual heroines' feelings for Rito may develop slowly over time, but the romcom itself is no closer to a conclusion at the end of To LOVE-Ru than it was at the beginning. The anime adaptation even took this a step further, its first season (which, incidentally, has a killer OP) featuring mostly original, self-contained episodes that embody this to the extreme, only pretending to have a story in its final moments with a half-baked arc about Rito having to impress Lala's father. The second season, which also has a killer OP, followed the manga more closely, but it was still very episodic with no major progress in the plot.
I'm not sure how I can impress upon you just how popular TLR was in the early 2000's. Despite being repetitive and consisting mostly of slapstick, its comedy somehow never got old, and the attention paid to the writing for a wide array of what were ostensibly fairly simple characters meant that there was something for everyone to enjoy, to the point that even several girls I've talked to have admitted to greatly enjoying the series.
Which is really saying something, since this series is very lewd. In fact, it was infamous for pushing the boundaries of what you can get away with in Shonen Jump, a magazine marketed towards people as young as elementary school. Yet not a single heroine made it through the series without being in various states of undress on multiple occasions, Yabuki relying on tastefully-placed clouds of steam or perspective to just barely conceal the bits that would run afoul of the law if depicted openly in Jump. In short, despite passing the Bechdel Test with flying colors, TLR is far from a paragon of feminism, but its frequent raunchy elements aren't enough to deter some women from enjoying the series.
That, I think, is high praise for its characters, arguably the most important part of any romcom. A lot of care is put into illustrating each heroine's unique charm while still making them feel fleshed-out. And since you can't expect interesting story developments that bring Rito's heart closer to one heroine or another, the story lives and dies by their standalone strength. And, you know, the quality of the comedy and lewds, but the character writing is what allows for the most depth, so.
What was I talking about again? Right, how TLR went down in otaku history. It was, as I've outlined, a lot of things, but one thing it wasn't was revolutionary. It followed pretty much the same formula as any other romcom of the time; it just executed it better. Series like Heaven's Lost Property were just as episodic and status quo-heavy as TLR, and while those other series weren't bad per se, they couldn't match TLR's irresistible characters and surprisingly titillating lewds.
To LOVE-Ru Darkness, Nisekoi, Bokuben, and the encroachment of story
Still, Shonen Jump's lineup consists mostly of battle manga, so romcoms can't last forever. Ultimately, TLR ended at 18 volumes, concluding on Rito trying and failing to confess his love to Haruna. But the IP's popularity had never dwindled, at least not enough to be a factor in its cancellation, and so it wasn't long before they launched a sequel in another Shueisha magazine, the monthly Jump SQ. This one would be called To LOVE-Ru Darkness, picking up right where the original series left off while also making several changes. Since SQ is for an older audience than regular Jump, Yabuki could be a little more risque with the lewds (though he'd eventually push SQ's limits, too). Lala was no longer the main heroine; in fact, Darkness relegates her to little more than supporting character status. By contrast, her sister Momo receives far more focus, as she proposes what she calls the "harem plan" to Rito. It's clear that a great number of girls have the hots for him, herself included, and the only way to make them all happy would be to marry Lala, becoming king of the galaxy, and take the rest as his concubines, a standard affair for space royalty.
The prospects of a genuine harem ending intrigued readers at the time, as most romcoms tended to end on either a single heroine or no heroine at all, as the original TLR did, but this paled in comparison to Darkness's biggest change. You see, this "harem plan" is only a subplot to the series, used to bring new possibilities to each heroine's interactions with Rito. The true spectacle was that Darkness had a bona fide story to it revolving around Yami and mysterious figures from her past. Suddenly, TLR was dealing with heavy themes surrounding Yami's creation as a weapon and her bloody history. It was certainly a first for the IP, but it worked incredibly well, bringing greater depth to not only her character, but also the ones close to her. Including the new heroines; despite being newcomers to an established cast, they more than carried their weight, feeling like they'd been there since the very beginning. In fact, two of them, Nemesis and Mea, rank among my favorite heroines in the series.
Darkness still contained plenty of episodic chapters, just like its predecessor, but this time they served the double purpose of allowing character relationships to simmer after particularly potent story beats. In the background of these innocuous lewdfests, Yami and Mea were given the chance to develop their uneasy friendship, Momo was given the chance to sell the harem plan to the Earthlings gunning for Rito's heart, and Mikado-sensei and Tearju-sensei were given the chance to digest the long and complicated history they've had across the galaxy. Let that not distract from the quality of the lewds, though: Yabuki upped his game considerably from the original TLR thanks to the freedoms he now enjoyed in Jump SQ. I remember a particular moment where a sentient vine was poking at a suspicious-looking orifice, and it came with a disclaimer reading, "This is her belly button." Then there was the picture of Haruna on Rito's phone, which... No, let's not get into that. I'll just say it was Yabuki at the height of his madness.
In every respect, Darkness was an evolution from the original TLR. Perhaps the most concise way to feel it is through the downright stunning OP of the first season of its anime adaptation. This is not the kind of OP your average ecchi manga gets. The vocals, the lyrics, the animation, everything about it is beautiful. You could tell they were approaching it as a serious love story, and not just some inconsequential, trashy fun. Sadly, neither TLR series got a full adaptation, each of them getting just two seasons (plus more OVAs than you can shake a stick at), but it's a franchise that nobody is going to soon forget, especially since Darkness didn't conclude the story. It ran for 18 volumes, the same as its predecessor, and while the final one featured the money shot of Yami telling Rito, "You're the target... of my love," it once again ended with no resolution, promising the zany romcom antics would continue just as they always had. Yabuki soon returned to Jump proper with a new ecchi romcom, Ayakashi Triangle, which would run for 16 volumes, but it was rather tame compared to TLR (and especially Darkness), and its characters were mostly forgettable. When's the next TLR series, my guy? Give me more Mea, coward.
In the time Yabuki spent away from Weekly Shonen Jump, a new romcom came into the spotlight: Nisekoi, which is a Japanese neologism meaning "false love." Protagonist Ichijou Raku is the heir to a yakuza syndicate, and he's ordered to pretend to date main heroine Kirisaki Chitoge, heiress to a gang that just moved into town. Their fathers hope that by having their kids date, it'll end the feud between their men. Unfortunately, Raku and Chitoge hate each other, making it hard to keep up the act, and besides, Raku still pines for a long-lost girl from ten years ago that he exchanged some important promise with (he can't remember what), and who should still have the key to his prized locket. He hopes that his current crush, classmate Onodera Kosaki, is the promise girl, though she's not the only one with a key...
Much like TLRD, Nisekoi had a plot that ever-so-slowly inched forward between all the silly romcom chapters, and despite the distinct lack of fan service and relatively weak characters (though few series are going to win that comparison with TLR), it was popular enough to run for a whopping 25 volumes, setting a new record for romcoms in Jump that still stands to this day. Apparently some people were surprised to see Chitoge win in the end, but like, mate? She's the main heroine. Yes, Marika was the only correct choice for any human being with taste, but an ironclad rule of romcoms is that if anyone wins over anyone else, it's the main heroine.
And shortly after Nisekoi ended, an assistant who worked on it penned a romcom series of his own: We Never Learn, AKA Bokuben, whose protagonist serves as a tutor to two girls with hopeless grades while also drawing the attention of a peppy member of the swim team, a snarky but short senpai, and his straitlaced teacher. Bokuben was little more than a more lackluster version of Nisekoi, though it stood out by having five endings, one for each heroine.
TLRD established, and Nisekoi solidified, a trend of having an overarching plot to tie a romcom series together. For TLRD, it was the drama surrounding Yami, and for Nisekoi, it was the mystery of Raku's locket. This conceit became so entrenched that it encouraged imitators. Some, like Imocho (which I might write about at some point, who knows) pulled it off quite adroitly, while others, like Bokuben and Iroha ni HoERO!, left much to be desired in their execution.
Gotoubun and the injection of mystery into the ending
Up until now, I haven't been shy about discussing how these series end, and that's because it's basically always predictable just by applying the principles of storytelling. Of course the main heroine is going to be the one to get the guy at the end. If she isn't, then why the hell would you feature her so prominently in the first place? Either she wins, or nobody does. Sure, Bokuben shook things up a bit by having an ending for each of its heroines, even the ones that couldn't really be considered "main," but that's not all that removed from having nobody win at all.
It's obvious why creators do this: as I said, having the main heroine win is satisfying from a storytelling standpoint. And when a creator is unconfident in the main heroine, or there isn't a single character who can be considered the main heroine, it's prudent (but undeniably cowardly) to have nobody win, lest you alienate the fans of the heroines who lose. Again, these principles make romcoms' endings highly predictable, and when they reach their endgame, it can sometimes actually feel like a low point, since they're just going through the motions you've seen coming since the very first page. That's not too much of a detriment, since romcoms are about the journey, not the destination, but it's also not terribly thrilling.
But what if the entire point is for the ending to be a mystery?
If you've set foot at all in Japan in the past five, six years or so, you have heard of Gotoubun no Hanayome, localized as The Quintessential Quintuplets, but more closely translated as "A Bride Divided by Five." Protagonist Uesugi Fuutarou is a cynical honor student from a poor family, so when his father's rich friend offers him a well-paying tutoring gig, he leaps at the chance to help with the Uesugi finances. Imagine his surprise when he finds out why it's so well-paying: he's tutoring the man's five twin daughters, the titular quintuplets. None of whom are too thrilled about the arrangement.
So what, right? That sounds like Nisekoi and Bokuben tossed into a blender. But what's interesting is that the series opens on a flash forward to Fuutarou's wedding with one of the quints, though it's unclear which one. Immediately this gets you curious about which one he chooses. After all, they're all given more or less equal treatment throughout the series, so it's hard to call any of them the main heroine. The closest one to that label, Itsuki, is the only one of the five who never falls in love with him, and the ones who have stereotypical sub-heroine personalities appear to make the most headway. My favorite of the five, Nino, has one of the most based confession scenes I've ever read.
In the end, the author does indeed choose one of the five heroines to win, alienating the fans of the other four somewhat, though he did an admirable job of lessening the damage by building up the quints' familial bond and showing how they all find happiness in their own way without drifting apart because of one man. The ending wasn't perfect, since in his efforts to keep the winner a surprise, the author forgot to give the winner appropriate buildup, so the development kind of came out of left field. You kind of got the sense that as he was wrapping the series up, he said, "You know what, she hasn't had any big scenes in a while. I'd better throw her a bone." And then he threw her the biggest bone possible for the series.
Despite the ending's iffy execution, Gotoubun was, and still is, massively popular. It only ran for 14 volumes, shorter than the TLRs, Nisekoi, and Bokuben, but every single one of them was rereleased in full color, and it's the only series I've mentioned thus far that got a full anime adaptation. Not only that, it got anime-original epilogue movies. People were drawn to the heroines' charms, each of them a solid execution of some tried-and-true character archetype. They enchanted readers far more than Nisekoi's heroines did, despite the extra time the latter had.
But perhaps more important than that was the growth the characters exhibited throughout the series, as well as the themes it built up. Gotoubun was not just a romcom; it was a coming-of-age story. Much ado (too much, frankly) is made about the quints' father and his draconian parenting, as well as the quints' efforts to come into their own despite opposition from their father's misguided attempts to railroad them onto his idea of a stable future. Reminds me of my own father in a way, whose astronomical expectations and blatant hypocrisy during my high school years caused me no end of needless grief that I would be hard-pressed to say had any substantial benefit for me later on. At least he mellowed out a bit by the time it was my brother's turn in the spotlight.
Gotoubun's themes and character arcs were every bit as important to the series as its romcom elements. The solidity of Gotoubun's overarching story did a great job of making up for the inevitable disappointment of best girl not winning. Even the protagonist, Fuutarou, had a distinctive personality and arc, a rarity for romcom protagonists, who tend to be fairly bland and nondescript. As much as I love TLR, Rito had little identity beyond "he's earnest and nice," which means exactly as much in fiction as it does in real life. I'm not saying Fuutarou is super exceptional as a protagonist, but he at least stands out among his peers in the genre.
Hyakkano and a return to classic times, but with modern improvements
You know who is super exceptional as a protagonist, though? Aijou Rentarou.
The 100 Girlfriends Who Love You Very, Very, Very, Very, VERY Much has one heck of a premise. Despite his best efforts, Rentarou's life has been devoid of romance all the way through the end of middle school. He's been rejected a hundred times, and after a rejection to the tune of "You're an incredible guy that any girl would be lucky to have, but for some reason I just literally can't," he visits a local shrine, whose god appears and explains that everyone in the world has a single soulmate they're destined to be happy with. In fact, breakups happen because people misidentify their soulmate, and if someone fails to get with their soulmate, they're doomed to die in despair. One problem: that god fucked up when Rentarou was born. Our boy doesn't have a soulmate; he has a hundred of them, and he's going to start meeting them in high school. Realizing that getting with only one will consign the other 99 to death, Rentarou resolves to make every single one of them happy.
It's a patently absurd premise, and it would absolutely fail to stick the landing if Rentarou wasn't a man among men. He proves as much to his first two girlfriends in the very first chapter; if his devotion to his lovers weren't true, none of them would be agreeing to this polyamorous relationship in the first place. I need you to know that this man lives rent-free in my brain. I spend every day absolutely seething at the fact that I will never be even one millionth the man he is. What I would give to love someone as much as Rentarou loves his girlfriends! And yes, the author appears not to be kidding about there being a hundred of them. The series is at 21 volumes and counting, and as of volume 8, where I am, Rentarou has met 14 so far.
This conceit kind of forces the story to take a certain format. After all, even if it only takes one chapter to introduce each heroine, that's still nearly two years total of introduction chapters. But we also have to make time for breather chapters in between each new addition to the Rentarou Family, so the series is forced to be a bunch of short, episodic stories, like the olden days. It simply doesn't have the time for too many long, drawn-out arcs. The author knows this, and boy does he lean into it. Not only do individual stories last three or four chapters at most, he even throws caution to continuity; if he wants cherry blossoms to bloom, he will make them bloom, regardless of how much time we've seen pass since Rentarou entered high school, and a running gag through the series is characters quipping about how it's always spring in their manga.
That's another key element to Hyakkano: its humor. Be it referential humor, meta humor, wordplay, or simply the characters' personalities bouncing off each other in funny ways, nary a page goes by without some kind of gag. In fact, it wouldn't be altogether inaccurate to call this series a gag manga with romantic elements. The author has chosen a lot of types of humor that can get stale quickly, but somehow he manages to be consistently funny. Referential humor, meta humor, wordplay... All of these have a reputation of being pedestrian, lowbrow, and the work of a hack, but Hyakkano makes them work, and I would even say that they add to the series's lighthearted atmosphere. Too much high-effort comedy might make you think the series is trying to be more clever and serious than it actually is; dumb jokes, on the other hand, especially good dumb jokes, keep the tone just right for a series of this kind.
It's almost inevitable that the "com" part of "romcom" is so prominent in this series, since with such a large cast of characters, there's no time to give each one a significant arc. Each heroine pretty much completes her growth and reaches max affection in her introductory chapter, culminating in her addition to the Rentarou Family. If the author were to spend time developing each character's feelings even further after that, we'd never get anywhere, and singling out just a handful to focus on as the most important would go against Rentarou's principles. That leads to a rather amusing problem by which the girlfriends all need more or less equal screentime, so vignettes that feature all of them can get rather... cramped, as you can see in that image containing ten of them in two pages. The sumo arc shortly afterward took two chapters to complete even at just two pages per heroine. While there's plenty of mushy romance to be had in this series, it's fast-paced by necessity and at least a little comedic.
But again, don't let that fool you into thinking the romantic elements are cheap. The author does a masterful job of showing why so many girls would fall for this giga-Chad, and why he'd fall for them in turn. He doesn't just use the "soulmate" gimmick as authorial fiat to activate more smoochy times. Warm fuzzies abound in this series, from the most cliched to the more out-there. My favorite heroines are the first two, Inda Karane the tsundere and Hanazono Hakari the well-endowed future sex offender. Their personalities and romantic interactions with Rentarou are more or less exactly what you'd expect from their archetypes, but as early as the third girlfriend, Yoshimoto Shizuka the smol floof, you start to see how creative the series can get. Shizuka is too shy to speak, so she uses a text-to-speech app to read out sections she highlights in her ebooks, making the few moments she does use her real voice all the more saccharine.
All this rambling is to say that Hyakkano feels to me like a return to olden times, where the cohesion of the work as a whole took a back seat to the present moment. Where every chapter was no smaller than a third of a story, and the point was just to watch the characters go at it. But it comes with the tongue-in-cheek genre-savviness that's only possible because of the long history of romcom manga, not to mention the objective improvement of a well-characterized protagonist with a distinct personality. In a way, it's like the genre has come full circle.
Of course, as I said at the top of the page, I'm probably making all this shit up. I'm sure there's a thousand counterexamples you could point to to take the wind right out of my sails. But my subjective experience is valid to me subjectively, dammit, and I ain't gonna let you take that away from me. How's about instead of pulling an Erika, you respect Rule Y of Beatrice's game board, huh?
Anyway, that was my clumsy attempt to tie all this up into the point I promised you at the top. Final thoughts on Hyakkano? Love it, and the anime has some of the best subs I've ever seen, despite them being official. They truly do justice to an already fantastic series.
Oh, and in the time I've spent writing this monstrosity, I did end up picking up that new series I mentioned at the top. Despite its endorsement from the creator of Gotoubun, it ain't great so far. I have been fooled.