There's a lot to say about To Love-Ru and its sequel, To Love-Ru Darkness. Is most of it good? Fuck no! It sucks! It fucking blows! It's like Hasemi read Urusei Yatsura and was like, "I can do this, but replace everything good with something unrepentantly horny," and created the least funny iteration on the alien girlfriend trope, complete with the normal schoolgirl girlfriend and the gender-swapping antics and the like. It sucks.
To Love-Ru is cute enough to start, as an extremely ecchi shounen manga, but Darkness just lays into the horny and becomes straight pornography. What's funny, though, is that they can't just show penetration--that'd be hentai! So the girls get fondled, petted, rubbed, licked... the limitations of the publication forces this almost-hentai to actually depict something a lot of hentai doesn't give a flying fuck about: foreplay. lol.
Girls still end up with phallic objects being shoved down their throats, so we can't have everything, but it's still amusing how much the manga ends up portraying feminine pleasure and blueballing the men. There's some satisfaction in that.
And honestly, Yabuki's art is excellent. His panelling is great, his forms are shapely, consistent, and pretty, his use of space constricted enough to keep the eye lingering and moving exactly where it needs. Which just always happens to be a titty or a pussy. Wait, we can't have pussy in a shounen manga! So Yabuki hides Stealth Pussies in reflective surfaces, bubbles, water droplets, irises... devil tails... Everything good about To Love-Ru is Yabuki's doing. Like, giving the devil tails labial anatomy was a stroke of genius when it comes to avoiding actual straight-on fingering.
But sweet baby Jesus, the story sucks, and always has. Why does it need a writer? They needed a professional to write all the different ways Rito ends up with his hands on titties and his nose in a girlhole? Moreover, people aren't fucking bored by this? It's the same shit over and over again. Hasemi, likely thinking that greater numbers = better (i.e. beginning with his shift from a silly rom-com to a straight-up Harem Keikaku because More Titties), he heard "rule of threes" pertaining to comedy and thought, "oh, so the rule of infinity would be even funnier, right?"
- Do you think it's funny when something pervy happens and the girl yells HARENCHI?
- Do you cackle when something pervy happens and the girl says ecchi no wa kirai desu?
- Do you burst into guffaws when something pervy happens and the girl says kedamono?
- Do you chortle when a boy slips, lands on a girl, and somehow has his palms on titty and face snuggled into a puss, every time?
- Do you chuckle when the nasty principal character is constantly preying on his students?
- Do you snort when there's a silly alien device that rips clothes off?
- Do you convulse with mirth when an alien girl puts other girls in compromising situations with the boy?
- Do you find it absolutely fucking hysterical when the ghost girl's ESP causes clothes to fly off?
- Do you slap your goddamn knees when the sisters sexually assault each other?
- Do you never get bored with horny misunderstandings?
Then congrats! You would consider To Love-Ru a comedy. Because those are the only jokes, and they will be played, again, and again, and again, ad nauseam, until this nightmare is mercifully put out of its misery. Calling this a comedy is about as much of a stretch as not calling it softcore porn. Which no one will do, because we go into TLR expecting exactly that. Even so... it sucks.
When the person below says "sexualizes children's bodies," they're probably talking about the high schoolers, but no! It gets worse! Lala gets lolified and still gets porned as much as she was when she had a more mature body! If anything, she becomes more relevant than ever as a loli! As someone that actually liked Lala (I find her sweet, and her interactions with Rito weren't annoying as shit, like every other girl that would punch him because kyaa ecchi), I wasn't a huge fan of this arc. That loli body was drawn a bit too detailed for my liking... The intention was definitely to appeal to people attracted to kids' bodies, and I say that as someone who tried to give this shit the benefit of the doubt with Mikan, Yami, and Nemesis, the more petite, flat-chested girls. Lala straight-up becomes a toddler and is depicted just as nude as ever. Hey, it's always funny* when Rito's face lands in a girl's crotch... what if it landed in this single-digit aged girl's crotch? You say HAHAHAHAHAHA, right? Lord. It sucks.
*Hasemi law of comedy states that things happening over and over again make them funny
There's also sexualized nursing as in, actual babies sucking on tits and that turning the girls on. And a chapter where a baby gets control of one of the silly pervy alien toys that manifests baby hands all over a girl who gets turned on, being touched, by DIGITAL GHOST BABY HANDS,,,
IT SUCKS!!!
I had a friend that said what made TLR good was that the girls were always safe with Rito, unlike other harem protagonists that absolutely would prey on the girls, given the chance. No disrespect to that friend, I still love and appreciate her. That being said, bitch WHAT. These girls are in constant danger because they're around the boy whose hands are boob seekers! His nose faces magnetic puss! His mouth, a nipple vacuum! Going to Rito's house is a death sentence for your chastity! He won't prey on you on purpose, but there's always some convenient brain-washing-controlling or plot-related personality change that will allow him to feel up the girls anyway! The only satisfying scenes are scenes where Rito is violated without the other girls getting hurt, which are limited to maybe a single scene where Mea shoves his face into her crotch and a scene where Rito is genderbent and gets treated like a To Love-Ru girl lmao. There's one chapter where he straight-up gets raped in girl-form. It's not even satisfying that time, it's just horrifying by this point. It sucks.
The girls are never "safe". Rito will violate them. Rito will violate them while asleep. Their principal will violate them. The baby will violate them. Plants will violate them(?). The other girls will violate them. Dogs will violate them. It sucks.
God, it sucks. If you read To Love-Ru just for the ecchi, you can enjoy it. Yabuki's ingenuity when it comes to sneaking explicit imagery into his conveniently-censored art is genuinely amusing. His art is pretty. The designs are pleasant. But as a story, it lacks any meaningful character development (until the final volume when they all conveniently and abruptly wrap up their loose ends lol), constantly fails the Bechdel test because these girls have nothing in their lives except for Rito (remind me again why this needed a writer?), and only pretends to have a plot occasionally to break up the silly kyaa ecchi chapters. Though of course, the plot chapters will be kyaa ecchi too, but also SERIOUS. Nemesis is a SERIOUS THREAT and also she wears no panties. Why? idk, horny, I guess. It sucks.
Nemesis dies, pussy out, by the way. It's really emotional. Anyway, back to Lala's HUGE BOOBA!!!
Just kidding, Nemesis is back, she's just naked now. Hey, she looks a little older than loli-Lala did, so that's fine, I guess! (NO)
Don't worry, she put on a dress, so she's not ALWAYS tits-out. But she does now have immediate and constant monitoring of Rito and can take control of him to make him violate girls even more than he already did in his own time. Great!
Just look at Yabuki's (or any ecchi artist's) art instead of reading this. I love episodic, silly, unserious hijinks in rom-coms -- I'm a Rumic fan, after all! But TLR isn't a comedy, because it fails to be funny. So instead you just have a recursive spiral of maddening, stupid events that serve to conveniently pull some panties down and shirts up. Holy shit, it's not funny. At some point it almost becomes self aware, but heel-turns immediately back into the status quo of "Ha Ha! Rito Touch Boobie!" There's no winning. It sucks.
Literally everything other than Yabuki's art is bad. That is, unless you're of the suicidal persuasion and want to turn TLR into a drinking game. In that case, by taking a shot after any of the above-listed Comedy Antics, you can kill yourself in under a couple of volumes, easily!*
*Please don't do this.
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