To Love Ru
To Love Ru is a Japanese manga series written by Saki Hasemi and illustrated by Kentaro Yabuki. The manga was serialized in Shueisha's manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Jump from April 2006 to August 2009, and the chapters collected into 18 tankōbon volumes. It follows high school student Rito Yuuki after he becomes accidentally engaged to Lala Satalin Deviluke, a runaway alien princess, leading to chaotic encounters with human and alien girls while facing threats from her would-be suitors. The title, Toraburu, is a pun on the English loan words toraburu and rabu, referencing the harem aspect of the series. To Love Ru is noted for its fan service, with Hasemi and Yabuki admitting that they tested the boundaries of what would be allowed in a manga.
A drama CD was released in February 2008, featuring an original story along with character songs. Following a 26-episode anime television series adaptation that aired in Japan in 2008, Xebec produced six original video animation episodes and a 12-episode second season, titled Motto To Love Ru, between 2009 and 2010. Four video games have been released for various platforms.
A continuation of the manga called To Love Ru Darkness was serialized in Shueisha's Jump Square magazine from October 2010 to March 2017, and the chapters collected into 18 volumes. Between 2012 and 2017, Xebec produced 10 OVA episodes and 26 anime television series episodes based on To Love Ru Darkness. The To Love Ru and To Love Ru Darkness manga series have over 16 million copies in circulation.
Synopsis
''To Love Ru''
Set in the fictional city of Sainan, the story of To Love Ru revolves around Rito Yuuki, a shy and clumsy high-school student who cannot confess his love to the girl of his dreams, Haruna Sairenji. One day when sulking in the bathtub, a mysterious, naked devil-tailed girl appears out of nowhere. Her name is Lala Satalin Deviluke, the runaway crown princess of the planet Deviluke. Her father wants her to return home to marry one of her marriage candidates. When Devilukean commander Zastin arrives to bring her home, she swiftly declares she will marry Rito in order to stay on Earth, leading Zastin to attack Rito. But when Rito angrily declares that marriage is only possible with the person you love, the two dull-witted aliens misunderstand him, believing he truly understands Lala's feelings.Lala quickly falls in love with him, and Zastin also approves of their engagement, much to Rito's dismay. While Zastin reports his support for the pair to Lala's father, Gid Lucion Deviluke, who is the King of Deviluke and much of the known universe, Rito reluctantly helps Lala transition to life on Earth, while gradually befriending his dream girl, Haruna, along with a colorful cast of other girls, such as the uptight, high-strung girl Yui Kotegawa, the sex-switching alien Run/Ren, and the queen bee Saki Tenjouin, among others. In the meantime, Rito must also fight off Lala's antagonistic alien suitors, one of whom sends the alien assassin Golden Darkness to kill him.
''To Love Ru Darkness''
The story continues in To Love Ru Darkness, which focuses on Lala's little sister, Momo Belia Deviluke. She and her twin sister, Nana Astar Deviluke, have since come to live with Lala in Rito's house. While Rito remains indecisive between his longtime crush on Haruna and his growing affection for Lala, Momo has also fallen in love with Rito. But not wanting to steal Rito away from her sister, Momo instead plots to build a harem of girls around Rito, hoping that if Rito marries Lala and becomes the King of Deviluke, he can legally marry every girl who is in love with him, including Momo herself. While Momo works in the background and plays matchmaker with Rito, a plethora of beautiful girls gradually enter Rito's life and warm up to his kindness, including Golden Darkness, who has since lived peacefully on Earth but struggles to escape her dark past. Thus, Rito's otherworldly love troubles continue forever.Production
Writing and development
Manga artist Kentaro Yabuki first met anime screenwriter Saki Hasemi at preliminary meetings for the 2005 anime adaptation of Yabuki's previous series, Black Cat. When Hasemi told Yabuki that he was interested in writing an original manga, the artist told Hasemi he could contact him if he had any questions. To Love Ru has origins in Yabuki's 2004 one-shot "Trans Boy". When the time came for him to create a new series, Yabuki said he "hit a brick wall". The editorial department asked him to go in a different direction, so he started asking Hasemi his opinions on things. After they started working together, Hasemi said he originally thought of doing a shōnen battle manga, but could not come up with a "hook". He then remembered that Yabuki had said he wanted to create a romantic comedy manga, and the two started to come up with ideas for one easily. Yabuki created the rough designs and personalities for Rito and Lala and then discussed what kind of story would work with them with Hasemi and their supervisor. Hasemi said that Yabuki was set on two things; having a love triangle between Rito, Lala, and Haruna, and that Rito could not be a pervert. They initially imagined the series as mainly a comedy featuring Rito and Lala, with Rito only longing for Haruna. But as they had more meetings, this changed to Haruna also being a featured character with feelings for Rito, in order to emphasize the love triangle. Hasemi said once Yabuki decided on Peke being a "robot for undressing", they could see the direction the manga was headed in.Having only worked on anime and video games previously, Hasemi said he had trouble fitting his ideas into the 19-page-per-chapter structure of a weekly manga serialization at the beginning. The duo's initial editor, Nakamura, would often tell him that certain details he added were not going to make it into the finished chapter. Hasemi said a turning point was when Yabuki asked him not to change scenes so much. While this is a heavily used technique in anime to show momentary pauses in action or passages of time, in manga, the more scene changes there are, the more expository panels are required. The basic plan was to give each chapter a self-contained plot and have the action take place in one location. Hasemi said that the manga was hard to write for; while it can paradoxically be easier on the author to make a story more complicated and build the world, To Love Ru instead relied entirely on visuals and emotions to convey everything. Yabuki said he made sure everything was easy to read by limiting each page to a maximum of six panels, and never using distorted panels. Hasemi and Yabuki always knew they were going to make many revisions to the collected volumes of To Love Ru. They thought it was more fun for the chapters to be different than when they were published in Weekly Shōnen Jump. It took six months for the first volume to be released, partly because Yabuki would look at his "old" art and feel compelled to "fix" it. Hasemi and Yabuki aimed from the beginning to have three or more years of serialization, on top of an anime adaptation and a video game, and Hasemi said he purposefully made the series easy to adapt into an anime. Towards the end of serialization, Yabuki was having a "hard time privately, and felt like breaking down and crying", but was happy that he was able to punctuate the final moments of the manga with the same "stupid perversion" it always had. He was happy that they were able to make the series fun up until the very end, and that they never drifted from the original premise by turning it into a serious action manga.
How to end To Love Ru was discussed over and over again in meetings, until Yabuki suggested that instead of having Rito end up with someone in particular, it could end without him choosing anyone. Although both Hasemi and Uchida, who became their editor around October or November 2007, were initially skeptical on an "ending-less ending", Hasemi told Yabuki he did not really want to end the series and came around to the idea. They wanted Rito to come to the conclusion that he loves Haruna, but purposefully did not explain why he did so. By having Lala misunderstand the situation, it connected back to the first chapter of the series. They did not know when they would find out that their next chapter would be the last, it just so happened that the characters were at the pool, which allowed them to show everyone. In an interview included in the final volume, Hasemi questioned how much they could reveal about their next manga project. To which Yabuki replied, "If they'd let us do it, it'd be To Love Ru 2!" Both creators also said that it was not really the end of the series and its world, with Yabuki stating that he personally was interested in a spinoff with Momo and Nana as the main characters.
Yabuki said that To Love Ru Darkness started as a "self-indulgent whim" of his. He drew an outline and "dragged" Hasemi back in for a spin-off. Hasemi described it as a spin-off with the intention of carrying on the original's spirit, while "adapting its relationships to a new vector of development". He said he was satisfied with how they portrayed the changes in Momo's heart, and that Lala and Haruna made romantic progress as well. Yabuki also initiated the ending of Darkness, telling Hasemi, the editor-in-chief, and all others involved around May or June 2016, the tenth anniversary of the entire franchise. He had several reasons; the events included in volume 18 finished telling everything there is to say about "the Darkness arc of Momo and Yami as we originally planned it", both the authors and the readers had become too desensitized to the sexiness, 18 volumes matches the original manga, and 10 years seemed like an ideal run. Yabuki also said he could not let To Love Ru Darkness drag on pointlessly forever, because he cares about the work. In the final volume, Hasemi described the conclusion of Darkness as being a "sort of waypoint" that leaves open the question of what really happens in the end, and both creators stated that it was not the end of To Love Ru.