In which I am a hypocritical jerk

[terajk]

(Or, after being annoyed at when female protagonists get fandom hate, watch me complain about how useless* a male protagonist is.)

I think I ship (ha! ship!) Mai from AtLA/Ryouko Hakubi now. Which is bad, because I haven't seen Tenchi Muyo! since I was in college 10+ years ago and had this...whirlwind love affair with it even then. By which I mean, it was the first anime series I ever watched. And I'd be like "Tenchi's on!" and "Ryouko, call me!" and "What do a princess from a powerful empire and a space pirate see in this dude?"** and "Why is he going to university now?!" and "THE CAT-RABBIT-THING IS A SPACESHIP??" after my professor's 12-year-old daughter explained it to me.

So, basically I was in it for the unresolved sexual tension between Ryouko and Ayeka, and had no understanding of, like, what was actually going on.

Also, this meme is still happening.

*I read that "Tenchi muyo" is a pun meaning, partly, "No need for Tenchi."

**While simultaneously loving the fact that all these ladies kept inviting themselves to live in his house. Actually, even though I haven't been watching anime/reading manga for long, several of my favorite ones are harem manga. It's not so much that I like love triangles (where the main character will end up with only one love interest), but I like the group of people all being in love/in a romantic friendship-slash-queerplatonic clump/etc. Which may be how Tenchi Muyo! ends up. (Warning: Links go to TVTropes).

Comments

[nenena]

lol Tenchi Muyo

If you have any interest, I would def. recommend the Tenchi Muyo manga by Hitoshi Ohkuda, which continues the story from where the first OAV left off. It resolves the love triangle, actually develops Ayeka and Ryoko's friendship, introduces new female characters who have zero interest in Tenchi but are awesome additions to the cast anyway, and does a lot of cool things with the worldbuilding potential that the original OAV series just kind of let go to waste. And yes, even with the love triangle resolved the whole cast does kind of end up living together as one big happy occassionally-having-adventures-together-in-outer-spaaaaaace! family.

[terajk]

Oh, I am interested! Especially because I just found out that Hulu has the OAV. Also, I think there's an Easily Lost Person named Mihoshi who can also teleport. (Crap! Also, LOL!) And, eeeee adventure-having space family!

In my defense, Toonami aired, like, ALL the Tenchis back in the day (the OAV, Tenchi Universe, Tenchi in Tokyo,) and they kept retconning things.

[nenena]

Yessss, Mihoshi is awesome and also very easily lost. Her teleportation thing is only temporary (and only because she gets her hands on a space-bending device), but she was always one of my favorite characters in the OAV. I still think that she was the only member of the "harem" whose attraction to Tenchi felt, you know, real and understandable. She's very much an archetypical idiot savant, but she's fun to watch (not to mention a LOT more competent at her job than most idiot savant-type characters tend to be) and she gets an amazingly sad storyarc later in the manga.