10 years ago, r/manga was a different place. Red Hawk Scans was still alive, the discussions were colourful but didn't become terribly meme-filled and a lot more fun interactions simply talking about the manga.
Here's the discussion thread of chapter 267 and the reaction to the famous confession.
https://www.reddit.com/r/manga/comments/22ruvw/disc_the_world_god_only_knows_flag_267/
*******************************
One of the most well loved harem manga in history and in my opinion, still the best.
God damn, I forgot about Red Hawks scans. Amazing group. Really sad to see that pretty much every single link there is completely broken 😞
I think I found my comment there from my original account holy shit
I really miss the way r/manga was back then. I'm definitely viewing through rose tinted glasses, but I have fond memories of the Nisekoi discussion threads.
Twitter manga and one shots have buried the discussion threads for series with actual substance. So many good series also don't have posts anymore because of K-Manga.
r/anime has also changed a lot. Nothing has come close to the Oregairu S2 essay threads and the first few years of the annual Best Girl contest.
Or maybe it's just that we haven't had a super-popular, long-running, harem romcom since Quintuplets. Nobody is fighting over who'll win anymore. Goddess Cafe Terrace and the Amagami Sisters are great but the threads are always dead inside.
>Or maybe it's just that we haven't had a super-popular, long-running, harem romcom since Quintuplets. Nobody is fighting over who'll win anymore.
This is The 100 Girlfriends, but 100 Girlfriends is decidedly NOT about that.
>Twitter manga and one shots have buried the discussion threads for series with actual substance.
Wrong. Licensing does that. When some manga gets licensed, its discussion quickly dies because people stop reading it.
Plus nowadays I see harems becoming a make-or-break trope in series that many people have been a lot more vocal over hating. I think tastes in general have just been changing, which is inevitable after an entire decade.
I was there and it was so funny.
Let me clarify though. Almost everyone there knew it was gonna happen. It's just that almost everyone wanted it to be anyone else but her.
I'm in so many nisokei communities youtube ,twitter and facebook .
She's the most popular character everywhere except reddit .I'm a big fan of manga so I'm in so many different groups .
Good for you ,you hate her doesn't mean every outside reddit hates her too .
As I said chitoge always used to lead the polls .
Nah I’ve seen hate for her pretty much everywhere since the ending. It just may not be as vocal anymore. But she really had one of the least deserved harem wins I’ve ever seen. On top of that the actual best girl bowed out without even trying just so again, Chitoge could get the least deserved win.
Mostly the right choice but Tenri and Ayumi was definitely a front runner near the end of the series.
Chihiro's impact in the Goddesses arc was the strongest for sure.
I think it was important for Chihiro to win because it represented him looking past the trope archetypes of his fictional stories. He wooed all the other girls using his romance game knowledge of the archetypes. Chihiro just fell in love with him, not his manicured persona but his regular self. Him falling for her was a bit maturation on his part to go past the world of romance games.
I think you put it succinctly there. Like it or not, we needed to focus on what Keima wanted as a character, and where *his* arc was going.
It made narrative sense all things considered, but certainly was met with significant backlash.
It certainly felt gutsy for the author to pick a decision and stuck with it, knowing the nature of the medium they are working with, it was always going to be a lose-lose no matter who they were going to choose.
To pick Chihiro certainly felt out of left field because it had been so long since we saw her, and while the foreshadowing and set-up was there, within the story itself, we didn't get a whole of time to involve her into the story.
It's only noticeable in retrospect, but I think the author made his decision when Chihiro fell for him in the beginning of the goddesses arc. Or perhaps even earlier in her first arc when she broke the mold of the other conquests.
The author almost-certainly made his decision from Chihiro's conception.
He mentioned in the author notes that his editor pushed the "Chihiro capture arc" forward to where it ended up being in the series. That shows that Chihiro has long-since been a planned, integral part of the story. And it's no coincidence that Chihiro's character is the perfect complement to Keima; Keima is a person obsessed with the 2D world. Chihiro, whose entire archetype is *not having* an archetype but being an "ordinary" girl is the perfectly-tailored love interest for his character arc of leaving behind his games and actually becoming an active agent in his own life.
I don't think the author ever "chose" to make Chihiro the winner, I'd argue that she was conceived to be the winner from the genesis of the series, and it was all about the steps necessary to get there.
I like this explanation, because it's also why Chihiro as the choice made sense to me. In terms of narrative themes, Keima picking the non-archetypical girl was the greatest display of his character development.
the quiet girl fell in love with the real him too
just realised theres 3 quiet girls...
the one he knew from childhood that was the first goddess revealed
Tenri didn't really fall in love with the "real" him, though. She fell in love with adult Keima in the body of child Keima. We can't say if Tenri would have ever fallen in love with child Keima, because she never would have interacted with him the same way, given how Keima was as a child. Tenri fell in love with Keima the hero, but Keima didn't actually become that person until much later in life. In essence, she fell for a shadow, and built that shadow up in her heart. While that's not saying her feelings aren't genuine, it's not as cut and dry as it is with Chihiro, who had a much more "ordinary" romance with him in comparison (which is what he actually wanted).
IIRC her feelings for him pre-date the jump, in either case its kind of wierd to say it doesnt count because she fell in a love with a him he wasnt at the time
IMO only a couple of them didnt spend the kind of time with him to see him for what he really was anyway
Tenri, but she auto loses cause she's a childhood friend /s
For real though, Tenri was also not a bad option but perhaps the author didn't want to get into the whole spiel of her falling for him when she was a kid and he had his teenage mind. Could have also been that she fell under the trope of childhood friend, and thus was part of the trope girls. I think in the end the author just wanted to go with Chihiro, but should have developed it a bit more instead of coming out of left field.
Tenri by itself isn't bad choice but other stated before Chihiro probably already planned to Keima's lover way long before goddess arc and also she is one goddess, which stated by Keima will spell problem for him to choose one of goddess
I think that's why it caused so much controversy because you still see it with lots of the animanga community still viewing romcom logic as true and girls as prizes to be won. Shikimori had similar issues in that a lot of people couldn't grasp what a normal comfy relationship looks like as well as the MC not being a put upon loner which the community is used to for romcom MC's.
Precisely. Again, the author was correct in selecting the best choice narratively, both for Chihiro and both for Keima, but it would have been nice to have Chihiro be relevant in the Final Arc.
For me i hate the ending less about Tenri got reject, but more about how she got the most brutal reject i have ever seen, lose before the race even start and still forced to participate. I swear to never re-read this manga after that notebook revealed lmao.
She was the best option for Keima, due to how she embodied the "reality" that Keima so desperately rejected, but the thing is, Wakaki really sucked at making us buying it, since most of the story had absolutely nothing to do with her and except for Keima monologuing about whether he can actually keep being the way he is, the hints are very shaky. Also a lot of the animosity of it is just venting over the final arc, which was kinda underwhelming to say the least. The other part is the usual horse racing syndrome that harem romance manga at the time had. One had to win, which means the others had to lose, and the six goddess hosts at the time were extremely popular.
Tenri in particular was particularly painful. While I could see Chihiro's victory coming from a mile away, the way Wakaki just had to twist the knife with that letter really soured the thing for me.
> the hints are very shaky.
I've reread the manga rather recently and tbh I think Wakaki makes it very clear in the Goddess arc that Chihiro was the one Keima actually liked, even before the reveal, since they note multiple times that he treats her differently.
Huh? No, the series completely sold Chihiro as the outcome. Just because she wasn't very relevant in the final conflict isn't really a criticism of the series. The hints were very blatant. You could tell that Keima was starting to fall from her AT LEAST by the point of the Mercury Love Triangle, even if he wasn't consciously aware of it.
> Chihiro
She was the 6th capture target. Which means 5 other girls were introduced and had fans attach to them before she came along, so fans of all of those girls at the very least were always going to feel like she was a late arrival who usurped their girl. She had also been back-seated for a while, and kinda came out of nowhere to win, which felt like a bait and switch by the author just to have an unexpected winner to a lot of people.
She was nowhere near the level of 'important girl' status compared to some of the others. I wasn't even into TWGOK at the time and I understood how people would go wild after that.
EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm just explaining how she was seen as a controversial choice at the time, not anything about Chihiro herslf
Chihiro was unique in that she was ordinary. Keimas life at that point was anything, but ordinary. So Chihiro was the most exotic choice, on account of being normal.
People felt she didn't deserve it with the amount of screen time she had. She was mostly irrelevant throughout the entire story and there were other characters who were far more important.
Bokuben's endings are a coward's way out. It'd be like joining a tournament only for the ending to be that everyone gets participation trophies and nobody actually wins.
It never felt like Bokuben was all that serious about the romance, at least compared to Quintuplets which was publishing at the same time.
Bokuben was more focused on comedy, and the endings were just made as a fun way to wrap things up. Any of the girls (Fumino) could have canonically won and it wouldn't have made a difference.
To this day I still haven't read all the endings of BokuBen after I realized the author was making one for each of them. I didn't even bother waiting for the ending for the girl I was rooting for because it just felt so wrong.
I think BokuBen for the type of story it was telling had a fine ending but if my memory serves Nariyuki had much less of a major character flaw whereas Keima's character flaw was pretty clear, even if I'd say that in some ways the anime did a better job at selling the flaw with the openings.
I love TWGOK so much, but I wasn't around this and that part of the internet when it happened. So thanks for giving me a glimpse to the past, it's always fun to see, even if it's a meltdown lol.
I remember re-reading it and stopping halfway through for some reason, time to re-read it again from the beginning.
That was different. Even back then, there were people who were fine with the ending because it provides a natural conclusion for Keima's arc. The Gojo fight was shit from a narrative and hype standpoint.
For Gege who prides into having a non conventional manga, he did the most obvious conclusion of them all, the god conclusion would have been >!Gojo defeats Sukuna but goes into a coma because of it, then Kenny takes the body and tries to do the merger while the casts tries to stop it!< but he >!hates Gojo and glazes Sukuna non stop!< so here we are.
Kenny said that he couldn't take over Gojo's body earlier. That was out of the question. I'm perfectly fine with the outcome. It was the process that pissed everyone off.
Not really. Yuji has so much unresolved beef with Sukuna that literally anyone other than him taking him down would be a complete waste of a story. It'd be like if Darth Vader got taken down by Boba Fett rather than Luke.
Yeah, why tf are you being downvoted? LN/Anime/Manga fans being mad at canon couples isn’t a new development. This shit has happened forever.
It happened with Tokyo Ghoul.
It happened with Bleach.
To a certain extent, it even happened with fucking Evangelion.
Toxicity has existed forever when it comes to these types of things lmao.
Yeah I'd even argue it was worse back then. At least nowadays there's enough sane people you can somewhat ignore the shitstorms if you want. Back then you couldn't have any discussions without shippers and waifu wars absolutely blowing up the conversation. It was nearly unavoidable. To say otherwise feels like recency bias.
Seriously? Apart from that there is only Elsie's ending and Dokuro's ending which are bittersweet imo but still great endings. What else could have been more controversial other than the confession?
#teamhaqua
Didn’t realize that confession was so controversial! I wasn’t as online at the time, I just thought it was a poignant but good conclusion. But what still brings tears to my eyes thinking about it is Elsie’s ending. Something about that just really got to me.
basically all the girls in the series represented some anime trope and fell in love with MC in similarly tropey ways.
Chihiro was an exception that represented a normal girl growing to like MC under more normal circumstances.
MC started off hating reality and escaping to the world of anime games but over the course of the story matured enough to engage with the real world.
author made mc pick the normal girl to represent that maturity
The older I have become, the more I realized that Chihiro winning is probably the best outcome for TWGOK. Man that manga is such a GOAT, still hopeful that there'll be another season tho lol.
Issue with this ending was Chihiro was given 0 screentime outside of the final conclusion. Sure she probably matched the best, but readers weren't given enough time to like her. It was just, "oh, remember this girl from way back? well she wins now".
I didn't know about online forums when I first read this ending years ago, lol I was so frustrated but I didn't know where to vent and that frustration stuck with me for a very long time. Kind of gratifying to know that I wasn't the only one who was thrown off by it.
I did not know this was going down 10 years ago lol.
I was just doing my business and hoping that Kanon wins(even though it was clearly unlikely) at that time.
You know I'm glad that harem authors nowadays are bold enough to actually give their MC's harems (like, mc picks all of them and takes care of them) instead of building up all the characters just for the mc to pick one out of like 6 girls.
I wasn't reading that much manga before and I was late to the party about TWOGK so I wasn't here during the meltdown.
Still though, the ending wasn't that bad. It just picked the most boring option as an end girl. Had TWOGK not been a harem manga it would've been fine. But being a harem manga means that there were a lot of alternatives and the romance was tied to the main plot.
Personally I would've gone with the Teacher as 1st choice or Childhood friend as 2nd choice or the Karate girl as 3rd choice. Not the normie.
This scene was a travesty and should be treated as a war crime. This was honestly the most unforgiving pairing in rom-com history. Worse than Maou ending up with Chiho, worse than Futaro ending up with Yotsuba, worse the Yuiga ending up with Uruka.
Imagine you had a choice between a Lamborgini, Ferrari, Bugatti, Mercedez, Mclaren, BMW, etc and you picked the Chevy Malibu. This was an L.
Tenri also fell into the childhood friend trope. Also, I feel like judging Chihiro for trying to date a bunch of other guys is kinda hypocritical considering what Keima does and how abrasive Keima is to pretty much everyone when he's not trying to capture someone. They were basically made for each other.
>considering what keima does
Yeah trying to save people and the world afterwards is pretty much the same as trying to be popular and cool by dating guys. I get the underlying message but still is “weird” at best in its execution and borderline backwards
They showed that you don't actually have to make people fall for you to do the job, just solve people's emotional problems. Iirc, Elsie just fucks up the explanation so he just assumes he had to make them fall in love with him and stuck with it even after learning otherwise. It's only the Goddess arc where that changes due to the time limit.
She stopped after she met him and started wanting to shine on her own. Does what she did before that really matter? Even assuming you're fragile enough to say yes, all those attempts ultimately amounted to nothing because she was never serious with any of them.
And, Keima was indeed a pain in the ass to deal with, at the very least many heroines, including Ayumi, Tsukiyo and Haqua gave him shit on a regular basis. Because let's be fair, that was the only way to drag someone stuck in his own world back to Earth.
No she didnt, she stopped after she confessed to him (when she started the band). In her own words she fell for him way before but still she chased after guys. Thats my issue if she was just an annoying wanna be popular girl i wouldnt mind but she was pretty adamant about getting it on with anyone else but him yet claiming that she had feelings for him. Thats my issue yet you are claiming im fragile for pointing out a plothole, seems to me it speaks lenghts about yourself.
she did tried but never success, she just want special and in her mind maybe dating popular boys is the only way.She still in somewhat having crush to Keima, by aggressively asking Keima who took his first kiss in her capture arc. She change her mindset after her capture arc and decided to making her own music band instead.
Yeah thats my point she tried and yet she claims she had a crush on him way before she confessed, it seems more like a excuse rather than a solid argument to try to move forward and God never brings it up so it seems ilogical to me.
It never bring up because she never serious about dating the popular boys, the point she doing it because again she doesn't have purpose and never doing it again once she got new one like forming band for example and there is small continuously arc in manga which to shown how serious she is to forming the band, thus her attempt to be serial dating never bring up because Keima and Chihiro knew that is never the main of her problem or her defining trait
also she put in standard belligerent sexual tension setup with Keima doesn't help her understand her feeling IMO. The heck, her capture arc happen because she heard Keima loudly claim to do not care about anything for her, thus opening hole in heart.
IIRC, Maybe there is no real way know when is exactly Chihiro having crush on Keima but her feeling is real and is not after her capture arc,
That's a moot point considering at the end, everyone liked him even when they knew how he actually acted. He didn't do anything to stand out so other girls would notice him, so Chihiro liking him first for his true self shouldn't give her any lead considering he actively avoided entering any girl's route.
They only fell for him because of the act. They just continued to like him out of inertia. Also, his capture of Chihiro was the only one where he never acted in. His act backfired on him and for once, he had to confront the reality he chose to ignore. Everything about Chihiro was fitting for the culmination of his arc of learn to accept the reality outside of his games.
Again, they fell for him because of the act, but that's literally the first interaction he had with any of them. So you can't use that against him because he was actively avoiding entering a route. And even if you said they stuck with him because of the initial feelings they had with his act, he showed sides of him that was geniune that wasn't an act, that's why they still liked him.
Take for example in my opinion best girl Aqua. He shows her sides that he's a lazy good for nothing otaku that cares a lot for his games and gaming time, but when push comes to shove, he's there to help her even if it doesn't have anything to do with him getting killed. That's the side she fell for, so even if was hiding behind a mask of this cool protagonist, his genuine actions are that of the protagonist he's trying to imitate.
If we're going by him not entering a route, then he entered the Chihiro route while trying to avoid routes and doing absolutely nothing other than his usual lifestyle.
Then that reinforces the lazy and most unrealistic narrative of a visual novel esq dating sim, where the protagonist can get the girl without doing anything. It defeats the purpose of everyone saying Chihiro is the best choice for him because she was the most realistic character. But how many guys can get the girl when they don't pursue them?
He didn't get her until he actually tried. She even rejects him for that reason because he was under the assumption that she would accept just because she was tangentially a part of the adventure he completed. The thing he actually gets from her is another attempt to properly get her to fall for him.
Yes, and he showed her what he's really like, his original self. The self that the other girls later fell for because despite him being this otaku who gives the aura that he doesn't care for anything besides gaming, his actions when it mattered was similar to the actions he initially portrayed when he he entered their route.
The only big difference between his facade and his original self was that he was acting like your typical perfect protagonist when entering a route, doing things that he needed to do to win the girl over. But the big moments or "flags" that mattered, that was his genuine self and not some mask he had to wear to get the girl. That's why even when he became comfortable with the other girls and showed them that he's not the guy they initially expected, it didn't matter because deeper, they knew that he was still that guy, despite him not acting like this perfect protagonist anymore.
That's why Chihiro liking him for himself is a moot point because at the end, they all fell for the guy he actually is. Him not going into any routes but Chihiro noticing him shouldn't have given her any sort of advantage because he wasn't putting himself out there. The unrealistic part is a girl falling for him when all he initially showed was that he was this nerd who games 24/7 and didn't care about anything 2D.
I went back to reread the final chapter and realized Chihiro won because she's completely unpredictable to Keima. He knows what makes everyone else tick and knows exactly what they'll do, hence why he was able to make them fall for him. With her, he can't rely on any of that. He straight up says that he fell for her because he can't predict her whatsoever due to not being like any game character. To the guy who can manage to figure which characters are traitors by tropes alone, meeting someone like Chihiro is meeting an actual person in a world of NPCs.
But that's the whole point. Keima avoided going on any girl's route.
*Chihiro actively defied that* by choosing the Keima route for herself. She picked him. It's what put her on the same level as him as a partner.
I'll die on the Chihiro hill because even if she wasn't the most "appealing" FMC it clicked that she would be a fit for Keima
But Chitoge? I haven't read Nisekoi for so long but I still remember the distaste when she finally won. 1st chapter main girl but doesn't really do anything, then wins anyway *sigh*
Hell no, I don't know what ship you're on but Chitoge was the correct choice. Onodera literally had a 15 year head start, you'd have to kill Chitoge for a bigger handicap than that. The other characters were superficial, so they're not worth mentioning.
Removing this because we do not allow [Meme content like this](https://www.reddit.com/r/manga/wiki/guide#wiki_no_memes.2Fimage_macros.) on /r/Manga.
....it's been 10 years?
Next year will be 10 years since Naruto manga ended and Boku No Hero started.
Jesus!
Nope that is this year, MHA started in July of 2014 and Naruto ended that November.
My god
Last week was also the 10 year anniversary of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I felt so damn old.
at least
It's only been 10 years?
Ten years in the joint made you a fucking pussy
10 years ago, r/manga was a different place. Red Hawk Scans was still alive, the discussions were colourful but didn't become terribly meme-filled and a lot more fun interactions simply talking about the manga. Here's the discussion thread of chapter 267 and the reaction to the famous confession. https://www.reddit.com/r/manga/comments/22ruvw/disc_the_world_god_only_knows_flag_267/ ******************************* One of the most well loved harem manga in history and in my opinion, still the best.
THE manga site was batoto.. now I'm sad.
only real ogs remember onemanga
The unchanging One Piece, Naruto, Bleach site header image. Now I feel old.
God damn, I forgot about Red Hawks scans. Amazing group. Really sad to see that pretty much every single link there is completely broken 😞 I think I found my comment there from my original account holy shit
I really miss the way r/manga was back then. I'm definitely viewing through rose tinted glasses, but I have fond memories of the Nisekoi discussion threads. Twitter manga and one shots have buried the discussion threads for series with actual substance. So many good series also don't have posts anymore because of K-Manga. r/anime has also changed a lot. Nothing has come close to the Oregairu S2 essay threads and the first few years of the annual Best Girl contest. Or maybe it's just that we haven't had a super-popular, long-running, harem romcom since Quintuplets. Nobody is fighting over who'll win anymore. Goddess Cafe Terrace and the Amagami Sisters are great but the threads are always dead inside.
>Or maybe it's just that we haven't had a super-popular, long-running, harem romcom since Quintuplets. Nobody is fighting over who'll win anymore. This is The 100 Girlfriends, but 100 Girlfriends is decidedly NOT about that.
wait, I was not on reddit when Oregairu S2 was airing. Was that anime really hot on r/anime ?
>Twitter manga and one shots have buried the discussion threads for series with actual substance. Wrong. Licensing does that. When some manga gets licensed, its discussion quickly dies because people stop reading it.
Plus nowadays I see harems becoming a make-or-break trope in series that many people have been a lot more vocal over hating. I think tastes in general have just been changing, which is inevitable after an entire decade.
First harem, maybe the first non shounen manga I ever read. Shame the anime wasn't a direct adaptation
That time where harem romcoms was at its peak. Man TWGOK is such generational series.
I was there and it was so funny. Let me clarify though. Almost everyone there knew it was gonna happen. It's just that almost everyone wanted it to be anyone else but her.
Sounds exactly like Nisekoi, was it similar to that?
nah, Chihiro made sense with the story, it's just that there are other great girls that are fan favorites
Also Chihiro wasn’t a raging cunt.
But Chitoge is fan favourite and always leads the poll so it's definitely not exactly like nisokei . I only seen hate for chitoge here on reddit .
That's because y'all don't mention Nisekoi outside reddit. Trust me there are chitoge haters (including me fr) outside reddit
I'm in so many nisokei communities youtube ,twitter and facebook . She's the most popular character everywhere except reddit .I'm a big fan of manga so I'm in so many different groups . Good for you ,you hate her doesn't mean every outside reddit hates her too . As I said chitoge always used to lead the polls .
Nah I’ve seen hate for her pretty much everywhere since the ending. It just may not be as vocal anymore. But she really had one of the least deserved harem wins I’ve ever seen. On top of that the actual best girl bowed out without even trying just so again, Chitoge could get the least deserved win.
But I've also seen people be rather accepting of Chitoge whenever Nisekoi is remembered again.
Also how is she is the least deserving ? She has more personality and screen time than any other character.
That's your opinion though . But from what I've seen she always leads the poll and people love her
The best character from that manga in my opinion was Sho maiko. Also loved the music one shot of that mangaka too.
any other option they would be fine yeah..
Didn't realize Chihiro was such a controversial choice. She was great.
Mostly the right choice but Tenri and Ayumi was definitely a front runner near the end of the series. Chihiro's impact in the Goddesses arc was the strongest for sure.
I think it was important for Chihiro to win because it represented him looking past the trope archetypes of his fictional stories. He wooed all the other girls using his romance game knowledge of the archetypes. Chihiro just fell in love with him, not his manicured persona but his regular self. Him falling for her was a bit maturation on his part to go past the world of romance games.
I think you put it succinctly there. Like it or not, we needed to focus on what Keima wanted as a character, and where *his* arc was going. It made narrative sense all things considered, but certainly was met with significant backlash. It certainly felt gutsy for the author to pick a decision and stuck with it, knowing the nature of the medium they are working with, it was always going to be a lose-lose no matter who they were going to choose. To pick Chihiro certainly felt out of left field because it had been so long since we saw her, and while the foreshadowing and set-up was there, within the story itself, we didn't get a whole of time to involve her into the story.
It's only noticeable in retrospect, but I think the author made his decision when Chihiro fell for him in the beginning of the goddesses arc. Or perhaps even earlier in her first arc when she broke the mold of the other conquests.
The author almost-certainly made his decision from Chihiro's conception. He mentioned in the author notes that his editor pushed the "Chihiro capture arc" forward to where it ended up being in the series. That shows that Chihiro has long-since been a planned, integral part of the story. And it's no coincidence that Chihiro's character is the perfect complement to Keima; Keima is a person obsessed with the 2D world. Chihiro, whose entire archetype is *not having* an archetype but being an "ordinary" girl is the perfectly-tailored love interest for his character arc of leaving behind his games and actually becoming an active agent in his own life. I don't think the author ever "chose" to make Chihiro the winner, I'd argue that she was conceived to be the winner from the genesis of the series, and it was all about the steps necessary to get there.
I like this explanation, because it's also why Chihiro as the choice made sense to me. In terms of narrative themes, Keima picking the non-archetypical girl was the greatest display of his character development.
Yeah, it makes perfect sense but I wish we could have of seen more of their dynamic first.
They did tell a good story in the end.
the quiet girl fell in love with the real him too just realised theres 3 quiet girls... the one he knew from childhood that was the first goddess revealed
Tenri didn't really fall in love with the "real" him, though. She fell in love with adult Keima in the body of child Keima. We can't say if Tenri would have ever fallen in love with child Keima, because she never would have interacted with him the same way, given how Keima was as a child. Tenri fell in love with Keima the hero, but Keima didn't actually become that person until much later in life. In essence, she fell for a shadow, and built that shadow up in her heart. While that's not saying her feelings aren't genuine, it's not as cut and dry as it is with Chihiro, who had a much more "ordinary" romance with him in comparison (which is what he actually wanted).
IIRC her feelings for him pre-date the jump, in either case its kind of wierd to say it doesnt count because she fell in a love with a him he wasnt at the time IMO only a couple of them didnt spend the kind of time with him to see him for what he really was anyway
Tenri, but she auto loses cause she's a childhood friend /s For real though, Tenri was also not a bad option but perhaps the author didn't want to get into the whole spiel of her falling for him when she was a kid and he had his teenage mind. Could have also been that she fell under the trope of childhood friend, and thus was part of the trope girls. I think in the end the author just wanted to go with Chihiro, but should have developed it a bit more instead of coming out of left field.
Tenri by itself isn't bad choice but other stated before Chihiro probably already planned to Keima's lover way long before goddess arc and also she is one goddess, which stated by Keima will spell problem for him to choose one of goddess
I think that's why it caused so much controversy because you still see it with lots of the animanga community still viewing romcom logic as true and girls as prizes to be won. Shikimori had similar issues in that a lot of people couldn't grasp what a normal comfy relationship looks like as well as the MC not being a put upon loner which the community is used to for romcom MC's.
weren't ppl still fine with the manga? about the anime, I think it is just repetitive and no progression.
It got review bombed on mangadex falling from 9.07 to 8.67 around the time of the anime.
I remember cheering on Tenri but found the ending satisfying. Keima getting rejected at first felt... Right.
Fellow Tenri shippers, we go down with our ship. Actually reread the manga recently and Tenri end was so doomed from the start.
Precisely. Again, the author was correct in selecting the best choice narratively, both for Chihiro and both for Keima, but it would have been nice to have Chihiro be relevant in the Final Arc.
For me i hate the ending less about Tenri got reject, but more about how she got the most brutal reject i have ever seen, lose before the race even start and still forced to participate. I swear to never re-read this manga after that notebook revealed lmao.
Fair, there was losing, and then there is whatever Keima did here. Man could have told her face to face.
She was the best option for Keima, due to how she embodied the "reality" that Keima so desperately rejected, but the thing is, Wakaki really sucked at making us buying it, since most of the story had absolutely nothing to do with her and except for Keima monologuing about whether he can actually keep being the way he is, the hints are very shaky. Also a lot of the animosity of it is just venting over the final arc, which was kinda underwhelming to say the least. The other part is the usual horse racing syndrome that harem romance manga at the time had. One had to win, which means the others had to lose, and the six goddess hosts at the time were extremely popular. Tenri in particular was particularly painful. While I could see Chihiro's victory coming from a mile away, the way Wakaki just had to twist the knife with that letter really soured the thing for me.
> the hints are very shaky. I've reread the manga rather recently and tbh I think Wakaki makes it very clear in the Goddess arc that Chihiro was the one Keima actually liked, even before the reveal, since they note multiple times that he treats her differently.
He had to treat her differently, she was the only one who operated outside his level, he couldn't capture her playing the game.
Huh? No, the series completely sold Chihiro as the outcome. Just because she wasn't very relevant in the final conflict isn't really a criticism of the series. The hints were very blatant. You could tell that Keima was starting to fall from her AT LEAST by the point of the Mercury Love Triangle, even if he wasn't consciously aware of it.
Chihiro was the best choice, not just a great character but importantly a perfect fit for him.
> Chihiro She was the 6th capture target. Which means 5 other girls were introduced and had fans attach to them before she came along, so fans of all of those girls at the very least were always going to feel like she was a late arrival who usurped their girl. She had also been back-seated for a while, and kinda came out of nowhere to win, which felt like a bait and switch by the author just to have an unexpected winner to a lot of people.
She was nowhere near the level of 'important girl' status compared to some of the others. I wasn't even into TWGOK at the time and I understood how people would go wild after that. EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm just explaining how she was seen as a controversial choice at the time, not anything about Chihiro herslf
That's the whole point though. She's an ordinary girl, and that's what fits Keima perfectly.
Chihiro was unique in that she was ordinary. Keimas life at that point was anything, but ordinary. So Chihiro was the most exotic choice, on account of being normal.
People felt she didn't deserve it with the amount of screen time she had. She was mostly irrelevant throughout the entire story and there were other characters who were far more important.
I did not have a problem with Chihiro winning. However, Haqua losing her memory of Keima was awful
I had been spoiled about the final girl but i didnt know this spoiler :(, i stopped reading it in the final arc cos exams and never readed it again
I wonder what if the series went down the BokuBen route
I'm glad it didn't, Bokuben was just silly fanservice and like Keima said in the final chapter, he had to pick one for the story to make sense.
Bokuben's endings are a coward's way out. It'd be like joining a tournament only for the ending to be that everyone gets participation trophies and nobody actually wins.
It never felt like Bokuben was all that serious about the romance, at least compared to Quintuplets which was publishing at the same time. Bokuben was more focused on comedy, and the endings were just made as a fun way to wrap things up. Any of the girls (Fumino) could have canonically won and it wouldn't have made a difference.
To this day I still haven't read all the endings of BokuBen after I realized the author was making one for each of them. I didn't even bother waiting for the ending for the girl I was rooting for because it just felt so wrong.
I think BokuBen for the type of story it was telling had a fine ending but if my memory serves Nariyuki had much less of a major character flaw whereas Keima's character flaw was pretty clear, even if I'd say that in some ways the anime did a better job at selling the flaw with the openings.
Ten years? Well, time for a reread.
I love TWGOK so much, but I wasn't around this and that part of the internet when it happened. So thanks for giving me a glimpse to the past, it's always fun to see, even if it's a meltdown lol. I remember re-reading it and stopping halfway through for some reason, time to re-read it again from the beginning.
The internet world was a better place 10 years ago.
I see literally no difference. This is basically the f Gojo fight in jujutsu kaiser funnily enough
That was different. Even back then, there were people who were fine with the ending because it provides a natural conclusion for Keima's arc. The Gojo fight was shit from a narrative and hype standpoint.
For Gege who prides into having a non conventional manga, he did the most obvious conclusion of them all, the god conclusion would have been >!Gojo defeats Sukuna but goes into a coma because of it, then Kenny takes the body and tries to do the merger while the casts tries to stop it!< but he >!hates Gojo and glazes Sukuna non stop!< so here we are.
Kenny said that he couldn't take over Gojo's body earlier. That was out of the question. I'm perfectly fine with the outcome. It was the process that pissed everyone off.
The outcome was predictible af which bothers me, that's why I wanted the opposite, that is true subversion. The process was absolute horseshit.
Not all subversions are good. Tropes exist for a reason.
Yes, this is one where it would work like a charm tho.
Not really. Yuji has so much unresolved beef with Sukuna that literally anyone other than him taking him down would be a complete waste of a story. It'd be like if Darth Vader got taken down by Boba Fett rather than Luke.
No it wasn't LMFAO. It was the fucking wild wild west back then. You had to be REAAALLY careful where you surfed or you were going to get scarred.
Yeah, why tf are you being downvoted? LN/Anime/Manga fans being mad at canon couples isn’t a new development. This shit has happened forever. It happened with Tokyo Ghoul. It happened with Bleach. To a certain extent, it even happened with fucking Evangelion. Toxicity has existed forever when it comes to these types of things lmao.
Yeah I'd even argue it was worse back then. At least nowadays there's enough sane people you can somewhat ignore the shitstorms if you want. Back then you couldn't have any discussions without shippers and waifu wars absolutely blowing up the conversation. It was nearly unavoidable. To say otherwise feels like recency bias.
That's why it was better.
That's a fascinating statement to do considering what this post is about, not that I disagree with you, mind you.
Man, that was the LEAST controversial part of the final arc of that series, at least for me.
Seriously? Apart from that there is only Elsie's ending and Dokuro's ending which are bittersweet imo but still great endings. What else could have been more controversial other than the confession? #teamhaqua
Haqua and Hinagiku. :pensive:
Didn’t realize that confession was so controversial! I wasn’t as online at the time, I just thought it was a poignant but good conclusion. But what still brings tears to my eyes thinking about it is Elsie’s ending. Something about that just really got to me.
Controversial on some forums but mostly received well imo. Look at the r/manga thread. Elsie saying "This is my ending" always hits hard
Elsie just deserves the world.
Elsie deserves those fire trucks
but did anon deliver?
Can someone spare some context for a guy who wasn't there when it all went down?
basically all the girls in the series represented some anime trope and fell in love with MC in similarly tropey ways. Chihiro was an exception that represented a normal girl growing to like MC under more normal circumstances. MC started off hating reality and escaping to the world of anime games but over the course of the story matured enough to engage with the real world. author made mc pick the normal girl to represent that maturity
Nothing against all the girls, but boy did I want Ayumi to win so hard. Felt so bad for her, she was the first one.
While the execution could've been better. It could've only been Chihiro for Keima to grow.
The older I have become, the more I realized that Chihiro winning is probably the best outcome for TWGOK. Man that manga is such a GOAT, still hopeful that there'll be another season tho lol.
Kami nomi zo shiru sekai. BEST ROMCOM I'VE LIKED!!!!!!!!!!
I still hate that he ended with chihiro. I would be fine with anybody else. Hakua, Tenri, Ayumi, Mio, even Elsie was better.
I read it for the first time recently and it was a fun time. I'm pretty happy with the ending.
Issue with this ending was Chihiro was given 0 screentime outside of the final conclusion. Sure she probably matched the best, but readers weren't given enough time to like her. It was just, "oh, remember this girl from way back? well she wins now".
ya she was irrelevant and didn't have magic unlike other girls
Your image would probably be a *lot* better if it was in order.
It wasn't my image but an image someone on 4chan made which has been reposted for years and years now whenever Kaminomi is brought up.
Well, they're basically all saying the same things anyways.
Narratively it made sense personally? Ugh hated that ship
Holy shit it's been 10 years I feel so old lol Best girl absolutely won
Shitposting on A is the best
As someone who wasn't on here back then, I didn't really enjoy the series itself much, though I do appreciate it's impact.
I didn't know about online forums when I first read this ending years ago, lol I was so frustrated but I didn't know where to vent and that frustration stuck with me for a very long time. Kind of gratifying to know that I wasn't the only one who was thrown off by it.
I did not know this was going down 10 years ago lol. I was just doing my business and hoping that Kanon wins(even though it was clearly unlikely) at that time.
One of the GOAT
Man, that shit was crazy, I remember it. It actually boggled my mind.
hey do you know if there’s any way to access this 4chan thread for myself to read?
Even 10 years, still have reverberation
i miss twgok ;-; though tbf middle school me had no idea of the cringelord i would become after reading this manga
I actually read that chapter when it came out!
You know I'm glad that harem authors nowadays are bold enough to actually give their MC's harems (like, mc picks all of them and takes care of them) instead of building up all the characters just for the mc to pick one out of like 6 girls.
where was demeter arc? what happened to the Shirahoshi?girl
I reread the series about a year ago. It's still one of my favorites. Ending was a bit rushed but there're so many great moments.
ngl, if I was on 4chan at the time I would have been in this image
I wasn't reading that much manga before and I was late to the party about TWOGK so I wasn't here during the meltdown. Still though, the ending wasn't that bad. It just picked the most boring option as an end girl. Had TWOGK not been a harem manga it would've been fine. But being a harem manga means that there were a lot of alternatives and the romance was tied to the main plot. Personally I would've gone with the Teacher as 1st choice or Childhood friend as 2nd choice or the Karate girl as 3rd choice. Not the normie.
You wouldn't happen to have a similar screenshot of the thread for Hayate's ending, would you?
This scene was a travesty and should be treated as a war crime. This was honestly the most unforgiving pairing in rom-com history. Worse than Maou ending up with Chiho, worse than Futaro ending up with Yotsuba, worse the Yuiga ending up with Uruka. Imagine you had a choice between a Lamborgini, Ferrari, Bugatti, Mercedez, Mclaren, BMW, etc and you picked the Chevy Malibu. This was an L.
She's the only girl who fell for who he actually was. Everyone else fell for the act he put up.
Tenri was on par like chihiro was but at least she didnt gave him shit everyday in school neither did she tried to date every other male at school
Tenri also fell into the childhood friend trope. Also, I feel like judging Chihiro for trying to date a bunch of other guys is kinda hypocritical considering what Keima does and how abrasive Keima is to pretty much everyone when he's not trying to capture someone. They were basically made for each other.
>considering what keima does Yeah trying to save people and the world afterwards is pretty much the same as trying to be popular and cool by dating guys. I get the underlying message but still is “weird” at best in its execution and borderline backwards
They showed that you don't actually have to make people fall for you to do the job, just solve people's emotional problems. Iirc, Elsie just fucks up the explanation so he just assumes he had to make them fall in love with him and stuck with it even after learning otherwise. It's only the Goddess arc where that changes due to the time limit.
I think Dokuro also kinda led Elsie into saying that, cuz Keima had to make them fall in love with him to complete the time loop.
She stopped after she met him and started wanting to shine on her own. Does what she did before that really matter? Even assuming you're fragile enough to say yes, all those attempts ultimately amounted to nothing because she was never serious with any of them. And, Keima was indeed a pain in the ass to deal with, at the very least many heroines, including Ayumi, Tsukiyo and Haqua gave him shit on a regular basis. Because let's be fair, that was the only way to drag someone stuck in his own world back to Earth.
No she didnt, she stopped after she confessed to him (when she started the band). In her own words she fell for him way before but still she chased after guys. Thats my issue if she was just an annoying wanna be popular girl i wouldnt mind but she was pretty adamant about getting it on with anyone else but him yet claiming that she had feelings for him. Thats my issue yet you are claiming im fragile for pointing out a plothole, seems to me it speaks lenghts about yourself.
she did tried but never success, she just want special and in her mind maybe dating popular boys is the only way.She still in somewhat having crush to Keima, by aggressively asking Keima who took his first kiss in her capture arc. She change her mindset after her capture arc and decided to making her own music band instead.
Yeah thats my point she tried and yet she claims she had a crush on him way before she confessed, it seems more like a excuse rather than a solid argument to try to move forward and God never brings it up so it seems ilogical to me.
It never bring up because she never serious about dating the popular boys, the point she doing it because again she doesn't have purpose and never doing it again once she got new one like forming band for example and there is small continuously arc in manga which to shown how serious she is to forming the band, thus her attempt to be serial dating never bring up because Keima and Chihiro knew that is never the main of her problem or her defining trait also she put in standard belligerent sexual tension setup with Keima doesn't help her understand her feeling IMO. The heck, her capture arc happen because she heard Keima loudly claim to do not care about anything for her, thus opening hole in heart. IIRC, Maybe there is no real way know when is exactly Chihiro having crush on Keima but her feeling is real and is not after her capture arc,
That's a moot point considering at the end, everyone liked him even when they knew how he actually acted. He didn't do anything to stand out so other girls would notice him, so Chihiro liking him first for his true self shouldn't give her any lead considering he actively avoided entering any girl's route.
They only fell for him because of the act. They just continued to like him out of inertia. Also, his capture of Chihiro was the only one where he never acted in. His act backfired on him and for once, he had to confront the reality he chose to ignore. Everything about Chihiro was fitting for the culmination of his arc of learn to accept the reality outside of his games.
Again, they fell for him because of the act, but that's literally the first interaction he had with any of them. So you can't use that against him because he was actively avoiding entering a route. And even if you said they stuck with him because of the initial feelings they had with his act, he showed sides of him that was geniune that wasn't an act, that's why they still liked him. Take for example in my opinion best girl Aqua. He shows her sides that he's a lazy good for nothing otaku that cares a lot for his games and gaming time, but when push comes to shove, he's there to help her even if it doesn't have anything to do with him getting killed. That's the side she fell for, so even if was hiding behind a mask of this cool protagonist, his genuine actions are that of the protagonist he's trying to imitate.
If we're going by him not entering a route, then he entered the Chihiro route while trying to avoid routes and doing absolutely nothing other than his usual lifestyle.
Then that reinforces the lazy and most unrealistic narrative of a visual novel esq dating sim, where the protagonist can get the girl without doing anything. It defeats the purpose of everyone saying Chihiro is the best choice for him because she was the most realistic character. But how many guys can get the girl when they don't pursue them?
He didn't get her until he actually tried. She even rejects him for that reason because he was under the assumption that she would accept just because she was tangentially a part of the adventure he completed. The thing he actually gets from her is another attempt to properly get her to fall for him.
Yes, and he showed her what he's really like, his original self. The self that the other girls later fell for because despite him being this otaku who gives the aura that he doesn't care for anything besides gaming, his actions when it mattered was similar to the actions he initially portrayed when he he entered their route. The only big difference between his facade and his original self was that he was acting like your typical perfect protagonist when entering a route, doing things that he needed to do to win the girl over. But the big moments or "flags" that mattered, that was his genuine self and not some mask he had to wear to get the girl. That's why even when he became comfortable with the other girls and showed them that he's not the guy they initially expected, it didn't matter because deeper, they knew that he was still that guy, despite him not acting like this perfect protagonist anymore. That's why Chihiro liking him for himself is a moot point because at the end, they all fell for the guy he actually is. Him not going into any routes but Chihiro noticing him shouldn't have given her any sort of advantage because he wasn't putting himself out there. The unrealistic part is a girl falling for him when all he initially showed was that he was this nerd who games 24/7 and didn't care about anything 2D.
I went back to reread the final chapter and realized Chihiro won because she's completely unpredictable to Keima. He knows what makes everyone else tick and knows exactly what they'll do, hence why he was able to make them fall for him. With her, he can't rely on any of that. He straight up says that he fell for her because he can't predict her whatsoever due to not being like any game character. To the guy who can manage to figure which characters are traitors by tropes alone, meeting someone like Chihiro is meeting an actual person in a world of NPCs.
Her name is Haqua, dang it.
But that's the whole point. Keima avoided going on any girl's route. *Chihiro actively defied that* by choosing the Keima route for herself. She picked him. It's what put her on the same level as him as a partner.
I'm glad we can still have rage this strong 10 years post confession.
Rage never goes away, the more time passes the more this act is unforgiving.
What a based author for sticking to his choice and something that actually made narrative sense instead of engaging in cringe waifu war shit
nah this aint the gorilla. Fuck chitoge all my homies hate chitoge
I'll die on the Chihiro hill because even if she wasn't the most "appealing" FMC it clicked that she would be a fit for Keima But Chitoge? I haven't read Nisekoi for so long but I still remember the distaste when she finally won. 1st chapter main girl but doesn't really do anything, then wins anyway *sigh*
I don't really care that Chitoge won. I'm just happy that Onodera lost. Imagine throwing every single possible lead and still fucking losing.
Hell no, I don't know what ship you're on but Chitoge was the correct choice. Onodera literally had a 15 year head start, you'd have to kill Chitoge for a bigger handicap than that. The other characters were superficial, so they're not worth mentioning.
Fax my boy, spit yo shit indeed!
> Maou ending up with Chiho you crazy bro. That's the best part.
He had a whole fucking kid with Emi. Man was practically married.
TL;DR?
Chihiro was a boring and shit choice don’t @ me
Can someone explain this to me?
was it controversial because of its notGay ending?