It’s one thing to profess to be in love. It’s another thing to be an actual couple, whether you know it or not. This idea has become the basis for many of the popular anime series today; boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, and vice versa. The girl may or may not know the boy’s love for her AND vice versa, girl gets captured by villains, boy risks all to save girl from villains, the list goes on and on. It’s a catching virus, especially when Valentine’s Day rolls around.

In an attempt to actually understand the workings of anime minds in love, the following list of the most popular anime couples (based on surveys, questionnaires, and the like) has been compiled to hopefully, gain better knowledge of why such people do the things they do for romance.

A Spoiler warning, however; some of the couples written about in this article may spoil some things for you, especially if you haven’t seen much of the series yet, so proceed with caution. You have been warned.


Targets #1 : Mushiest Couples (The Yoo-Hoo!-There-are-other-people-in-the-world-over-
here Syndrome)
Symptoms: Girls and boys becomes limited to each other’s names.
Usual scenario: Girl is klutzy / ditzy / naive, but guy thinks it’s cute anyway. Sweet? Maybe, maybe not...



1. Miaka Yuuki and Tamahome
Anime Series: Fushigi Yuugi

The Good: They are hopelessly, desperately in love, probably the kind of love one can find in fairy tales (this is especially true, in this case; in the series, Tamahome *is* a character from a book Miaka accidentally gets sucked into). Theirs is the ultimate love story-soap opera, where one sacrifices all to see to the other’s welfare. This may be fine and dandy, but...

The Bad: Individually, they seem intelligent enough, but whatever glimmer of sensibility they may have tends to fly out the window whenever they’re together. “Miaka!” “Tamahome!” “Miaka!” “Tamahome!” “Miaka!” “Tamahome!” Even the most erstwhile romantic tends to grow bored from listening to all their ramblings and repetitive declarations of love.


2. Mamoru Chiba and Usagi Tsukino
Anime Series: Sailormoon

The Good: They look pretty good together, for numerous reasons. Their fighting outfits (Usagi’s sailor fuku and Mamoru’s misplaced tux rental) even compliment each other. They fight from time to time, but they don’t really drag it out, unlike some other series that comes to mind (not in the later episodes, anyway)

The Bad: Ditto with the Miaka and Tamahome problem. “Usako!” “Mamochan!” “Usako!” “Mamochan!” Need we go on?


3. Erika and Richard
Anime Series: Daimos

The Good: Personally, there doesn’t seem to be any. Both parties involved seem to take heroics and sacrifice to the extremes.

The Bad: Where to start? Whenever they seem to think they do something that’s best for the other, it almost always turns out the exact opposite. The fact that they’re supposed to be enemies (gee, original plot) doesn’t help matters at all. They make Miaka and Tamahome sound like the two old guys Stattler and Waldorf from the Muppet Show. This is probably only true if one sees the anime shown in the Philippines, especially because they put too much hype in that series and emphasized too much on their Romeo-and-Juliet-esque love story.

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