Welcome to the Anime Walk of Fame, a series of retrospectives on the many characters of the anime world. You'll see all your favorites along with a few that deserve more than their reputations give.

So sit back relax and enjoy the show.

Naru is Flatout Insecure

For our next few entries, we are looking at characters that I don't like anymore, I find that over time, characters can easily fall out of favour as your tastes mature, it'll make more sense as it goes along and were starting with Naru.

Naru is the worst kept secret of Love Hina's plot, being Keitaro's promised girl and the fact that Ken Akamatsu styles Naru on his own wife makes her the only choice.
While I figured that Naru had a lot to offer to begin with especially when Keitaro was quite the sorry excuse for a male, it really flips things over when you read through the manga that Naru is actually horribly insecure and Keitaro actually grew to be respectable.
Naru's romanticized view of meeting her promised man at Tokyo University burned out her vision and she even failed to pass first time, the more Naru was called out, the worse she got, even after beating the spirits of Hinata House to confess to Keitaro and literally french him on the beach they landed on, the final book just threw in another spanner instead of end by dragging out Naru's insecurities to it's maximum.
Looking back, Naru just made Love Hina drag for so long and robbed us of an awesome love confession ending.

Mutsumi is the Smartest Character in Love Hina

I'm a huge apologist for Love Hina because the anime never did the series justice and the manga was brilliantly written, but it wouldn't be nearly as good without Mutsumi Otohime.

Mutsumi started as the character that could've been Keitaro's promised girl being as she was also present at the beginning of the series when Keitaro made the promise.
Mutsumi also failed her exams multiple times, even worse than Keitaro did but her bad health and luck was always her undoing as opposed to a lack of intellect, in fact about half way through the manga she performed her most genius act in getting Naru and Keitaro together.
At her home town in Okinawa during a visit she loses her memory and she's made to believe that she's a child and playing with Keitaro as his girlfriend, this comes to a zenith when she ends up staging an actual wedding and is about to marry Keitaro only for Naru to call out to stop it, it's then that it's heavily implied that she faked her memory loss all along and did it to bring Keitaro and Naru together, succeeding in what is argubly one of the most genius acts in the anime franchise's run.
While I never really liked her role as the ill girl that always collapsed, a joke that wore out it's welcome pretty quick, her other traits more than made up for it.