#i would say that if you aren't hooked by the time [redacted] shows up For Real then it might not be for you

[soubiapologist]

Hi, this might be a silly question, but my mind is stuck on this. So a few hours ago I watched the first episode of the Loveless anime for the first time, and I am intrigued. After the first episode I was a bit confused and decided to take a moment to check the wiki for the fighter & sacrifice deal, just to make sure I got that part of the world building—this turned into a rabbit hole and I’m left with some more confusion.

So what I gathered so far: there are people born with magical abilities and there are normal people without magic. The first group is also the one that has soulmates, sort of? Which then brings up the fighter & sacrifice thing. And here’s where I’m hung up: why are the teams fighting each other? Like does all their fighting training from childhood on have a bigger purpose? It looks like the ones with magic abilities are a minority so training and making fighting each other the main deal seems… counterintuitive? In all the digging I did I realised how little that whole aspect was brought up. Maybe it’s a me issue—either bc I went in with a wrong impression/expectation or just my impatience/not trying the manga first.

So now I wonder: how important is that world building in the story aside from it being the setting that enhances/enables some of the abuse? Does it get more fleshed out in the manga or is it left vague bc it’s really more about the characters themselves, their developments, trying to heal their traumas etc (which is totally fine)? I just walked into this curious about the fighter & sacrifice dynamic that I had heard some vague stuff about before trying the anime.

Thank you in advance :)

ok so hiiiii thank you for sending me this aaaaask i have no idea why i'm the person of all of us you picked to ask loveless questions but i'm so humbled omg......... <- ego inflating massively and kicking my legs back and forth and giggling

ugggghh this is really hard to answer because a lot of stuff in loveless is either left vague intentionally or not um. finished because the mangaka fucked off for like half a decade and has shown signs of like. mulling around on the idea of returning but it's been dead in the water for half a decade and there's still a LOT of unanswered questions but i'll do my best to answer what i thhhhhiiink you're asking?

i've read that yun kouga was inspired to make loveless in part by the buddy battle media that was popular at the time like pokemon/digimon etc but idk how accurate that is it's just something i read on twitter when shit was Blowing Up a few days back from some rando i don't have an actual source on that but ANYWAY yun kouga loves Fucking Tropes and Deconstructing Them And Being Fucked Up With Them it's a whole Thing so...... keep that in mind lol, she loves to present you with something and then go PSYCH YOU THOUGHT and then when you're like MAN she really got me wtf she goes PYSCH GOT YOU AGAIN and this continues on for many many year. where was i going with this. ANYWAY!!!!!!!

so the thing about the soulmates system which is what i'll call it for convenience's sake going forward is that it isssss one of those things we don't have a lot of information on, haha. we can make a lot of assumptions about the symbolic meaning of it but we don't really know on a literal level enough to say where it came from or how it like. WORKS, but on a meta level loveless is VERY invested in the power of language. i believe in one of the essays published in the tokyo pop releases it's mentioned that in the spell battles the spells are influenced partly by like the amount of strokes in the kanji or something idr i donnnnn't have my copies of either the TP or viz releases on me and i don't recall them being included in any scanlation i've seen. loveless is one of those series that does involve some cultural signifiers that are hard or even impossible to parse as westerners but i don't think that they make up so much of the story that it takes a TON away from the story if you don't get them.

mild spoilers ahead;

i CAN tell you that midori and ai aka breathless do show up again, several times (they are cute and i love them) and do have narrative significance, especially ai. i think in the beginning they're just setting up the spell system and letting you know that it's a thing and telling you about the dynamic between fighter and sacrifice for the most part. i don't think the battles themselves are that important outside of kind of being action setpieces and showing the dynamic between the characters BUT the POWER SYSTEM that they use for the battles and the fact that the battles are a thing at all is very significant to the themes of the story. if that makes sense haha. it's sort of hard to explain without like. doing a play by play of literally every part of the story and also without spoiling soubi's uh........ deal so to speak which really recontextualizes basically the entire story once you find out about it somewhere between volumes 3 and 5 i don't. entirely remember. also the whole deal with seimei is uh........ ((gesturing vaguely and grimacing and looking back at the audience for help)) integral. to the understanding why they're fighting in the first place. the first part of loveless is sort of a convoluted slog of bullshit because of characters intentionally obfuscating information for various reasons but it is. mostly intentional in this. loveless is at its core a story about systems of power and an exercise in exploring disempowerment within those systems and having a literal magic battle system using the thing that we most commonly use in the really real world use to navigate interpersonal relationships (language) is an important facet of exploring that, despite the LITERAL battles not really representing that, the EXISTENCE of the battles does, if that makes sense? it also relies heavily on visual language, such as the thing with the cat ears and the bondage, which both seem like fetish bullshit (and honestly definitely probably are to some degree) but both have extremely important functions w/r/t the narrative and storytelling regarding disempowerment and interpersonal relationships.

tl;dr they are fighting for a reason, the reason these people have powers isn't really explained but it's sorrrrt of implied to be some kind of bloodline + genetic thing at one point or another but we don't really know for sure, [the following is purely my opinion] my reading of it is that it's a criticism of the way the nuclear family enables abuse partially through the idea of a One True Love which is something popular in shoujo, and loveless is a deconstruction of a lot of bl and more broadly speaking shoujo tropes.

additionally i would like to say that you are not going to understand what is going on in loveless from one read i would say it takes at least two to really start DIGGING into the meat of it and frankly every time i've reread it i've noticed something new to think about. it's deep! it's dense! it's the nekomimi mariana trench. loveless is an investment. it's like a mortgage or something