I hate Chobits, as I’ve made clear more than once. I have enough on my plate that my essay on it is long in coming, but in the meantime, I recommend the above YouTube video from a user by the name of “Hiding in Public.”
Hiding in Public has a very different take on Chobits from my own, but I find it quite thoughtful, so I think it is worth hearing, and after I get my own essay up, his discussion will make for a good counterpoint to what I’ll have to say. Check it out.
My nine-part series, “Why I Hate Cardcaptor Sakura,” is consistently the most popular thing on this blog. In the last essay of that series, I promised a similar discussion of the insanely popular and bestselling Chobits, which is CLAMP’s homage to—or possibly their sly takedown of—the magical girlfriend/robot girl genre.
I hadn’t got around to this for several reasons, the main one being that, due to life circumstances, I did not until recently have access to my two-volume omnibus set of Chobits. The other reason was that I detested the story so much that I was loathe to pick it up again. I couldn’t even bring myself to finish it on my first attempt.
Of course, as an author, I’m not above swiping stuff even from things I hate. Readers familiar with my novel Jake and the Dynamo may have recognized that I borrowed from Chobits—or mocked it, rather—in my depiction of Grease Pencil Marionette.
This essay may take me some time to complete, not because it’s hard to express my hate (that part’s easy), but because it will take a lot of time to explain, thoroughly and carefully, exactly what’s wrong with Chobits, exactly why it is a failure as a story, a failure as a hamfisted and amateurish attempt at philosophy, and generally loathsome.
As I stated before, my hate for Cardcaptor Sakura is fanboyish hatred, the kind of melodramatic grousing that fans do about things they like. But my hatred for Chobits is the real deal. It is disgusting, wretched, and more importantly, stupid, in every possible way.
One thing about it, though, is easy to point out and mock, and I have done so in the little meme I put together above. The story is actually, I kid you not, about a girl robot with a reboot switch capable of reformatting her drive, located in her nether regions. And this isn’t some dirty little gag created for a cheap laugh, either: it is actually the centerpiece of the plot, leading to the burning question of whether the protagonist will be able to shag his computer console because of her stupid switch. The whole damn story centers around where this robo-chick has her on/off button.
And even though at least three of the characters are computer experts, brilliant enough to build their own hyper-realistic girl robots, not a single one of them, not one, suggests the simple solution of disconnecting or moving the damn switch.
I friggin’ hate Chobits, man.
