YMMV / Chobits

• Adorkable: Hideki's awkwardness and silly shenanigans when dealing with Chii makes him all the more endearing.
• Awesome Music:
  • The ED sounds like Queen led by a small Japanese girl.
  • The opening theme "Let Me Be With You", from the same group (Round Table ft. Nino) that did the Welcome to the NHK OP, is one hell of a banger.
  • The Dark Chi Theme. It makes you feel not just the suspense of action sequences, but truly the emotion behind them too. Not only is it beautifully composed, but the musical flow typically goes PERFECTLY with whatever scene it's set against. Be it Chii's defending herself against Dragonfly or Hideki rushing into a Hopeless Bossfight in order to play an RPG together with her. It's never inappropriate when used and it's always the perfect choice for the scene.
  • "Yasashisa no Shouzou", a soft, slow piano and violin tune that manages to be sad, happy and sentimental all at the same time. Usually popping up in soft, emotional or sentimental scenes, the song is a Tear Jerker on its own.
• Cult Classic: It has fallen into obscurity over the years despite being once one of Clamp's most popular works, but there's still a nostalgic fanbase that remembers its unusual charm.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The manga ending. We're supposed to be happy that Hideki and Chii can be together, but society is still implied to be falling apart from humanity's obsession with Persocoms, Chii is explicitly not sapient which makes the entire relationship feel awkward, and the idea that Hideki and Chii can be happy despite not being able to make their relationship physical (aside from some easy-to-miss implications that might not be the case) is ruined by all the virgin-shaming the story has piled on Hideki up to this point.
• Fan Nickname: "Dark Chii" for Freya, as she looks almost exactly like Chii save for her darker clothing and more serious personality.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Referring to Freya as "Dark Chi(i)" (though she was called that a lot before her actual name was revealed) gets some fans riled up.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The view that the reader may have to empathise with a Japanese-centric worldview in order to enjoy the series becomes this when CLAMP released Gate 7 a decade later. That series requires readers to know their history on the Japanese Sengoku era.
• Just Here for Godzilla: During the series' heyday in the 2000s, most people were invested in the series because of Chii and the pretty outfits she wears in official art, with rarely any discussion about the plot or any of the other characters. She was a very popular subject for fanart and cosplay as a result.
• Les Yay: With Chi's other self, her twin sister Freya.
• Memetic Mutation:
  "Gentlemen! I have made love to this machine! And now, upon retrospect, I ask, WHY?!"
  "Um, because she's hot?"
  "Oh, right."
  • The shot of Chi playing with a pair of panties◊, which has been parodied many times in GIFs in the mid-to-late 2000s.
• Moe: Oh, Chi...So sweet and innocent and adorable.
• Squick: Your tolerance for this series depends on how disturbing you find the premise.
  • Chi looks sixteen, acts like she's eight years old, and is an Innocent Fanservice Girl. It makes every moment of her nudity that much more awkward.
  • Chi's relationship with Hideki is played up as a "pure" and "innocent" romance, but even after Chi learns more about the world around her and comes to terms with her past, she's still heavily dependent on Hideki for many things and is as naive as a child. Their relationship tends to read more like father and daughter than anything else, which can make the romance between them hard to swallow for some people.
  • A lot of Chi's clothes come from Ms. Hibiya because Chi/Elda and Freya were built by her husband to be their surrogate daughters since she was infertile. While that sounds heartwrenching on paper, the fact that most of those outfits are obviously for cosplay (including a School Sport Uniform) can be a little suspect if you think about it for too long.
  • Minoru is 12, may not have parents, and is such a genius he knows how to build persocoms. Yuzuki is in a super modest Meido outfit, but his other four persocoms are all busty women dressed in maid outfits so Stripperiffic that they're essentially in bras or corsets with garter belts and a frilly apron. Minoru tells Hideki they're "only computers" and not to get so aroused, nor that they put out. ^note  He probably does it for the reaction he gets out of guys like Hideaki. He may have considered the whole thing an elaborate prank.
  • If you're disturbed by incest, then pretty much everything to do with Freya's backstory, namely her almost breaking down due to her unrequited romantic feelings for her own creator/father figure ends up being incredibly unsettling. While the series does play up how tragic her circumstances are, it's still a touch disturbing to hear a young girl talk seriously about falling in love romantically with her "daddy", especially since she seems to think that he might have loved her back if only he wasn't in love with her "mummy".
  • For that matter, why did Mr. Hibiya build robots that were supposed to be his children that anatomically correct? And put the reset switch there?
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The idea of a society where personal computers take the form of humanoid, often sexualized, androids is rife with potential for social commentary and exploration of our relationship to technology and how it affects relationships between people. The story does explore this somewhat early on, particularly with the subplots surrounding Takako and Yumi (Takako is ignored by her husband because he's attracted to their persocom, and Yumi has anxiety about having to compete with the "perfection" that persocoms have compared to flesh and blood humans), but the story ultimately puts more focus on the romantic relationship between Hideki and Chi and whether or not Chi is capable of sentience without further exploring the implications that come from humanity's relationship with Persocoms.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Many people feel this way about the anime compared to the manga. The anime adds a lot of lightweight filler subplots and messes up the original chronology. Also, the mystery of Chi's reset button, or the program she had that was such a threat to Persocoms is never properly explained, and she has a cheesy fake death sequence that makes no sense.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: With some overlap with What Do You Mean, It's Not for Little Girls?. Despite the cutesy art style and the fact that it's by the creators of Cardcaptor Sakura (which is aimed at young girls), the series is primarily aimed at an adult male audience and has a fair amount of Fanservice and mature themes. Barnes and Noble even put a "Not appropriate for children" label right above the Buy button on the listings for both the omnibus collections on their website. Despite this, it was still adored by teenage and preteen girls at the Turn of the Millennium anime boom, probably because their parents glanced at the covers (which all depict Chii wearing pretty, elaborate outfits) and thought it must be innocent and girly.