- Adorkable: Kae. Even when she's talking about otaku things, she's so excited about it that you can't help but find her adorable.
- Alternative Character Interpretation: On one hand, Mutsumi only saw Kae as a good friend before she lost weight, and has mostly been shown to feel no romantic attraction towards Kae until she became thin. On the other hand, since he had no idea what romantic attraction felt like until the others —sans Kae— told him to figure it out, it can be guessed that he did love Kae before she became thin and may have thought it was strong admiration that he felt towards her. Sort of confirmed in chapter 45, where it's shown that he developed feelings for her before she got thin, but wasn't aware of them due to inexperience.
- Base-Breaking Character:
- Kae. Opinions differ whether she's just a normal girl whose fantasies and otaku tendencies make her Oblivious to Love, or a half-assed character inserted in the series to keep it from becoming full-fledged yaoi. Her treatment of Mutsumi in her relationship with him during chapters 46 and 47 only break the base around her further.
- Yashiro became one after Chapter 49. Seeing that he's trying to come between Kae and Mutsumi because of his own feelings for the latter, and because he's intentionally trying to cut Kae off from Mutsumi, Yashiro comes off as kind of a prick and an unnecessary addition of drama where just Kae and Mutsumi's base problems would have sufficed. But others thought that his role in the story worked since he was right on calling her out for ignoring her own boyfriend, and his Secret Test of Character did hold some water.
- Mutsumi as well, for that matter. Where some see a kind, patient love interest who they feel had the most complete picture of Kae before falling for her, others saw a bland Extreme Doormat who barely did anything to win Kae over, and who they argued broke the Aesop of the seriesnote .
- Broken Base:
- Oh boy, Kae's weight loss. While some people are angry about it and consider it to be very unrealistic even by the standards of this show, others try to tell them that it's not all that important and mostly there for the sake of comedy.
- Should the boys have liked her from the start, or is the premise fine the way it is? One camp argues that the fat-shaming would be avoided and the harem dynamic would be more interesting, while others argue that if they had, it'd make her a regular harem protagonist that everyone pursues for no clear reason other than "s/he's nice".
- Fan-Preferred Couple:
- Despite getting Maybe Ever Afters with Nishina and Shinomiya, respectively, in the epilogue and a later manga by Junko outright confirming Nanashima/Shinomiya, shipping Igarashi and Nanashima with each other tends to be more popular due to the amount of Homoerotic Subtext the two get from Kae shipping them together and their relationship as best friends.
- In the West, there are also lot of people who prefer Mutsumi and Shinomiya together, due to them having a lot of Homoerotic Subtext moments together. This is despite Mutsumi ending up with Kae.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: Yashiro forces Kae to pick between her relationship with her boyfriend, or her obsession with Mirage Saga and Shion. By the finale she gets to have it both ways; she marries Mutsumi, but she names her child after Shion and has him on her high school photo.
- Memetic Mutation: "Mom, the mirror's broken!" note
- Ship-to-Ship Combat: It's Team Igarashi versus Team Mutsumi for the most part, with some different ships floating around here and there.
- Strawman Has a Point: While no one denies he's a Hypocrite for only seeing Kae's old figure as the true Kae, many felt Mitsuboshi had a point when he took fault in the other boys because they only seemed to fall in love with Kae after she lost weight considering it was already a fairly common complaint about the whole premise.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Some people think Kae should have stayed chubby as it would have made for a more interesting dynamic, as well as a lack of Big Beautiful Woman support in manga.
- Ugly Cute: Even though it's supposed to be undesirable, Kae's fat form does spark a certain charm in people.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/KissHimNotMe
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