YMMV / Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches

• Adorkable:
  • In many of Yamada's interactions with Shiraishi, he's definitely as friendly as can be, but somewhat awkward. As the series goes on, this trait is also seen in some of his interactions with other characters as he becomes less likely to take the Good is Not Nice approach.
  • When Shiraishi opens up and shows her more emotional side, she can be a bit clumsy, but nonetheless very charming.
  • Even though part of Hikaru's awkwardness is him impersonating his twin brother, he's also quite dorky and slow on the uptake on his own, but nonetheless charming.
  • Hotaru is socially awkward, but his politeness and friendly optimism makes him very sympathetic nonetheless.
  • Odagiri is more socially awkward than she’d probably like to admit, so the rare times she’s openly trying to be friendly usually result her being very adorable.
  • Otsuka's shyness and odd army games make her quite endearing.
  • When Tamaki takes a level in kindness, he often becomes endearing, obviously wanting to get along with others and make himself heard, but not always managing this.
  • Himekawa is awkward and clumsy, but that doesn't at all prevent her from being almost embarrassingly cute and friendly.
  • Arisugawa acts a bit awkward during her initial time with the student council, but it's obviously played for cuteness. Later on, she subverts it, often proving herself to have more refined social skills than most of the other members.
  • When Kurosaki is around Miyamura, he becomes really awkward, but is also nicer than he otherwise tends to be. He can also seem a bit awkward when he hangs out with others, but that's due to bad social skills in general.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Rika. Is she one of the meanest characters in the series, or is she a poor victim of circumstances? She definitely has done spiteful things, but she definitely also has a clear Freudian Excuse. Fan interpretations of her differ a lot and usually depend on whether the fan in question puts the most emphasis on her status as a villain or her status as a victim of being forgotten.
• Angst? What Angst?: Given how mentally broken Leona was at the start - to the point of shutting herself inside her room for a year, stopping taking care of her appearance, and throwing scissors after people who tried to talk her - she was pretty quick to regain her good mood and sanity. Granted, it did take Yamada some effort to get through to her, so she didn't get better in an instant, but a person in her condition in real life would definitely need actual psychological help.
• Ass Pull: Several:
  • How Yamazaki for example could know Yamada's wish didn't work as intended and instead gave birth to new witches is unknown. They are needed to tie the story together but the overuse of the trope is starting to make them more and more blatant. However, this can be justified that he knew this informations while he was still searching for witches with Leona,forgotten it when he was mind wiped by Rika and regains them after his memories are restored.
  • The second set of witches shows that you can use the witch powers through indirect kisses (such as kissing a doll and having it kiss people) which - other than the obvious pro of not having to kiss all sorts of random people - has the added advantages of not letting witch killers copy your power and making two-way powers one-way. It is an example of how Tropes Are Not Bad, since it is a creative and fresh use of the powers, but it still seems quite contrived and made up on the spot by Yoshikawa with how no-one of the first witches learned to use their powers this way despite experimenting all the time.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • As much as Odagiri can be really supportive and helpful, she can also be really mean-spirited and bad-tempered. As such, she splits the fanbase somewhat; she tends to be well-liked by those who focus on how she is when she's at her best, and disliked by those who focus on how she is when she's at her worst.
  • Shiraishi is generally beloved by her fans for being kind, caring, and pretty, and disliked by other fans (especially Odagiri fans) for being somewhat "boring" (not showing much emotion, tending to be a bit passive) as well as too perfect and idealized.
• Broken Base: The series easily could have ended after the ceremony, around chapter 90 - everybody agree on that. So what breaks the base are discussions on whether there was any merit to continue the series. Some think it was the stupidest decision ever and that it was only done to milk the series for money. Some think the series is still worth a read, but that it seems pointless for it continue, and that it was at its very best during the first part and will never reclaim that glory. Some think that the new characters and plotlines are interesting enough for the series to have completely redeemed itself for the slightly weird decision of not ending - and that the second part may even be better than the first part.
• Captain Obvious Reveal:
  • Ushio getting a magical power of his own and becoming the instigator of the mysterious revolts happening at the school after the winter break. There were obvious hints that he had become able to use witch powers and was hatching evil plans - so the long, ominous build-up to the revelation that Ushio is the one who stole Kotori's power was a bit unnecessary since you just knew it had to be him. The only thing that wasn't correctly guessed by all readers was the nature of his power - some correctly deduced that he was a witch-killer, but others thought he was a regular witch like Kurosaki.
  • Nancy's status as the girl Yamada and Ushio saved in the street fight was painfully obvious, even by this trope's standards. More and more clues are given to it throughout her appearances, and when it's finally revealed that Odagiri wasn't the girl the two guys saved, it becomes clear that it can only be Nancy. Because of that, it's treated more like an Info Drop than the Ushio revelation, with Nancy indirectly confirming it by apologizing to Yamada for wiping his memories of the fight, and two chapters later explaining what actually happened.
  • Most fans foresaw that Himekawa was a witch. Due to the Law of Conservation of Detail, it was easy to conclude that she was going to have a larger role than simply being a pawn for the manipulation power - otherwise, she probably wouldn't have gotten two chapters of characterization before Yamada kisses her. When Nancy started to intervene on Yamada interacting with her, most were able to piece together the clues.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: The arc about the Telepathy Witch is set around remedial exams which both Yamada and the new Witch have to take. They use the telepathy power to cheat and make the grade with the help of all of Yamada's friends. After the exams an author's note says "Please don't cheat."
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Kimishima the archer girl has her fair share of fans despite appearing rarely and not even being a Witch, let alone aware of the magical goings-on.
  • Noa is probably the most popular witch next to Shiraishi and Odagiri (who are too important to be darkhorses), with many fans rejoicing whenever she makes an appearance, finding her crush on Yamada adorable even if it's purely comical. She actually becomes a Breakout Character for a while.
• Ending Fatigue: The series has become somewhat infamous for not ending when you'd expect it to. The pacing is never slow, the story just continues beyond points that sometimes look like ending points. Of course, continuing after chapter 90 is something the series will never live down in the eyes of a lot of the fanbase, but there are also other points - for example, after Yamada got his memories back, and when Yamada returned to the Supernatural Studies Club after his time in the student council - where some fans expected or wanted the series to end, and yet it didn't.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The final chapter is clearly intended to be a standard happy ending with a wedding and Babies Ever After, and for the most part it is, but... The wedding ends with Yamada stating that the witch powers may not have been real after all, but that he is nonetheless glad he went to Suzaku High. If it's true that the witch powers weren't real, then it means Yamada and co. spent all of their high school years in some kind of mass hallucination or mass psychosis, which doesn't sound very pleasant and surely casts a lot of Fridge Horror elements over any chapter involving use of witch powers.
• Fanon Discontinuity: In some fans' eyes, the series ended at chapter 90 and didn't continue, period. (Even before the anime came out and indeed ended at that point). It's not so bad as with certain other series, though, as plenty of fans can accept that the series continued, but getting them to agree on the quality of the second part of the story is very difficult.
• First Installment Wins: The first witch war - chapter 1-90 - is the most well-known and generally most beloved part of the series, especially because the anime - which may very well have doubled the (Western) fanbase - only covers that part. Even before that, the start of the second witch war broke the base, and many readers dropped the series, leaving a fairly large part of the fandom who either doesn't about know about the new characters and plot points despite their huge importance, or plain refuses to acknowledge them.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • Yoshikawa's former series, Flunk Punk Rumble, is very popular amongst Italian manga fans which was enough to invite Yoshikawa to an Italian comic con in 2013 - and since there is a longer interview with her about Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches from the con, this series seems to have become just as popular in Italy. Going by the internet (for example pages like DeviantArt), the Spanish fandom is also proportionally larger than the English-speaking one.
  • Character-related example: Odagiri is, despite being a Base-Breaking Character to some degree, probably the most popular character in the Western fandom, with only Shiraishi giving her some competition. In Japan, she is still very popular, but in the Weekly Shonen Magazine character popularity poll, she only gets a third place behind Shiraishi and Yamada.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Yamada acting all confident about meeting Rika, given how much her magic messes up his life afterwards.
  • When Yamada asks Arisugawa why she wants to join the student council, she replies it'll get her qualifications for college - if she graduates from a good college, she can get a job in a good company, marry a rich employee and get an easy life. This makes her seem rather lazy and greedy in a comical way. However, as her younger self later reveals, she doesn't want to be lazy and greedy - she simply feels that this is the way her life was laid out before her, and is actually a bit frustrated from having a boring life.
  • Yamada telling Himekawa that they'd probably have become a couple if they hadn't suddenly lost their memories of each other is treated as a heartwarming moment in the chapter he says it. It becomes much less heartwarming later when it's revealed that he never had any romantic feelings for her and even fell in love with another girl while he knew Himekawa. This broke her heart so much that she saw no other way out from the pain than having everybody's memories wiped. So no, they wouldn't have become a couple.
  • When Yamada wants to rescue Shiraishi from her future as Tamaki's secretary, she tells him that he shouldn't worry since she'll probably still have time to come to the club, to which he retorts that it isn't about her time, but about the fact that she looked unhappy. Later, when Yamada himself is made the student council secretary, he barely ever has time to come the club, and Shiraishi and Itou's dissatisfaction with this is actually one of the things that fuel the conflicts of the second witch war.
  • For all of Shiraishi's The Spock moments, she is rather emotion-driven about the fact that she was Yamada's first kiss, doing everything in her power to be the first one he kisses after his supposed amnesia, and crying when she sees him kissing someone else. But as we find out almost 100 chapters later, she wasn't his first kiss. Yamada kissed Nancy's witches many times before he kissed her, and his first kiss was actually with Seishuin - a girl that he doesn't have much to do with.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: In chapter 161, Odagiri gives Himekawa advice on how to confess her love to Yamada. The fact that Odagiri, the quarrelsome Tsundere, genuinely supports and gives advice to a friend, can be seen as heartwarming in itself, but this trope really comes in when it's revealed a few chapters later that Odagiri herself had fallen in love with Yamada by that point. So she was apparently hiding her own feelings because she believed Himekawa would be a better fit with Yamada.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: When Yamada tells the other club members about Noa's ability and how he saw her past, Miyamura asks - as one of his standard perverted comments - if Yamada saw her take a shower. He didn't, but next time Yamada uses a witch power on Noa - much later, and another witch power - he actually does see her take a shower.
• Ho Yay: All over the place, especially since powers are transferred through kisses and everyone kisses everyone else eventually.
  • Miyamura has absolutely no problem with kissing Yamada for their experiments.
  • The President apologizes to Yamada and actually hugs him after Yamada's friends forget all about him.
  • Tamaki is really really desperate to form an alliance with him.
  • Sarushima making out with Itou several times to activate her power during her arc.
  • Shiraishi and Itou's friendship, being the series' only genuinely close friendship between two major female characters, has undertones of this. Itou is much sweeter and more touchy-feely towards Shiraishi than she is with basically anybody else, and even though Shiraishi otherwise makes it clear that she doesn't want to be kissed or held tightly by anyone else but Yamada, she has matter-of-factly put up with Itou kissing her to test her body swap power and later copping a feel of her breasts to check out the possible symptoms of a witch power (the others even point out that Itou just wanted to grope Shiraishi since witch powers are mental, not physical).
• Idiosyncratic Ship Naming: Fans who ship Yamada/Noa will sometimes give the ship the rather obvious name of "Noa's ark".
• Iron Woobie: Yamada becomes this full stop after meeting Rika. Losing all of his friends hits him very hard, but he holds his head high and tries to distract himself from the misery by putting all of his attention into his After-School Cleaning Duty every day.
• Jerkass Woobie: Rika and Kaori. Both clearly established themselves as villains by actively doing malevolent things (Rika ruined the lives of a soon-to-be romantic couple by wiping their memories of each others, and Kaori instigated the bullying of an innocent girl), but both have been given Freudian Excuses and have been shown to suffer just as much in life as their victims. In at least Kaori's case, she also couldn't foresee how much her actions would spiral out of control.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Memory-ception." ^Explanation A term invented by readers as a reference to the plotline of Yamada's lost memories becoming increasingly convoluted - to the point that there are even lost memories within lost memories.
  • "This was very flamingo." ^Explanation When Yamada and friends go to the zoo in a flashback, a Running Gag about describing animal traits ends with them using "flamingo" or "flamingoish" as an adjective to describe flamingos.
• Moe: The series clearly likes to go for this reaction, having a fairly large percentage of its cast made up by girls who are cute in various ways. Kotori seems to be the designated Moe character (it's even in her last name), but Shiraishi and Himekawa also get played for endearingness very often. Even characters like Odagiri whose general personalities are not that cutesy have several Moe moments.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Yamazaki crosses it when he has Asuka swap bodies with Shiraishi - who was completely innocent and unaware of her own body-swap power at that point - and she is locked inside Asuka's house, all alone and confused, for days.
  • Yuri putting Odagiri under his power in order to (try to) make Ichijo win the president election. One thing is simply resorting to a dirty trick to win which is despicable, but not necessarily unforgivable - but he crosses the line by choosing Odagiri as his victim, since she did her very best to make Tamaki a worthy candidate as one of her most open-hearted displays of friendship in the entire series. Tamaki is obviously feeling betrayed, and Odagiri seems to feel extreme guilt.
• Narm:
  • Yoshikawa's rather peculiar way of drawing tears can make some of the sadder scenes look rather silly - because it looks like, at least at first glance, that sweat drops instead of tears are running down the character's face. On the other hand, it can also be a refreshing and actually more believable difference from shows in which crying characters have regular waterfalls appearing from their eyes.
  • Kotori is a shy, childlike girl who prefers to talk by pretending that her doll Satori is talking for her. It isn't that conspicuous during casual play scenes, but it becomes slightly ridiculous during more serious scenes, since it effectively means that she is playing with dolls when she is supposed to say something dramatic.
  • For a series that rarely tries to be overly dramatic, Odagiri acted very melodramatically when she tried to persuade Tamaki to run for presidency. It's fully understandable that she doesn't want to be alone, but her facial expression when she says it makes it look like he broke her heart or someone just died.
• Narm Charm: When Shiraishi, Miyamura, Itou, Tsubaki, Noa, and Ushio promise to help Yamada bring back everybody's memories, they make a pact by having their ice cream spoons touch each other. It makes for a pretty odd picture, and it's not too believable that anybody over the age of 5 would earnestly seal a deal this way, but it's nonetheless a very cute and friendship-enhancing scene.
• Nightmare Fuel: The scene in which Yamada tries to kiss Shiraishi to get her memories back, only for her to stare at him with a blank, evil look and challenge him to kiss her in a not very Shiraishi-like way - to reveal that it's actually Asuka in Shiraishi's body - is seen as somewhat creepy by many fans, especially because of the surprise factor.
• Obvious Judas: At the start of the second war, the story keeps throwing us hints that Ushio is turning to villainy, to the point that it's a Captain Obvious Reveal when it's finally made official that he's one of the masterminds behind the school chaos.
• Pair the Spares: Due to being mostly involved exclusively with each other in the second part, Ito and Tsubaki are neatly paired with each other without getting in the way of other pairings.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Ushio was The Scrappy for a long while, but loses some of the status when he is shown to have been a genuinely good friend to Yamada in the past. Back in the present, he finally does a Heel–Face Turn, and Yuri is presented as a worse villain who crosses lines that Ushio never quite crossed. He reconciles with Yamada, and the two of them have some neat Friendship Moments together. As a result, there are very few fans left who actually hate Ushio now.
• The Scrappy: Ushio was never a popular character, especially because of what he did to Yamada, but also because of a lot of fans finding his personality to be somewhat plain in general - and his popularity decreases even more when he's an actual villain, though in that case it's probably the intention that the fans are to dislike him. Unlike the first Big Bad, Yamazaki, Ushio never quite reaches the level of Evil Is Cool or Love to Hate, because he's more of a simple jerk and not a Magnificent Bastard. Nonetheless, he gets better later.
• Self-Fanservice: Noa is often drawn a lot more busty in fanart than in the series proper. Usually to emphasize that she is almost the same age as the other girls despite being young-looking.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: With the revelation that Yamada was once involved with Himekawa as a friend only, fans are divided among those who like Yamada with Shiraishi, those who like Yamada with Himekawa, those who like Yamada with Odagiri, and those who like Yamada with Miyamura.
• Shocking Moments: The moment when Yamada thinks he can finally restore Shiraishi's memory by forcing her to kiss him, only for "Shiraishi" to reveal herself as a body-swapped Asuka by looking at him with cold, blank eyes, really threw most people for a loop when they first read the chapter.
• Signature Line: "You can erase memories, but you can't erase the feelings behind them" - which is also the Arc Words for the Myth Arc of the series.
• Signature Scene:
  • The staircase fall in chapter 1, of course, being the thing that starts the whole story.
  • Yamada who, after some hesitation, asks Shiraishi to join the Supernatural Studies Club with him, after which Shiraishi is overjoyed and immediately goes with him.
• Stoic Woobie: Shiraishi at the start - she doesn't show much emotion and seems indifferent to the world around her, yet she is very much a poor Broken Bird from the bullying she has been put through.
• Unconvincingly Unpopular Character: Quite a few since the series thrives on characters that are both lonely (at their introduction) and sympathetic:
  • Arisugawa is a major example since that in the case of most of the series' characters with a Friendless Background, it's established that there is a clear reason why they don't have friends even though they are sympathetic people when you get to know them. In her case, there's no logical reason: She's friendly, outgoing, cheerful and humorous. She comes off as a person that most people would want to befriend...
  • Kaori is The Friend Nobody Likes in the Japanese chess club. She is very considerate and helpful towards the other members, yet almost all of them scorn her to some degree. Unless they're simply big jerks and think of her as a pawn, not an actual person, it's hard to tell why they dislike her so much.
  • Kotori only has a couple of friends in her huge class which isn't exactly much for someone who is kind, polite and very helpful. However, she is a much more justified case than the others in that students are weirded out by her playing with dolls and as such stay away from her. Those who have gotten to know her are generally fond of her.
  • Himekawa is kind, outgoing and extremely compassionate, and yet, she apparently couldn't make friends (before she met Yamada, a fellow friendless person) just because she is somewhat clumsy and a bit ditzy.
  • Leona is a Cool Big Sis and nice when you get to know her, so why she didn’t seem to have any friends except for Yamazaki back in their Supernatural Studies Club days is a bit of mystery.
  • Inverted with Odagiri. Despite having a hefty temper and often being impolite and arrogant, she is well-liked by pretty much any person who has gotten to know her. (She does have her good sides, of course, but her bad sides are tolerated more than you would expect)
• Unexpected Character: The mysterious last witch in Takuma's group isn't found for an awfully long time, and we have no clue of who he is. It turns out Takuma himself is the last witch. Or rather his second personality is.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Not an offensive example, but the scene where Yuri rides his bike to school to make a stylish and unusual entrance may not translate well to all readers. For example, countries like Denmark and the Netherlands have an incredibly widespread cycling culture, and it’s more the rule than the exception that high school students ride their bikes to school if they live nearby and don’t have a driver’s license/car. As such, Yuri’s Big Entrance may look like a completely banal entrance to these readers.
  • In chapter 227, when Yamada says he hasn't thought about his future and doesn't have to a clue about what he'll study at university, Shiraishi starts a speech on how great it is that Yamada says he doesn't know. To many Western readers, it can seem really weird that she showers him with praise for just giving a simple and neutral reply to a question. However, in Japanese culture it's seen (especially in formal contexts) as somewhat rude to straightforwardly say "I don't know", and people will often try to tiptoe around the question and give non-answers instead. Thus, Shiraishi praises Yamada because she thinks it's cool that he is so true to himself that he's willing to break some norms for his individuality.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: The class representative of Yamada's class who is flat-chested, has short hair, a plain-looking face and thick glasses obscuring her eyes. When she had a major role in chapter 198, a lot of readers (who couldn't remember her from her earlier appearances) thought she was a boy, only to be surprised by the next chapter in which her school uniform clearly shows that she's a girl.
• The Woobie: Almost every named character to some degree (except for some of the yet-to-be-redeemed villains) since the series thrives on Dysfunction Junction, but of course some more than others. Characters that stand out for having had pretty damn miserable lives are Yamada, Shiraishi, Noa, Rika, Kaori, and Leona. (Rika doubles as a downplayed Jerkass Woobie since at least some of her suffering comes from her own exaggerated and groundless jealousy).

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