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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"Don't fall in love with her... She'll just make you cry.", October 22, 2002
The ladies of CLAMP are known for two types of manga. The first is "average schoolgirl becomes magical girl, saves world," such as their most successful work to date, Cardcaptor Sakura. The other is "prettyboys with windswept hair swordfight between bouts of angst," such as X/1999. Chobits, set in real world Tokyo sometime in the near future, is something different. It has - dare I say it? - themes.Protagonist Hideki Motosuwa is a typical college student. He's forthright and reliable, but struggles with his studies, has a lousy job, and secretly owns an enormous collection of pornography. His greatest shortcoming is a seeming addiction to porn, which is played - perhaps overplayed - for laughs in this first volume of the manga. While he's surrounded by beautiful and personable women, he becomes tongue-tied and paralyzed around them, often unable to do more than blush and silently obsess over the size of their chest. Fortunately, these women are amazingly forgiving. None of them are shocked or offended when they find a dirty magazine on his floor, or a video on his TV. Instead, they perform a philosophical shrug and assume an amused "boys will be boys" attitude. One night, Hideki finds a small girl lying unconscious in a dumpster. He panics until he notices her unusual ears, which identify her as a "persocom." Persocoms are the home computers of the future, humanoid robots designed to be physically perfect and programmed to fulfill whatever their owners desire. Persocoms, despite their appearance, are not intelligent, and don't have feelings, although a well-programmed one can fake both. In short, they're not people, but sophisticated tools. Charmingly, the world of Chobits also has "laptop" persocoms - five inch miniature versions - and persocom PDAs the size of a key chain charm. Astonished to find such an expensive piece of hardware, Hideki takes the snow-haired, amber-eyed persocom home. When he activates her, all she can say is "Chii," and that becomes her name. Chii has no memory, and apparently no operating system. She is sweetly childlike, quick to smile and eagerly imitating everything she sees - including the poses in Hideki's ample collection of porn. There are several scenes in this first volume in which Hideki scrambles to eliminate some new cache she's discovered; fortunately, this sort of thing becomes less frequent and obnoxious in later volumes. This sudden change in Hideki's everyday behavior begins to speak to the themes of Chobits. Here is a young man who surrounds himself with images of imaginary, idealized, willing women, who suddenly finds himself in possession of an idealized, arguably imaginary woman. Left alone with his magazines, Chii could have become a doll. But confronted with the reality of her, Hideki's instinct is to treat Chii like an actual person. Moreover, when he finds she has the capability to learn through observation and imitation, he begins to teach her as if she were a younger sister. Hideki does not mold Chii into what he wants her to be, as most men do with their persocoms. Instead, he fosters her individuality and self-worth. Persocoms appear to have had a profound impact on society. "A City With No People," an eerily symbolic children's book read by Chii, seems to refer to them when it says, "Being with 'them' is fun. More fun than being with people. Nobody comes outside anymore." Hideki's friends are troubled by Chii. His teacher, upon meeting her, murmurs, "Are all persocoms that cute? No wonder so many people would rather live with persocoms than real people." His coworker tells him, "My sister has (a persocom) shaped like a guy... I had one like that before. It's just... I got really sad." Most tellingly, a young persocom engineer warns, "No matter how cute she is, no matter how human she seems... Don't fall in love with her. She'll just make you cry." Mere character study is often not enough to interest readers, so CLAMP quickly stirs in the mystery. Who made Chii, and why was she in that dumpster? Why can she run without an OS installed? Why can she, unlike most persocoms, learn rather than rely on reprogramming? Near the conclusion of this volume, a discovery implies that Chii may be better off leaving her past forgotten. Although Chobits is often laugh-out-loud funny, the parts I appreciate the most are those that resonate with the themes CLAMP is exploring in the work. Hideki is a commentary on men who pursue the company of the imaginary "ideal" women in pornography and Japanese "dating sim" games instead of flesh-and-blood women. That this is explored through a cute robot girl, compelling that very male audience to read Chobits, is deviously ingenious. Meanwhile, Chii - so heartbreakingly earnest in her attempts to comprehend the world and herself, naively fumbling into painful comprehension of human relationships, sexuality, and her own identity - puts those male readers into the shoes of a young girl reaching maturity in a world obsessed with appearance. Chii makes me smile. She also makes me cry. I can count on one hand the number of manga characters that regularly have that effect on me. Chobits is a strong character piece written as a metaphorical comment on society. As a series, I give Chobits four stars. It's not a timeless work of art, but it *IS* very good. This volume gets only three because the art and storytelling are still settling in, which results in some rougher drawings and an irritating superabundance of "fan service." By volume two, both are up to snuff. Be aware that Chobits contains mature content. This volume includes language and partial nudity.
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