Yui Kotegawa

About Kotegawa, Yui

BWH: 88-59-87 cm Yui is one of Rito's classmates and stands out for being noticeably stricter than the other girls. Her uptight attitude about school morals stems from her childhood—she watched boys sexually harass her classmates and picked on her friends, so she took it upon herself to be the defender. That experience left her deeply resentful of boys and anything she sees as shameless behavior. She clashes almost immediately with Lala's carefree personality, viewing it as a threat to school discipline. Rito doesn't fare much better in her eyes at first; his constant accidents and misunderstandings make her convinced he's just another perverted jerk. It takes time, but she gradually realizes that's not actually who he is. She loosens up as the series goes on, though she remains more guarded than her peers. She ends up falling for Rito alongside the rest of his harem. The manga and anime portray her pretty differently, especially early on. The anime version makes her far more puritanical and harsh—her introduction episode is almost comically strict compared to the source material. Even after the anime tones this down, that initial impression stuck with anime-only viewers. The bigger issue is that a lot of her actual character development from the manga either got left out entirely or handed off to Haruna instead. The fantasy RPG arc in the OVAs, for example, features Rito and Haruna, but in the manga that role belonged to Yui. What makes this odd is that she was actually pretty popular. According to creators Saki Hasemi and Kentaro Yabuki, Yui was deliberately written as the only character meant to genuinely develop—the rest of the cast basically reset each chapter because of the slice-of-life format. That approach changed with To Love Ru Darkness, which had more of an actual plot and gave most characters real arcs. In the manga specifically, her feelings for Rito are way more obvious. She fantasizes about marrying him and raising Celine together, and this shift softens her personality noticeably as the series progresses. The anime hints at it but never commits to making it clear.

Content compiled by AnimeList.moe from publicly available sources.