WARNING: This post spoils the first season of Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! ABSOLUTELY. Proceed at your own risk.
Love and Other Delusions or Chuunibyou demo koi ga shitai, as it’s more commonly known, is a TV anime – based on a series of light novels – about a teenage boy named Yuuta. He, like most readers (and writers) of this site I’d imagine, spent his younger years dressing up in elaborate costumes, parading around his room and the playground in the guise of a superhero of his own invention; The Dark Flame Master. Apparently, this delusional behavior is so common and widespread in fictional Japan that the term ‘chuunibyou’, or ‘2nd year syndrome’, was coined to describe it and when we meet Yuuta, he’s entering high school and is determined grow up and put his chuunibyou very squarely in the past. So determined in fact, that he, literally, locks everything to do with his alter ego in a box and hides it away from the world. Unfortunately, his plan to live a normal adolescent life is turned on its head when he crosses paths with a girl named Rikka.
Rikka is crazy. She’s nuts. She’s is right smack bang in the middle of a serious case of chuunibyou and she does not care who knows it. She wears an eyepatch, which she claims holds back the power of the ‘Tyrant’s Eye’, which is differentiated from her other, very normal eye only by the fact that she usually wears a single gold contact lens, and weaves every last element of the real world into her twisted superhero fantasy, right down to detailing her dislike for tomatoes by claiming ‘the red ones’ deplete her mana.
Understandably, Yuuta don’t need that shit. Not when he’s trying to start his new, ordinary, fantasy-free life. Unfortunately the universe has other plans and Yuuta and Rikka do gradually grow closer and closer together along with a whole cast of equally unlikely friends. As delightful as the characters are though, it’s the romance between Rikka and Yuuta that really steals the show.
Although Yuuta wants as little to do with Rikka as possible at first, It doesn’t take long for her strangeness to become strangely endearing and eventually, Yuuta and Rikka develop a pretty adorable friendship. Admittedly it’s mostly based on casual domestic abuse and the fact that she lives directly above him but it’s adorable all the same. When Rikka starts to develop feelings for Yuuta, she reacts to it like she reacts to everything else; by assimilating it into her fantasy. The only problem there is that her feelings are real, and even in her delusion, she still has to deal with them. While she’s doing that, Yuuta is struggling to accept the fact that in his attempts to leave his chuunibyou behind him, he’s fallen in love with a girl who can’t function outside her own. Does love stand a chance?
Rikka’s older sister, Touka, is as close to an antagonist as we get in Chuunibyou demo koi ga shitai. Determined to get her sister to grow up and move past the traumatic family event that caused her chuunibyou, Touka shows Rikka no sympathy and eventually convinces her to move away to their grandparents house in the hopes that a fresh start will snap her out of it once and for all. Under the impression that Yuuta also wants this, Rikka spends her last few days in town trying to be normal and guys, seriously, it’s honestly one of the most traumatic things I’ve ever seen on television. She abandons her eyepatch and alienates her friends and at no point does it make her any happier. It doesn’t make Yuuta any happier either, and by the time she vanishes in the night, their relationship has fizzled out completely. Chuunibyou is a fun show, but take it from me, the last few episodes are seriously upsetting.
Thankfully, the finale brings with it some much needed redemption. Yuuta finally realizes that he fell in love with Rikka because of her craziness, not in spite of it. One John-Cusack-boombox-outside-your-window moment later, Rikka realizes that real world love is just as crazy as her fantasy world and that in Yuuta, she’s found someone who knows that too. So yes, love wins in the end and the two ride off into the sunset. Literally. That’s actually what happens. Here’s a gif to prove it.
So why are Rikka and Yuuta my favorite fictional couple? Well, think about it; They’re two people who, against the odds, fell in love. When society said they had to grow up and change themselves, they said no. Because in each other, they found acceptance for who they really were, delusions, imperfections and everything in between and in the end isn’t that what love is about? Finding someone who puts up with, and encourages, all the stupid little things that make you happy? I think so. So Rikka and Yuuta are, for my money, the most romantic fictional couple for being the only ones to call love out for what it really is; a crazy, brilliant delusion.