To Love-Ru Episode 16 – Idol Status

This episode involves most of the cast of characters hanging out at a public pool/water park and Run is trying to grab Rito’s attention. Her plans eventually escalate to her trying to become an idol to impress Rito, but things don’t go as well as she wants them to.

Summary

Rito and the gang arrive at the water park and engage in the usual activities with Lala, of course, pulling out many of her odd inventions. Run tries to get closer to Rito and tries almost everything to get to him. She eventually thinks that everyone else is trying to keep Rito for themselves and tries to embarrass them by trying to strip them in front of him. However, this plan only ends up embarrassing Rito as she repeatedly pulls off his swimsuit instead.

Just as they find out that Run is behind all the trouble, everyone immediately puts the blame on Rito. But after Rito angrily expresses that it has nothing to do with him, Run gets a bit heartbroken and runs off. Run later comes across the idea to become an idol so Rito can look up to her. Run’s own imagination takes her on a wild trip on the path of supposed “stardom” (which apparently only lasted a few minutes or hours as they were still at the water park).

Run is confronted by a group of thugs and Rito arrives just in time to stand up to them. Despite his bravery, he’s not strong enough to take them on himself. Everyone else arrives and confronts the group of thugs as well and Lala comes in and finishes them off with a giant water gun.

And the episode ends with some sappy feelings of friendship and crap, blah, blah, blah…

Impressions

This episode started out okay. It had me laughing at some points and it was pretty good at first. But for some reason, once Run started the whole idol thing, it just got really boring. Run’s antics are pretty amusing since they always backfire in pretty amusing ways. But whenever she goes on those self-dramatizing (is that a real word?) trips it just makes me want to go in and slap the crap out of her.

Speaking of Run, I think the anime version of her might be a lot different from the manga version. In the manga she seems a little bit more mature and doesn’t go on those drama trips like she does in the anime. I think I like her in the manga a little better. Even the chapter when Run becomes an idol was done much better in the manga than the anime.

They really need to give Yami more screentime. These short scenes of her doesn’t do her any justice at all. Let’s have some Yami and Mikan bonding going on (not in that perverted way either).

Surprisingly, next episode seems to include the ghost, Shizu(Oshizu… I’m not sure which is correct version). I didn’t think they’d move this far into the series, but she might not appear much past this episode since there’s only about 8 episodes left.