Let’s take a trip into the flashback machine:

A few months ago, Mio Akiyama of K-ON! fame was voted Most Desirable Wife (in terms of 2D) by readers / users of Recochoku, tailed by Hinagiku Katsura of Hayate no Gotoku!, Taiga Aisaka of Toradora!, and many other girls that hailed from big-name, recent (if not current) anime.

Aside from noting the fact that, clearly, exclamation marks make anime girls more appealing wives, sometimes, one has to think:

That kind of girl, isn’t the kind you would call a ‘wife’ at all!

Let me share my experience from the world of the visual novel, of the harem anime, of the obsessive. Let me teach you about,

The Passionate Pursuit of Perfection in a Waifu LEXUS

Of course, I’ve had many favorites over the years as well. I know my childhood, growing up with crushes on bimbos from shonen shows and empowered women from shoujo. One can forgive those sorts of mistakes of youth, sometimes even the ones that continue until adulthood. The fixations that one always finds slightly strange but can never pull away from, such as (#18) Hanyuu Furude –

Excuse me, I may have made a bit of a slip there.

(official art)
But indeed is it just that gut feeling that can drive one to waifu classification? That way you get stunned by certain girls in the manner that a character in a 2D fighter is stunned after having their shield broken.

Unfortunately, a crush – (#17) Hitagi Senjougahara would call it a fascination – does not a relationship make. Certainly, it’s a far too serious lesson that far too many otaku-alikes make in real life.

And that’s why the L stands for Liking!

Of course ‘liking’ is such a vague word; how does it differ from a crush or a fascination or an obsession? I like anime. I like cheese. Do I like (#16) Satsuki Yumizuka?

After a lot of soul-searching and game-playing I found out I only ever pretended to like Sacchin for her lack of a route and her Another Arc Drive versus Shiki in Melty Blood; indeed, it was the curiosity that led to the crush which led to the misinterpreted feelings.

Naturally, I talk about these feelings like they have even the slightest of meanings in real life, but of course this is just the difference between, say, punching someone every time they say ‘Isn’t it sad, Sacchin’, and laughing and ending with a heavy sigh.

It’s probably curiosity that is so often misinterpreted by anime fans as something resembling ‘liking’; this is almost natural. Things we don’t understand are exciting. Confusing. Scary. Intriguing. Maybe all at once.

Certainly this is something that occasionally you may want a wife to be but in the end you just can’t tell which part of your feelings are real, and which are fake, when your target someone who you know nothing about and only observe from behind telephone poles.

(art by Newhonpo)
Speaking of real and fake, that’s an argument in itself for humanoid acronym substance (#15) Yuki Nagato, the perennial favorite for Haruhi fans the world round and arguably one of the most successful silent-type characters ever (in terms of fanbase). Given that she’s the one intersection between my list and Recochoku’s, it can be seen that her popularity is enormous.

Of course, whether one wants to marry someone who is massively famous is up to personal taste; it has been proven time and time again that my tastes lean against things that are cool and popular, but this of course boils down to a pretentious slant of mine.

Nevertheless, the fall from grace, so to speak, of Nagato, is not due to that but due to the letter E: Emotion.

“But CCY, Nagato’s fantastic!” you say. “She’s cool-headed and she’s smart and she’s unbelivably hax and you named your blog partially after the glasses attraction that you gained to girls like her!”

Perhaps you may be right on at least one count there. Nagato is the world’s smoothest criminal (one must agree that Dissapearance Nagato is so moe-inducing it’s criminal), can probably beat Deep Blue in a game of chess and Tiger Woods in a game of golf, and just for kicks, is pretty good at altering the fabric of space and time. Always a plus in my book.

But when it comes to waifu material, Nagato and practically every other girl in the silent-girl archetype can be considered pretty close to first on the chopping block. You think that stoic demeanor is cool now, but when you’re having dinner, out shopping, or in bed (stifle your nosebleed, sirs) struggling to make the slightly semblance of conversation, wouldn’t you want someone who can string together more than two syllables at a time?

Naturally, the argument for silent girls is very similar to the tsundere archetype; if you hammer at them enough, eventually they will open up and the floodwaters of blushing and talking and moe and shiny rainbowy wonderfulness will rush out, and verily it will be glorious.

I call nonsense. If you’re getting into the waifu business with someone with the intent to change them into someone that they’re not already, you’re approaching it entirely the wrong way. Find someone that you like the way they are.

So, until I get a more solid stance on Dissapearance Nagato, let’s move on.

(art by Shaa)
One might imagine that the concept of ‘range’ also falls under this umbrella of the word ‘emotion’. As boring as it is to have someone who is stoic all the time, equally such, someone who is gushingly, gushingly sappy all the time, can be painful.

We’re all hopeless romantics here, and I know it’s hypocritical to say this in a waifu post, but … just a little realism is nice sometimes?

Haruka Nogizaka (#14) may have a word edgewise in here one way or the other; naturally, the big-breasted soft-spoken popular anime-loving rich girl is an archetype that you will find -very difficult- to match in real life. However, such flaws in her character are made up by admittedly subjective judgments on not just her character, but that of her match, Yuuto Ayase (unranked).

Really, the two of them are such an adorable fit that it’s hard to not be slightly envious of Yuuto and his noble yet undeniably realistic position as a man who has a chance at scoring a big-breasted soft-spoken etc etc etc, which is why Haruka trips the waifu meter here.

Still, Yuuto’s done a good job here. I’ll defer to him. I feel that’s fair.

But rather, perhaps the stronger case against Haruka, and especially, Yuumi Hoshino (#13) is a different kind of realism, perhaps, emotional realism.

I don’t question that Haruka and Yuumi have feelings for their respective men. And while Haruka just wanders around in that baneful land where shonen romances go to die – failure-to-confess purgatory (even if they are essentially a couple at that point) – Yuumi’s situation is even more dire, and far-fetched.

In a sense, Yuumi is so close, yet so far from the heart of a person like me.

Naturally, I sympathize with her shy personality and intensely strong (and adorable) crush on Kouichi; certainly it should be the case that many an anime fan be in exactly her situation. And so, it becomes easy to root for someone like her.

(art by kishida-shiki)
But here (and indeed in KimiKiss as well), I can’t help but rule against her. Her emotions are pure but her viewpoint is horribly, horribly stuck up in the clouds. The classical romantic fallacy of desiring a goal, but not knowing what to do after accomplishing it.

It’s a marriage-breaker. Focusing on only admiring the other person, putting them on a pedestal without bridging the gap between the two, is foolish.

You could say that “X” in LEXUS is not actually a letter, but a X, meant to be put between the names of two people who are destined to be together, showing their unison as one person. Not one worshiping the other, but two people, working together, bonding together.

Alternatively, I originally ruled it “eXquisite”, which is to say, just like with Reimu and her cups of tea, I prefer a more refined taste. Which is to say I’m a pretentious arse and don’t want to admit drooling over moeblobs.

Noe Isurugi (#12) is not a moeblob. Nor is she a case one would not file under ‘exquisite’. Certainly her tenuous grip on reality, in a way that if her name was prefaced by “The Melancholy Of” it would be totally believable, makes Noe a very complex and dynamic character.

Just like in True Tears, you could say she is out of place here, both in terms of writing structure and waifu list. Probably she is the first case of subjectivity in a list like this, where even though I lay out these guidelines, a “How to Be a Waifu for Dummies”, you can have someone who fails the ‘Liking’ test hard still rank all the way up here.

Noe is interesting. I can’t place the pin on her. She’s a different kind of interesting than Satsuki, that kind of person I feel that even if I knew for a million years I wouldn’t understand. And that’s why, as digiboy attested, it’s something not worth pursuing, myself.

(official art)
Moving back onto the topic slowly, Misaki Yamamoto (#11) is another girl who breaks all the rules in the list and yet still ends up one higher. It must be the lollipops.

I don’t know much about her other than her relatively level-headedness (something that is admired but something that shouldn’t sell the Brooklyn Bridge).

And certainly she is not an ‘exquisite’ taste in my sense, which believes that there’s a certain level of physical attraction that becomes too much for waifu material – the point where you may be focusing on the wrong assets, say, of this person’s character.

Still, in some senses, I am a man. And so Misaki is found to be a very intriguing personality. As are many of the Hatsukoi girls.

Otoha Kagura (#10) is yet again other opportunity for you to throw tomatoes at my head for being 1) inconsistent and 2) pretentious by naming random girls from random shows everyone thought sucked.

Certainly Otoha doesn’t seem like a 10 nor a number 10 when you look at her; she ends up somewhere on the list by sheer force of ‘genki girl’, a trait I feel would be exceptionally worthwhile in waifu material land. Certainly as you becoming an aging, lifeless husk of a salaryman, that never-ending smile and bright demeanor of a genki girl becomes exceptionally valuable, right?

It seems as such that smile will never change, anyway, and I must also admit that the seventh episode of H2O with her touching parting (amidst all the chaos) was what put her over the top of other girls of her caliber and ilk, especially her prototype Asa Shigure.

(art by Sayori)
Well, we’re halfway there and running up on 2,000 words fast, and what I’ve learned is that for some reason, raw emotional ranking of the girls is not matching the numerical ranking at all. For instance, I’ve expounded about 10,000 more words on KimiKiss than H2O, as far as I recall.

Perhaps that’s a tell to how rationally I -attempt- to approach such a thing as waifu selection; a reflection of my serious business roots? The mark of trying to pick a intelligent choice for such a ‘lasting’ thing as a waifu, rather than going by seat-of-the-pants gut-shot moe feeling? Time will tell.

Until then, stretch, get a cup of water, talk to your neighbors for a bit. We’ll reconvene this Waifu 101 class in a week or so.

-CCY