YMMV / Chihayafuru

• Adorkable: Despite being a beautiful, aloof epitome of Lady of War in karuta for most of the time, Shinobu's love for Snowmaru, her fashion senses and tendency to make weird facial expressions at times (probably most notably during her first on-screen encounter with Arata) make her cross into this territory.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Chihaya/Taichi, mainly due to Taichi being popular out-of-universe and Arata, well, not there most of the time. Shinobu/Arata is quickly getting popular too since their first on-screen interaction.
• Les Yay
  • Chihaya shows considerably more affection for the female teammates than the male ones. When a classmate asks her who in the karuta club would she date, Chihaya cheerfully responds, "Kana-chan!".
  • Chihaya also has a huge, mostly rivalry, but often expressed like a romantic one, obsession on Shinobu, and Shinobu reciprocates interest to some degree.
  • One of Megumu's teammates seems to have a crush, or at least a very strong Pseudo-Romantic Friendship for her. Later Chihaya even gushes over that player, calling her a 'perfect gentleman', and apparently sees her pretty much as a White Prince.
• OT3: On Archive of Our Own, the most popular pairing is actually Chihaya/Arata/Taichi, which handily solves the love triangle while also resolving the strong (and, especially on Taichi's end, complicated) feelings between the two guys.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: As love triangles are wont to have, Taichi/Chihaya and Arata/Chihaya both have their squabbles over who has the better relationship and which boy is the better boy.
• Tear Jerker: The treatment Arata received in elementary school. His classmates started talking about him behind his back (sometimes with him in the room), started avoiding him for petty reasons, and mocked him in a karuta match when Taichi had an unfair advantage over him. Not to mention Taichi's cruel actions being the result of him being jealous of Arata for receiving attention from Chihaya.
• Threesome Subtext: The love triangle can verge into this at times, due to Taichi and Arata's complicated friendship with one another as well, most notably when Taichi says he understands how Arata feels about Chihaya because she belongs to both of them.
  • Another example comes in the second season when, during a heartfelt evening conversation with Taichi, Arata says that the only team for him is the one with the three of them. And then Arata blushes and says awkwardly while averting his gaze that that probably sounded kinda gross because he was looking up at the moon at the time, a reference to a poem brought up earlier in the episode about a lover thinking about the object of their affections while gazing at the moon. The only 'team', huh?
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Little Girls?: It is a series about a high school girl who gets into competitive karuta (a type of card game). It's often mistaken for a shoujo but ran in a josei magazine.