YMMV / Domestic Girlfriend

• Accidental Aesop: Out of all the instances of Teacher/Student Romance that occur in the story, only Miu and Kiriya come out almost drama free. The one difference between their relationship and others was that they only began going out after Miu had long since graduated, while when the rest acted on their desires in school, trouble followed.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Was Shu's wife genuinely as bad as she was made out to be by Shu when he explained why he was cheating on his wife with Hina or was she genuinely the innocent victim of an adulterer who was only telling a self-serving story to make himself look good and come off as the unwitting victim in an unhappy marriage? Notably, we never get to see Shu's wife with our own eyes to come to our own conclusions and while Reiji did seem to confirm Shu was stressed out by his wife, Reiji was also a friend to Shu so we can't be sure if he's not a biased party, because he may not have even gotten the wife's side of the story or only saw bits and pieces of the troubled marriage without necessarily seeing or understanding the whole story.
• Anvilicious:
  • Good communication and working together to solve your problems is the key to a successful relationship. It is repeated several times throughout the manga and is even the final lines chronologically in the final "bonus" chapter that ends the story.
  • Also that people should not be forced to conform to society's standards and should be accepted for who they are. Nearly every major character is a social outcast for one reason or another, and the manga repeatedly reminds the reader about how they are people who deserve care and respect too.
• Arc Fatigue: Natsuo chooses Hina after about fifty chapters, then they break up due to circumstances. Natsuo chooses Rui after about 100 chapters, but the story still continues even after high school, becoming a Slice of Life in the process. Though the love plot did continue after Rui broke up with Natsuo for about 50 chapters.
• Audience-Alienating Ending: Even the most staunch supporters of the winning ship hate the way the ending brought it about, between Tanabe coming back to meddle, Hina going into a coma for five years, Natsuo impregnating Rui and their decision to stay unmarried, and Natsuo deciding to marry Hina while still living with Rui and his daughter. Fans were downright confused and angry at how out-of-nowhere and out-of-character it all is, how it makes Natsuo look like a flaky lover, how disrespectful it is to Rui and her daughter, and how it throws away all 200+ chapters of development Natsuo and Rui had in their relationship— essentially making the vast majority of the manga completely pointless. The ending became so infamously hated that it eclipsed everything else about the series, and negative response to it eventually snowballed into Sasuga receiving death threats on Twitter over it. It frequently gets brought up in discussions of "worst manga endings.".
• Awesome Music: The series' OP, "Kawaki wo Ameku" by Minami, has been touted as one of the best Opening themes in the Winter 2019 Anime lineup. Moreso with the full version.
• Base-Breaking Character: Tokiya Kajita. His introduction as a potential love interest for Rui has resulted in a lot of fans of Rui despising him out of fear that Rui will eventually end up with him instead of Natsuo. It hasn't helped that Hina has no such Pair the Spares counterpart, or rather, a love interest that wasn't as antagonistic as Tanabe was. Not that it matters anyway, since in the end, Rui doesn't end up with either Natsuo or Kajita.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Natsuo and Rui sleep together in the first chapter. Not only is this completely out of character for both of them, but it is hardly ever mentioned again after this, and it has absolutely no impact on their later relationship with each other.
• Ending Fatigue: The series ended with 276 chapters and even then it had 11 extra chapters. There were quite a few fans wishing that the series would just end, especially due to the Arc Fatigue section above. It doesn't help that with each new romantic development, drama seemed to lurk around the corner, halting any sort of progress. Of course, when it actually did end, the conclusion itself pissed off the fanbase.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Although the end of the Manga is treated as a happy ending, that does not change the fact that Rui spent years of her life (including a pregnancy!) in a relationship with a man who had always carried a bigger torch for her older sister, and Hina lost a good five years in an accident and three more years recovering from it. Their family situation by the finale is also pretty messy, which Rui even acknowledges by her statement of moving out when Haruka gets old enough to question it. According to Sasuga, this was intended to be a sort of compromise so that both girls could get their happy ending while sacrificing something in the process, but to most fans, poor Rui gets the worse deal compared to her rival, who herself ends up married a man who now comes off as unreliable, putting into question just how long the relationship will last.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • While the manga is a hit, the Oricon rankings are at the lower side even with an anime (about 20k), but it has an active online following in the West due to the soap opera plot being so addictive.
  • Latin American readers freely admit to loving this series. Some have commented that it reminds them, for better or worse, of Telenovelas they're familiar with.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In the English dub, Austin Tindle and Monica Rial played siblings in Black Clover. Here, Tindle's character Natsuo has a one night stand with his future step-sister Rui, who is voiced by Monica's younger sister, Natalie.
• Ho Yay: The manga has quite a few scenes where the (heterosexual) males lean their faces reeaally close to each other (Kiriya sensei and Natsuo), holding hands (Natsuo after finding out Kiriya sensei is his favorite author), and even Kissing Under the Influence. It's all played for laughs.
• It Was His Sled: Thanks to Memetic Mutation and much online discussion about the ending, about the first thing anyone learns about this series is that Rui gets pregnant and Natsuo marries his teacher Hina. The vast majority of discussion about Domestic Girlfriend is about the ending, primarily how terrible it is.
• Memetic Loser: Rui, mostly because of the fact that despite getting pregnant with Natsuo's kid, she lost a Love Triangle with Hina, who was was in a coma. It also doesn't help she's a blue short-haired girl, who tends to get memed on due to how they tend to lose in love triangles.
• Memetic Mutation: The ending brought us two, thanks to Gigguk:
  • COMA STRATS
  • Black Comedy jokes on how Rui was a chef but lost to a "vegetable".
• Moment of Awesome: Rui gets two -
  • She slaps Shu for two-timing her older sister.
  • Then, Rui brushes off Hina's concern about the supposed incest nature between her and Natsuo since they aren't technically blood related.
• Never Live It Down:
  • Rui will never live the fact that she loses the love triangle to Hina despite being pregnant with Natsuo's kid.
  • Alex is usually only ever remembered for the drunk moment where he attempted to rape Rui.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: Hina vs Rui, where fans of both sides will argue on and on about who will be with Natsuo in the end as the story continues. Eventually Hina is proven the victor, although it did little to stop the arguments among the fanbase about who should have won- even some fans who wanted her to win thought that the way it happened was incredibly stupid, out-of-nowhere, and disrespectful to everyone involved.
• Spiritual Successor: A lot of comparison to Scum's Wish came after this series' animated adaptation, due to both having more emotionally involved plots, the protagonists having crushes on their teachers, and more importantly, sex as a major component of both series. Add the fact that DomeKano takes place during and after high school where Scum was isolated in high school for all of its run, and the fact that both series have very controversial endings, and you have this trope.
• Trapped by Mountain Lions: While they are admittedly occasionally interesting, the manga's tendency of giving every character who has as much as a name their own subplot draws out the whole story immensely.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Early on, Natsuo calls out Shu for having an affair on his own wife with Hina. While he is right in all the things he says, Shu himself does note that Natsuo is doing this partially because he appears to have feelings for Hina himself. Eventually, Hina calls her relationship off with Shu and enters into a relationship with Natsuo. This, of course, puts her in a different, but still precarious position because later on, her relationship with Natsuo is discovered and she's forced to leave the school. Given how Natsuo tried to help Hina out of one toxic situation but ended up landing her in a different, but equally scandalous scenario, his moral lecturing in front of Shu and Hina can come off rather flat. One can't help but feel that Natsuo is technically in the moral right... but for all the wrong, selfish reasons of wanting Hina for himself. And then he and Hina break up and he ends up in a relationship with Rui instead... only to change his mind and dump Rui for Hina after already getting her pregnant. While Rui was the one who called off the engagement, encouraged Hina to marry Natsuo, and forgives him for it and left him on good terms, in addition to still being in Haruka's life throughout his separation with Rui, this has the effect of making Natsuo look like a hypocritical philanderer who toys with the hearts of the women he supposedly loves, a fact that Rui lampshades and directly tells Natsuo in the last few chapters.
• Values Dissonance: This manga is surprisingly western friendly for the most part, although there are still some examples of this:
  • There is a lot of emphasis on how Hina and Natsuo's relationship going public would be a disaster for his career. This is because in Japan merely being associated with a scandal like this could tank public perception, regardless of whether it was his fault or not. In the west, he would be viewed as clearly the victim and Hina would take all of the blame regardless. The sympathy might even help his career, which is the opposite of what it would be in Japan.
  • Hina not wanting to go to the police when she is being stalked by her ex-boyfriend is due to a Japanese perception that you deal with your own problems and going to the police for what is essentially a domestic dispute would be a significant failing on her part. To western eyes, she's being selfish and stupid. Somewhat subverted when her friends and family also criticize her for not getting the police involved sooner, and she herself later admits that she made a big mistake in not doing so.
  • Occurs in-universe where the American-raised Al doesn't understand a lot of the typical Japanese cultural norms and fictional tropes.
• Values Resonance: For a manga, Domestic Girlfriend is quite progressive by Japanese standard in a few ways that carries over to western ideals:
  • LGBT+ characters, of which there are a few, are treated like normal people and not jokes and Natsuo (a straight male) wants to raise awareness about gay rights.
  • Rui eventually decides she doesn't need a man in her life and chooses to live as a single, working mother. Granted, very few fans were happy about this, especially since Natsuo ends up looking like the worse parent in the main story.
  • Women professionals aren't expected to retire because they get married and pregnant, and some are shown as being the main breadwinners for their family. The only major character who disagrees with this is the villainous Tanabe.
  • While drug use isn't glamourized, drug addicts are depicted as normal people who need help as opposed to simply being violent criminals.
  • Both the Japanese Rui and her Mexican-American housemate are the victims of racism in the United States, and the treatment of immigrants by right-wing Americans is heavily criticized.
  • The manga is highly critical of dismissing women because they are either too old or not pretty enough.
  • The manga is very sex positive.
  • It promotes the idea that one should only Marry for Love and never out of obligation or responsibility.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Little Girls?: With its authoring by a woman, its sensual nature, the attractive male characters, and the soap opera like drama that fuels the plot, some readers come out fully convinced that it's a shoujo or josei. They would be wrong on both fronts, since the manga runs in Weekly Shonen Magazine. Though that means it qualifies for another trope due to its subject matter.
• The Woobie:
  • Poor, poor Hina. She goes through hell and back over the course of the manga.
  • Rui, considering that she spent years of her life with a man who made her pregnant but ultimately left her for her sister. She did also have a tough time in America with a spiteful and racist co-chef.

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