YMMV / Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku

• Awesome Music: The opening theme "fiction", by sumika. A cheerful, happy, catchy song very fitting with the series' tone.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Narumi. Many find her otaku habits and energetic attitude endearing, if not relatable, and her relationship with Hirotaka sweet and funny. Others, however, feel that she's too passive in her relationship compared to Hirotaka and she's only settling for him.
  • Kabakura. His more hot headed personality and Slap-Slap-Kiss relationship dynamic with Hanako both work to set him up as a foil to the more passive and Stoic Hirotaka. Some people find this to make him the most dynamic character of the central four whiles others find him to be far too abrasive. The fact that he's often the instigator of the a lot of the arguments between himself and Hanako often furthers the divide.
• Broken Base:
  • While it's one of the most popular Pixiv comics and was seen as very relatable to its audiences, many reviews (a lot of them also made by Japanese otaku) also criticized it for feeling like the characters were otherwise normal aside from their otaku-related interests and didn't act like how real otaku act, which is rather similar to criticism The Big Bang Theory received regarding its nerdy main characters.
  • Kabakura/Koyanagi definitely have their fans, but some fans felt like their Slap-Slap-Kiss relationship got repetitive and stale, and that their constant fighting in the office looked less like they were in love and more like relationship problems further down the road.
• Designated Love Interest: The manga is great at dropping the point that you don't need any type of Love Epiphany to get into a fulfilling relationship, but at the same time Narumi and Hirotaka's relationship is so low-key that sometimes it really does appear that they're just friends. Narumi even realizes this In-Universe, noting that their dates tend to end up with them going off and doing their own things for a while more often than not.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: It's virtually impossible to find someone who doesn't adore Naoya, Hirotaka's younger brother.
• Les Yay: Narumi and Hanako often engage in low-key scenes of this, usually with Hanako calling Narumi cute and Narumi drooling when Hanako cosplays. They're close enough that one of their coworkers briefly interpreted Hanako's statement that they were "kindred spirits" to mean they were together. They even use the affectionate nicknames "Hana-chan" and "Naru" on each other.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Kabakura/Koyanagi get a lot of positive press, especially from those who don't like the manga or the main pairing, and a lot of fans admit to read the manga solely for them. Their close relationship despite being at each other's throats at work every day, as well as the fact that they've been together since they met in high school, endeared them to a lot of the audience. It helps that they're both deliberately drawn as attractive characters too, as well as approving in their taste in media.
• Signature Scene: Hirotaka asking out Narumi on a date, which is what starts the whole plot. This would've been a run-of-the-mill shoujo love confession scene, if not for the fact that the proposal's content is about grinding materials and levels for a video game. Hilarity Ensues as Narumi straight up accepts the whacky offer and starts the relationship.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Kou's entire arc is that she looks like a boy and that her friendship with Naoya sort of hinges on it, but that doesn't stop the readers from getting confused as all hell. The author even had to put a disclaimer after the initial reveal, telling the readers that their (eventual) relationship isn't a Boys' Love subplot.
• Woolseyism: In one scene, Kabakura gets on Hirotaka's case for using "ore" as his personal pronoun at work, since it's too rough and informal for a business setting. Hirotaka corrects himself and uses "boku", which is somewhat more polite, if less than ideal (earlier that scene, Kabakura uses "watakushi," the most formal way of saying "I", on a call with a client). In the localization, Hirotaka starts out by saying, "It's me" casually, then corrects himself to say it in a slightly more formal manner.

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