chobits

Chobits (ちょびっツ) is a manga and anime series created by CLAMP. The original manga was published from 2001 to 2002 by Kodansha. The English manga is published by TOKYOPOP, and the American translation is imported to Australia by Madman Entertainment. Chobits is well known for being one of the few CLAMP stories marketed heavily towards a male audience.

Story

The story centers around the life of Hideki Motosuwa, a repeat student ("ronin") attempting to get into university by studying at Seki cram school. One day he stumbles across a "persocom" - a computer designed to look and act like a person; in this case a beautiful young woman - lying out by the curb with a pile of trash bags. He takes her home and turns her on, then discovers that not only does she not even know how to talk, but she also doesn't seem to have any operating system installed. All she can say is "Chi," so this is the name Hideki gives her. The story follows Hideki's attempts to teach words and concepts and behavior to Chi while he attends school, holds a job, and makes new friends (many of whom have strong opinions of persocoms). Meanwhile, Chi seems to have a mysterious background and there are people who want her for themselves, and at the same time Chi seems to be developing feelings for Hideki while she looks for "The Person Just For Me." The story questions whether there can truly be love between a human and an artificial person, and whether or not such emotions are healthy. The series and the manga also contain quite a bit of humor, mainly centered around Chi's attempts to learn about her environment and her ignorance of the usual social norms. A few moments have an ecchi flavor, but with the intent of contributing to the humor of Chi learning the normal life and ways of people. An important piece of the Chobits story is a series of in-story books titled A City With No People, which are written about the main character. The final ツ character in the title is in Katakana instead of Hiragana because this is Chi's original user password (as explained in the story). The password program would not accept a complete Hiragana word as the password, so it was changed to incorporate a Katakana character. Hideki gave Plum/Sumomo the same password, but instead of having the last character in Katakana, he used the first character in Katakana.

Chi's password: ちょびっツ (chobitTSU)
Plum/Sumomo's password: チょびっつ (CHobittsu)

The manga of Chobits has a direct connection to the earlier CLAMP work Angelic Layer. In the manga, Chi's creator was also the person responsible for Angelic Layer (referred to in Angelic Layer as Ichiro Mihara, or Icchan). The anime has removed the connection between the two stories. There is also a connection to Cardcaptor Sakura. In the manga version, Tomoyo's mother, Sonomi Daidouji, makes a brief cameo appearance in Chiroru bakery, owned by Hiroyasu Ueda, in order to buy some sweets.

Chobits

Story

See also