SaiTeru

"So let's just agree...When you and I combine our powers, nothing is impossible. We're invincible"

- Saiki's thought about himself and Kokomi (Chapter 218) SaiTeru is the het ship between Saiki Kusuo and Teruhashi Kokomi from the The Disastrous Life of Saiki K. fandom.

Canon
When Kokomi was first introduced, she was shown to be very conceited and a gold digger. As the most popular girl in school, she is highly sociable. She is a smooth talker, making her able to manipulate and persuade nearly everyone with her beauty and easily gets away from others with just simple excuses.

Being flirted on and getting extreme reactions is normal for her, therefore when Saiki Kusuo was not startled or star struck by her beauty she was puzzled as to why. With this reasoning, along with her stubbornness and pride, she started to pursue after Kusuo until she fully falls for him.

Chapter 16
On August 6th, Teruhashi's birthday, she is walking around aimlessly. Several men approach her and she nicely rejects their flirting advances, a normal for her. She notices Kusuo across the street, recognizing him from her class. She admits that she nearly forgot about him due to him being very quiet in school. She goes on to incorrectly remembering his first name, believing it is Kunio. Feeling sorry, believing he is having a dull summer vacation, she decides to go and talk to him. She greets him, he only politely bows and leaves.

Dumbfounded by Kusuo's brief and unfazed reaction, she starts on trying to get his attention, believing he is thinking about her being an illusion. However, no matter what she tried, Kusuo continued to ignore her. When Kusuo suddenly disappeared in front of her, she thought that Kusuo might be an illusion. Remembering her own words from before, she concluded that she was the one hallucinating about Kusuo and believed that she had fallen in love with him. It shocking Saiki and making him say "offu"

Still, Teruhashi remains unaware that he knows about her crush. One day, Saiki's class goes on a field trip, where the groups are drawn by lots. There, Teruhashi asks the gods to get Saiki's group, which is the paper she reaches for, until Saiki switches the papers up and she ends up with Takahashi. Teruhashi is still able to get into Saiki's group. When artiving there, Saiki takes a nap, where Teruhashi sees him. She takes off one of his control devices, sending her to another island. When waking up, Saiki is worried for her safety and checks if she's alright. When seeing that she isn't injured, Saiki is relieved but it fades away when he sees that there is a bear in front of her. He then teleports to her and punches the bear away, where Teruhashi thinks that she is dreaming and starts clinging onto his arm. She then wishes to be in a castle, which Saiki does. Then, she asks him to say "offu", which he is reluctant to do. He then uses Toritsuka to grant her wish, and takes her back to the hotel.

When Saiki tries to get Akechi back after he's turned to stone, Saiki turns up in another universe. There, the two are dating and act like a couple.

In chapter 242 of the manga (episode 24, season 2 of the anime), Teruhashi overexerts herself by staying up for several nights to memorise everything about her male classmates in an effort to make them happy while also maintaining her reputation. Saiki notices her efforts and commends her for being so perceptive and hard-working, saying that she "can read people like a psychic". However, due to her exhaustion, she passes out, and Saiki catches her. He is shown to be angry at their classmates saying "None of you noticed. Teruhashi-san noticed all kinds of things about you all, but not a single one of you noticed how exhausted she was". The boys seem to be more concerned about Saiki being close to Teruhashi rather than her actual wellbeing, seen by how they tell Saiki to "get off her", creating an obvious difference between Saiki's relationship with her and the others' rather shallow obsession with her. Saiki carries her to the nurse's office, and upon waking, the boys tell her that Saiki "showed up out of nowhere" and caught her. Teruhashi is shown to be touched, and ignores the boys to go and thank Saiki.

In chapter 280 of the manga, after Saiki's psychic power was removed, he was caught staring a long time on Teruhashi. Saiki admitted that she actually has a beautiful face.

Fanon
Due to its simplicity and the most attention from the authors, SaiTeru is the very first and most famous ship in the franchise. In particular, it was Teruhashi's crush for Saiki and her rivalry with other girls that were devoted to the ending animation of the anime adaptations. Either way, Teruhashi appears so frequently in the manga and anime as the character in charge of the romantic subplot that many fans of the ship mistakenly confuse her status as main love interest with Saiki's canon partner. In this regard, the fact that the franchise ended at a seemingly open end in terms of romance was found "disappointing" by many of them.

Many people enjoy this ship because both Saiki and Teruhashi have changed so much after they met each other. At the beginning, she had an interest in him only because he's not like the other boys who are amazed by her, however, throughout time, she started to grow genuine feelings for him, a remarkable development of this is when she rejected the man who got everything, Saiko, because she has feelings for Saiki. On the other hand, despite the fact that Saiki was always finding ways to make Teruhashi uncrush him, he still ended up saving her multiple times, for example is at chapter 182, when he realized Teruhashi was still thinking about him even when she was in a mixer. At that time, Saiki had actually smiled a little and then had all the guys who is after Teruhashi beaten up because he thought that they don't deserve her. This only means that Saiki also cares about her a lot.

Even so, due to the controversial attitude towards Teruhashi among work's fans, as well as the obvious popularity of slash shipping for the shounen franchise, this ship has many rivals, for example, Saiai, ImuTeru and KaiSai.

It is currently the third most popular ship on AO3 and the most popular on Pixiv among the fandom with 1680+ works.

Fandom
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PIXIV

Trivia

 * Saiki's Japanese Voice Actor said his favourite character in the series was Teruhashi Kokomi.