1. Short answer: it started with "the only one who can beat me" and ended with "the person whose choice matters more than my power"
Meruem didn't fall for Komugi the way people usually fall in love. It most likely started with shock, rivalry, and obsession: she was the one person the King could not beat, no matter how many times he tried.
He discovers the only person who can beat him
→ recognizes exceptional ability
→ loses repeatedly despite learning
→ admiration, curiosity, and fixation grow
→ fear shifts from losing games to losing the person
→ reunion becomes more important than domination
→ he asks for her remaining time and respects her choice
So yes, the "he liked her because she was a strong woman" take works well as the spark. But skill alone doesn't explain where he ended up. All those games, Komugi betting her life on her play, the way she never backed down on the board even while afraid of him, and his panic when she got hurt slowly turned respect for her skill into love for her as a person.
By the end, he doesn't want to own her. He bows and asks if she'll spend his last hours with him. The all-powerful King puts one human's decision above his own authority.
2. How his feelings change in the story
Nippon TV's official episode summary says that while playing Gungi with Komugi, the King took back his own declaration, offered her a break, and that meeting her was slowly changing him.[1]
2.1 At first, she was just another game to win
Meruem had crushed the masters of other board games and believed his mind was unbeatable. Komugi was just the next opponent. He wanted the win, not her.
2.2 Losing again and again made him respect her
Every time Meruem came up with a new move, Komugi was already a step ahead. A girl who looked weak in every way, physically, socially, and in daily life, kept beating the King at the one thing he valued most: a contest of the mind.
His worldview was simple:
The strong have value
The weak are consumed
The King stands above everyone
Komugi broke all three at once. Someone who looked weak was overwhelmingly strong, the King was not at the top, and the one who was supposed to take everything kept having victory taken from him. That's why he couldn't stop playing.
2.3 From opponent to someone he had to protect
The turning point is when a bird attacks Komugi and Meruem saves her on reflex. "Keeping a useful opponent alive for the next game" doesn't fully explain it, and Meruem himself is shaken by what he did. By now he cares about Komugi herself, not just her Gungi skill.
2.4 Seeing her again mattered more than ruling the world
After he comes back from the Rose bomb, Meruem has lost part of his memory and is irritated by a gap he can't name.[2][3] When Welfin says "Komugi," it all comes back. He declares the fight over and bows to Palm to ask where she is.[4][5]
From that moment, the Selection, ruling a nation, and winning stop mattering. All he wants is to see Komugi.
3. Can one name really bring a memory back?
It's not as far-fetched as it sounds. There are different ways to pull up a memory: free recall (remembering with no hints), cued recall (remembering after a hint like a category or name), and recognition (knowing something when you see it). Doctors actually test these separately. The Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test gives category hints for items a person can't recall on their own, to figure out whether the memory is stored but hard to reach, or not stored at all.[6][7]
So here's a simple way to read the scene:
Meruem cannot independently search for Komugi
→ the proper name is supplied externally
→ the name activates linked games, places, people, and emotions
→ the network restores not only information about Komugi
but the self that developed through her
In other words, the memory wasn't wiped. The path to it was just cut off.
That said, this isn't a realistic picture of dementia. Meruem is a fictional creature who survived an explosion, nearly died, and had his body rebuilt. The closest real-life comparison is temporary memory loss of the past (retrograde amnesia) or trouble retrieving memories. In real patients, a hint might bring back only bits, nothing at all, or just a vague sense of familiarity.
4. Remembering Komugi brought back the person under the King
Before he remembers her, the revived Meruem is close to a perfect, absolute ruler. He senses the whole palace with a massive En, appears in front of Welfin almost instantly, forces him to submit with pure presence, and never doubts he'll be obeyed.
But once the name comes back, he doesn't force the information out of Palm. He lowers himself and bows.[5]
What came back wasn't just a file on Komugi. It was the personality he built through playing with her:
Power permits taking
→ another person has an independent will
The King's objective is supreme
→ access to Komugi must be requested
Humans are inferior as a species
→ one human can matter more than the world
So when fans say "he became human the moment he remembered Komugi," that's spot on. Not human as a species, but as a person who understands other people's will, loss, needing someone, asking for help, and running out of time. Komugi's memory was the key that unlocked the humanity he had built inside himself.
5. Were they equals? Only on the Gungi board
Calling them "equal lovers" erases Komugi's actual position.
Outside the game, Meruem held all the power. He could decide whether she lived or died. She always spoke to him politely, never saw herself as his equal, and to the very end described staying with him as serving him.
On the board, though, it flipped:
Social reality: Meruem >>> Komugi
Gungi: Komugi > Meruem
That narrow reversal changed everything. In the one area Meruem cared about most, he had to learn from her, lose, and ask for another game. He couldn't make the relationship work just by protecting her or owning her.
After his memory returned, it flipped again, this time off the board:
Earlier: the King summons and Komugi obeys
Finally: the King bows and asks others for access to her
That doesn't mean they became equals in real life. It means Gungi and his final choice broke his belief that power automatically decides who matters and who gets a say.
6. Did Komugi love Meruem romantically?
We have to be more careful here than with Meruem.
The story never clearly shows Komugi wanting him romantically or wanting to be his partner. What we can clearly see is awe toward someone far above her, gratitude for being saved, warmth toward the one person who took Gungi, her whole life, seriously, attachment to the best opponent she ever faced, happiness at being needed, and the devotion to stay with him even knowing it meant death.
So the fairest way to put it: awe, gratitude, love for a fellow player, and devotion overlapping into a deep bond that can also be read as romantic.
Meruem's side is much more clearly romantic: he chose her over ruling the world, accepted that she could say no, showed her his weakness, and asked her to be with him at the end. He may never have known the word "love," but the story strongly supports reading it as his "beloved" or his "nameless first love."
Their feelings weren't perfectly matched, but by the end they truly needed each other, and both chose to be together.
7. "He loved her because she kept beating him": does that hold up?
It fits who Meruem was at the start.
He wasn't a normal human man. He was born a King and had never had his status, body, or intelligence threatened. So losing didn't have to feel like a humiliation to run from. It could feel like proof that she was something incredibly rare.
Komugi wasn't just smart. She was the only one who kept proving, game after game, that the King was not absolute.
One defeat
→ anomaly
Defeat after a new strategy
→ recognition of ability
She remains ahead after repeated growth
→ admiration of a superior opponent
Repeated interaction
→ need for the person, not merely the contest
Near loss
→ fear of losing Komugi herself
A more accurate version than "he fell in love because he lost" is:
He found the only person strong enough to keep beating him, and his admiration and urge to learn from her turned, through countless games and the fear of losing her, into romantic love.
The story doesn't show that Komugi being a girl was required. A man with the same skill and character might have triggered the same intense attachment. "Strong woman" is a fair reading, but we can't prove "woman" was the core reason.
8. What psychology research can (and can't) back up
8.1 Smarter women: attractive or intimidating?
Across six studies, Park, Young, and Eastwick found that when men imagined a woman who felt distant, they rated women smarter than themselves as more attractive. But when a woman who was actually close to them outperformed them, their attraction and interest dropped.[8]
So there's no universal rule that losing to a strong woman makes you fall for her. For ordinary people, losing can hurt self-esteem and make them pull away.
Meruem is the unusual case. He has none of the usual male insecurity and starts out completely sure of himself. A loss that would threaten a regular person could instead signal rare value to him.
8.2 Seeing someone better can spark admiration, not just envy
Researchers separate hostile envy from admiration and "benign envy" (the kind that makes you want to improve). Admiration and benign envy are linked to wanting to get better, and admiration can also make you want to be close to the person you look up to.[9][10]
Meruem never tried to tear Komugi down after losing. He kept playing, invented new moves, and tried to improve. That looks much more like admiration than defensive rejection.
8.3 Admiration makes you copy; adoration makes you want to be close
Schindler and colleagues found that admiration helps people grow by copying the person they admire, while adoration (something close to worship) helps people grow by wanting to be close to or belong with that person.[11]
You can see the same pattern in Meruem:
understand her ability
→ learn and improve
→ require continued interaction
→ require her presence
The research doesn't prove romance, but it explains how respecting someone's skill can lead to both learning from them and wanting to be near them.
8.4 Spending time together in person can increase attraction
Reis and colleagues found that the longer strangers talked face to face, the more they liked each other, partly because they felt understood, comfortable, satisfied, and like they really knew the other person.[12]
Meruem and Komugi didn't meet just once. They sat at the same board again and again, tried new moves, and reacted to how the other was growing. That's a believable bridge from respecting her skill to loving her as a person.
Of course, more time together doesn't always help. Bad interactions can make people like each other less. What matters is how well they respond to each other.
8.5 Romantic attraction is about more than skill
Research on what people want in an ideal partner finds several dimensions, including warmth and trustworthiness, energy and looks, and status and resources.[13] Skill alone doesn't create love.
Komugi also showed consistency, honesty in how she played, winning without humiliating him, and full attention to Meruem as an opponent. Those traits help explain how admiring her skill grew into trust and love.
9. Counterarguments and limits
You could say this was just obsession with a stronger rival, not romance. That fits the beginning. But at the end, he cares about where Komugi is, what she wants, and spending time with her, which goes beyond wanting to win.
No sexual desire doesn't mean no romantic love, especially for a nonhuman character who barely knows what romance is. The story shows love through uniqueness, fear of loss, vulnerability, reunion, and dying together instead of through sexuality.
Komugi's side can reasonably be read as devotion to a ruler. Her romantic feelings are not a confirmed fact.
Finally, studies on humans can't diagnose a fictional hybrid creature. They offer ways to explain the story, not proof of what the author intended.
10. Conclusion: Komugi didn't just beat the King. She ended the version of him that could only be King
Komugi never beat Meruem physically. Outside Gungi she couldn't give him orders, and she was never his social equal. Still, she kept disproving the idea that the King had to stand above everyone.
The King always wins
→ he cannot defeat Komugi
The weak have no value
→ the weakest-looking person holds the greatest strength
Power can take anything
→ another person's will must be requested
The King will rule the world
→ Meruem chooses one person and his remaining time
The spark was probably fascination with the only opponent stronger than him. Countless games, admiration, learning, feeling understood, and the fear of losing her turned that spark into love.
And when the name "Komugi" brought his memory back, it didn't just bring back the girl he loved. It brought back the person he had become by loving her.
That's why their story isn't just "a monster falls for a girl."
It's the story of a King who learned what another person is by losing, found himself through her, and in the end chose being with her over winning.
