Well, actually I finished this before I began reading Pretear, and also saw the anime way way before, probably around high school (2001?).

Inuyasha is a story about Kagome Higurashi a seemingly normal junior high school girl and a inu(dog) hanyou (half demon) named Inuyasha and their quest to retrieve shards of a jewel called the Shikon no Tama (Jewel of the Four Souls), which then turns into an adventure that includes a youkai kitsune (demon fox) child named Shippou, a monk with a cursed hand (can be taken to mean at least two things here :P), named Miroku, and a taijiya (demon slayer) girl named Sango. The quest for the shikon shards turns into a quest to defeat an evil being called Naraku, and the story begins expanding from there.

Well, as usual some events and characters differ between the anime and the manga, and the manga continues further on than the anime itself.

One thing that's been on my mind though is why there are such a lot of Kikyo haters out there. Well, yeah she was a real pest for the Inu-Kag shippers, but if you look at it from a non-biased (neutral, non-shipping) POV, she was more of the tragic character than an adversary (although admittedly a love rival for Kagome). Had circumstances been different, it may well have been an Inu-Kikyo pairing.

Well I am not a shipper of any sort, although I do occassionally read fics from this series, but still, though Kikyo started out as a betrayed, and therefore vengeful resurrected spirit doll of clay and souls, she still loved Inuyasha (although how she shows it IS kind of...twisted, but let's face it, she's dead, so of course she'd think of taking her love with her to the afterlife/hell where she "initially" probably ended up in).

Kagome does come off as a martyr for love, holding in her feelings of jealousy (although at times rather poorly, since she does take it out on Inuyasha).

These arguments I've presented are actually why I liked this manga, the "love-triangle" between two women, one dead and one from the future vying for the affection of a young inu-hanyou :P What's more fantastic than that?

Seriously though, I like the many character interactions and I see why a myriad of "non-canon" pairings are quite imaginable. There's also elements of "nakama" working together to achieve a certain goal, and then there is also a look at sibling relationships: like in Inuyasha's and Fluffy (Sesshomaru)'s case, Sango and Kohaku, Kagome and Souta...plus parent and child relationships or lack of (there are so many examples of this). Plus I like the "alternate world" feel which I sort of associate to Fushigi Yuugi as well.