Watamote: Episode 7

Episode 7: I’m unpopular, so I’ll enjoy my summer break

Tomoko starts her summer break playing tons of games and watching TV (including one of my favorite movies, Kiki’s Delivery Service), but starts to worry that she’s wasting all of her time. She starts looking for more productive things to do, and considers livestreaming a video of herself on Nico Nico Douga, but she’s too worried about what people might say to go through with it. Then, she realizes that a game she bought came with a ticket to a meet-and-greet with one of the game’s voice actors, and she starts researching ideas of lines she can ask him to record. Somehow, her “Gaagle” search leads her to horror stories, and she spends so much time reading them that she gets too scared to go to the bathroom alone at night and has to ask her little brother to walk downstairs with her. Later, at the meet-and-greet, Tomoko overhears the girl in front of her ask the voice actor to record a more risqué line than she’d thought appropriate. Suddenly, Tomoko is overcome with ideas of what she could ask the guy to record, and she decides to just squish them all together. Later, at home, Tomoko decides to edit the audio she recorded together with lines from the game and her own voice. Naturally, she gets caught doing this by her exasperated mother.

This episode started out awfully slow-paced. The scenes of Tomoko laying around the house and playing video games took a lot more time than was necessary to get the point across, and most of it wasn’t terribly interesting. It got better once it got to the point, though; there were some cute scenes involving Tomoko and Tomoki, which I always appreciate. The scene of Tomoko talking to the voice actor was pretty cute, and it was obvious that even there she felt out of place. Hearing the audio that she put together later on was another great scene, because even without understanding Japanese it was obvious how different the voice actress sounds when she’s  acting as Tomoko compared to when she’s playing Tomoko acting. Tomoko’s acting was totally deadpan in what she’d intended to be a romantic scene. The episode ended with another sweet moment between Tomoko and Tomoki. On the whole, though, I thought this episode was a bit mediocre; there’s been much better material in earlier episodes.

It’s interesting, though, that Tomoko is just as anxious in situations that involve her interests as in any other situation. A lot of socially anxious people feel better or worse depending on the social context, so I’d have thought that Tomoko would feel like she was more in her element in parts of this episode. But talking about anime or video games on a livestream was just as difficult for her as having a conversation about anything else, and I got the impression that Tomoko felt just as out-of-place surrounded by fans of an otome game as she felt buying clothes. I can certainly relate, but it’s something that stood out to me.