With this post, I'm caught up on Watamote. There will be another episode airing later tonight, so I'll do my best to get a review for episode 7 posted sometime tomorrow.
Episode 4: I’m
unpopular, so I’ll have a nice dream
I’m just going to be straightforward and say: This episode
is pretty fucked up. It’s fucked up in a way that you’d expect from moe
schoolgirl anime, but just to be fair, I wanted to give you a trigger warning for
discussion of rape ahead of time.
In the first segment of this episode, Tomoko overhears girls
talking about being molested on the train, and she starts to wonder if the fact
that she’s never been molested means that there’s something wrong with her.
Later, she actually does have a bad experience on a crowded train and
immediately realizes that wanting to
be molested was a terrible idea, but it turns out that it was actually an
accident involving a girl’s longsword. The second segment has Tomoko asking Yuu
for help buying a cute pair of panties, thinking that that will improve her
image. She has Yuu take her to a nice shop and – feeling uncertain and out of
place – asks her a bunch of invasive questions that I naturally viewed with my
yuri goggles firmly in place. (Tomoko: “Man, Yuu-chan’s really cute. And she’s
really nice. If a girl that cute were wearing panties that adorable with a
skirt that short, she’d accidentally expose her panties from time to time. If I
were her boyfriend…” – and the next part is accidentally spoken out loud – “It’d
get me so damn hard!”) Anyway, she buys a pair of frilly pink things, and after
she takes them home, she immediately misplaces them. Later on, in class, she
reaches into her pocket and pulls out a handkerchief to wipe her face with, and
just as the teacher approaches her desk, she realizes she’s rubbing her face
with her panties. The ending of the show has Tomoko shopping for a new game,
and lands on a pretty sexy boy’s love game. When she buys it, she gets a game
ticket, and ends up winning a “handy massager” (a Hitachi Magic Wand,
actually). Later on, using the Hitachi on
her shoulder while she plays the game, she falls asleep in her room. Her
father knocks on her door and walks in, finding her lying there. He just
switches off the TV and puts her to bed.
Now, being a woman and a feminist, it’s pretty unsurprising
that I’d have a problem with the light, joking treatment of rape and
molestation in this episode, but I can see both sides of the issue. On the one
hand, girls being groped on public transit is a common problem in Japan, and
it’s something that Tomoko would definitely hear about. And it makes sense that
Tomoko would be jealous of the girls in her class, considering that a) She is
completely clueless about social realities and probably hasn’t considered what
molestation actually feels like, and b) She is desperate for any little bit of attention from men. When she feels
something touching her on the bus, she reacts realistically: with terror and
humiliation. Tomoko certainly doesn’t enjoy the feeling, and she explicitly
states that thinking of molestation as a status symbol was a huge mistake. So,
the show portrays all of this realistically. On the other hand, the show also
portrays all of this as a joke, which
I can’t go along with. It simply isn’t funny, and even if it is realistic, its
inclusion is unnecessary.
The grossness of the molestation segment is made a bit worse
by the fact that the episode as a whole is so sexual. It’s preceded by a brief
scene involving erotic dreams, and followed by the aforementioned panty
shopping segment. It makes it feel like the whole show is nothing more than
mindless fanservice, when in actuality it has a lot of heart, and I think that
Tomoko’s character is really well thought-out. But when it has such a shitty
topic stuck in the middle and the rest is filled with fanservicey crap,
watching the episode just leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.
On a totally different note, I have to say I was a bit
surprised by her dad’s reaction to finding his daughter with a vibrator in
hand. Honestly, I thought it was kind of a sweet scene; it’s obviously awkward,
but I kind of expected him to flip out, and instead he just took care of her.
It kind of makes me wonder if Japan is a bit more open-minded towards girls’
sexuality. That’s 100% speculation, but I feel like in the US people would
think a girl masturbating kind of freaky, especially at her age. In this, it’s
uncomfortable, but not any sort of big deal.
Episode 5: I’m
unpopular, so I’ll try improving my skills
Inspired by an anime, Tomoko starts to think her
unpopularity is due to lacking a defined character type, so she decides to be
an expressionless character (like Nagato Yuki in The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi). Tomoki is totally unimpressed
by her act, being more concerned with the sports drink she stole from him, and
continuing the experiment through several classes doesn’t give Tomoko any
better reactions. Thinking, “To be considered quiet, you need people who talk
to you,” she starts to tear up in class. On the way home, she thinks that
sitting and drinking coffee alone would suit her expressionless character
image, so she goes into “Ster Tully’s Coffee,” where she struggled with an
incomprehensible menu and bitter coffee. In the second segment of the episode,
Tomoko wants to get purikura done, but Yuu can’t come with her and Tomoki
won’t, so she’s forced to go alone. Later on, she draws more inspiration from
TV when she sees a woman saying that her job at a cabaret greatly improved her
conversation skills. Tomoko decides to try and get a job in a cabaret and
quickly starts imagining herself as a member of the “underworld.” After school,
she adventures to the red light district, and is terrified. After a call from her mother
telling her to come home, she tearfully agrees to come home.
"I'd be a plain honors student by day and a beautiful butterfly of the night after school."
I didn’t talk much about the purikura segment in the
synopsis above, but that’s because I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who
hasn’t seen the episode. That’s because I thought it was easily one of the
funniest segments the show has had so far. The interaction between Tomoko and
Tomoki before getting the photos done was hilarious, and what Tomoko ultimately
decided to do with her purikura stickers absolutely killed me.
Also, there were a couple different anime references that I
picked up on in this episode, and probably a couple that I missed. The most
obvious one was the resemblance between the expressionless character and Nagato
Yuki in The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi,
which I mentioned earlier. Another blatant one occurred in the scene in which
Tomoko first starts thinking about joining a cabaret, she thinks, “In that kind
of environment, the stress would make me look like one of those white kids from
Akira.” There’s a more subtle one while Tomoko is in the purikura booth: The machine
tells her to make a duck face, and Tomoko exclaims, “Duck?!” while making an
expression just like Duck makes in Princess
Tutu (although unfortunately I couldn’t find a Princess Tutu screenshot for comparison). The
last one I’m not really sure about, because this is a show I haven’t watched in
several years, but the second screenshot below of Tomoko in the city at night reminded
me so strongly of Serial Experiments Lain
that I had to include it.
Episode 6: I'm unpopular, so I'll go see the fireworks
While playing an otome game, Tomoko has so many ~feels~ that
she ends up convinced she’s in love, using evidence that people suddenly think
she’s happier and prettier. She ends up playing so many games that she forgets
to bathe, and the next day, a series of mishaps ends with her covered in soda pop
and ants. The ants get tangled in her hair for the rest of the day, and several
different guys either stare at her or approach her because of the ants, but in
her shock Tomoko mistakes that for positive attention. In the second segment,
Tomoko realizes that there are about to be a fireworks display, and she has no
one to see them with. She goes to the library, thinking that there will be
other losers there with no one to hang out with, but she doesn’t even manage to
have a conversation with anyone. Instead, she goes to a rooftop where she used
to hang out with Yuu in middle school, thinking she’ll be able to see the
fireworks from there. Some middle school boys show up on the roof, and Tomoko
almost leaves, but instead tearfully asks if she can join them. They agree, and
pretty soon Tomoko finds out that they’re not there to watch fireworks, but
rather to peep on people in the love hotel next door. Rather poetically, Tomoko
reflects: “I just wanted to have a good time with someone.”
The first segment of this episode was a bit over-the-top. I
can believe that Tomoko would be clueless enough to think that an otome game
would give her the “glow” of being in love, but the ants were really a bit
much. Also, it was a bit unclear: Were the ants stuck to her because of the pop
in her hair? Was the pop completely incidental to the whole thing? I’m really
not sure, but the result was pretty bizarre. I did appreciate this bit, though:
I thought the second segment was much better, though. I can
certainly empathize with how difficult it is to approach a stranger to start a
conversation, and when Tomoko tries and fails to start a conversation with
another girl, her judgmental response cracked me up. Her attempt to get a guy
to approach her was even better. Faking a conversation on a cell phone was a
surprisingly good idea for Tomoko, but she was so damn obvious that it was hilarious.
When she went up to the roof later, I was a bit surprised that it was a pair of
middle school kids that showed up, but I think it worked really well and was
ultimately a pretty cute (if ridiculous) scene.
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