Watamote: Episode 10

Since I’m Not Popular, Second Term is Starting

Tomoko’s summer vacation is over, and she’s ready to start a new term. She’s optimistic beforehand, but that quickly changes when she finds out that her seat has been moved from the back of the class to the very middle, surrounded by talkative people. At lunchtime, Tomoko leaves to find a place to eat alone and ends up sitting in a cluster of dusty, unused desks, and she quickly becomes attached to the place she’s claimed as her own. Unfortunately, after spending plenty of time there playing games by herself, she eventually discovers that the desks have been removed, leaving her with nowhere to spend by herself. In the second half of the episode, Tomoko’s class is preparing for the cultural festival. Unsurprisingly, Tomoko dodges out on working with the group after remembering bad experiences in middle school despite her best efforts. Instead, she decides to try to start a Daily Life Club (“A club for doing fun things and finding happiness in life every day”) so she has something to do outside of her class. She has high expectations for her club proposal and spends a long time imagining the possibilities, but her club proposal due to being too vague.

 This episode is a particularly sad one, especially during the first half. On the one hand, it’s good to see Tomoko so happy in school, but pretty depressing that she can only feel like that in a dark, abandoned corner of the building. Plus, losing that little space to herself is clearly devastating for her. As the episode progresses, it becomes clearer that Tomoko isn’t really doing anything different in her second term; she’s still clueless and anxious in social situations, and she’s still living in a fantasy world and applying her best efforts in the wrong direction. She could decide to stick with her class and work with them on the cultural festival, but instead she leaves and tries to work out a way to avoid her classmates. She tries to start a club without really considering the reality of what that entails. Tomoko can’t even bring herself to respond to a classmate saying hi to her, but somehow she thinks that she would be able to run a club, just because she saw it in an anime. It’s amazing how the things that go on in her mind have so little connection to reality.

There were a couple different references in this episode, but I’m afraid I don’t recognize most of them. The allusions to Battle Royale and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (the latter being the SOS Brigade mentioned) were pretty obvious, but I can’t name the other two pictured below.