Watamote: Episode 9

Sorry this is a bit late! I had some "real life" shit to deal with the past couple days.

Episode 9 has Tomoko visiting the café where Yuu works, where Tomoko naturally feels nervous since she’s the only one who’s gone there alone. The atmosphere also intimidates her, because everything from the food to Yuu’s uniform is so cute that Tomoko feels out-of-place. Tomoko starts to think she might be able to become cuter and more popular if she worked at a similar place, so she asks her mother to help her find a job at a place that makes cakes, and she ends up working at a factory adding decorations to cakes. After her first day, Tomoko quits, and her mother is so irritated that she makes her spend all of the next day doing housework. When Tomoko complains, she discovers that Tomoki spends plenty of time helping around the house, and she takes her feelings out on her brother for making her look bad. Later, while cleaning her room, Tomoko finds a box of cicada shells that she and Tomoki had gathered when they were children, as well as an old school report that Tomoki had written about how much he loved his sister. Feeling nostalgic, she leaves one of the shells on Tomoki’s desk. Finally, Tomoko goes out to watch a meteor shower, and she makes a wish that a boy will come and sit with her. Pretty soon, she’s joined by a cute male cat.

Throughout the show, Tomoko has always been a bit of an asshole; in her internal dialogue, she frequently says terrible things about the people around her. I felt like she was a bit worse than usual in this episode, though. Most of the time, it seems like way she puts people down in her mind is driven by her insecurity and a desire to feel better about herself in comparison, but there were a few points in this episode where it seemed entirely unnecessary. For example, this is the first time that she’s called Yuu her “bitch friend,” which stood out to me because it’s dropped in so casually even though the statement serves no real purpose.

She’s also pretty terrible to her mother and Tomoki about doing housework, which seems odd when it’s revealed later in the episode that she used to do extra work around the house so Tomoki wouldn’t have to. That struck me as very odd, so I can’t help wondering if she was much happier as a child, and grew more bitter and unfriendly as she got older and became increasingly unable to navigate social situations. That’s mostly speculation, but I also feel like her cluelessness about other people was emphasized with the scene where Tomoki finds the cicada shell Tomoko left on his desk. When she first discovered the box, Tomoko had no idea what it was, and probably wouldn’t have figured it out if it weren’t for the label saying “Summer Trinkets, Tomoki and Tomoko.” But once the memory’s fixed in her mind, she leaves a cicada shell for Tomoki and apparently expects him to know what it is without any sort of reference. I don’t think Tomoko has any idea what’s going on in other people’s minds.

On another note, there were several cute references in this episode. The one that I thought was the most obvious was the scene of Tomoko playing with some castanets like Yuu in K-On!, and a while before that, there was a visual gag showing Tomoko’s mother framed by the God Warriors from Nausicaa. Tomoko also compares Tomoki to Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star. The reference that had me stumped until I Googled it was when Tomoko found the cicada shells, she says, “No one other than Shoko**n would want these, anyway.” It turns out that she was talking about a cosplayer, “Shokotan,” who made a costume out of cicada shells.

And you can read about Shokotan here.