Welp, I’m a day late, but that’s really Watamote’s fault for coming out at 2 AM on a Tuesday. Just like her, isn’t it? Anyway, I actually really liked the first episode of this, which surprised me – I normally don’t like cringe humor and I feel most anime comedies suck at pacing and, well, making jokes that are funny. This one doesn’t. It has great direction, which is a massively underappreciated and very necessary component of a comedy. It has semi-painful but always pretty sharp writing. It has a great voice actress nailing one of the most necessarily melodramatic roles out there. It’s got the goods. Is it gonna keep delivering?
That got a little weird. Sorry.
Episode 2
0:30 – “What are you crying for? You talked to a boy who wasn’t me!” See? Fuckin’ thirty seconds and we get a weird, creepy, delayed setup-punchline that plays off her personality and the weirdness of anime culture in general. If any comedy’s going to actually impress me…
1:47 – Oh man this OP. Keep raging Tomoko, you’re obviously a special snowflake. This show’s a lot less subtle in its MC-mockery than OreGairu was, but it’s a perfectly valid choice
4:28 – “The only thing I’ve gotten better at is pretending to wake up from pretending to sleep.” That is brutal.
5:54 – “I can’t believe they don’t see the appeal of hungry characters.” Not really much to actually talk about here – this show is just really funny
7:31 – “Sleeping with a guy during the day…” This show strikes a good balance between actually kinda tragic scenes and Tomoko being so ridiculous that you don’t really feel bad for her. Normally empathy’s pretty important in shows, but if the point of the show is to shit on the protagonist, that’s not necessarily a great idea
7:57 – “Manager, huh? I bet she likes someone on the team. Or she’s into buzz cuts.” Yeah, sorry, Tomoko, you’re no Hikki – you’re just a lonely asshole, not an occasionally insightful lonely asshole
9:26 – When I heard they were adapting this, I figured it’d be as cheap of a cash-in as possible, but this all lookspretty okay
10:52 – “Happy people should just die!” “Talking about stupid crap all the time… don’t they have anything else to do?” Her turnaround on hypocrisy is like, what, three seconds? That truly is a remarkable lack of self-awareness
12:43 – “But his face says he has no experience with girls.” And your face says you have a lot of experience with meth. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, eh?
15:40 – Aw c’mon, don’t be coy with the damn picture! Damnit Watamote…
16:45 – “Do all girls smell this good?” Hah! Kind of a nice trick there – that’s normally the cliched line some harem self-insert would apply to one of his lust-object girls, but here they have our decidedly un-lust-object protagonist apply it to the standard anime girl who’s pretty much from a different species
19:09 – “Well, I haven’t played it in a while…” Things are going waaay too well here. What are they going to do to her?
22:15 – AHAHAHA, now the ED is just her alone listening to her fake yandere boyfriend? Beautiful
And Done
Well, at least the picture made her feel better, even if she is just a background character. Funny episode overall, too – I didn’t like it quite as much as the first (probably because I think she works best when she’s bouncing off her having-none-of-it brother), but it made me a lot more confident the show isn’t a one-trick pony, so that’s a relief. I still think the yandere boyfriend tape was the best gag of the episode, but there were plenty of nice lines throughout. Good times!