12 Days of Aniblogging, Day 2Oh, Watamote. It’s been forever, hasn’t it? I’ve had a messy on-and-off relationship with this series for the better half of a decade now, so it’s time to write about what it means to me and why I ultimately learned to love it.I was introduced to Watamote through its fall 2013 anime adaptation. At this point, I was a fledgling young weeb, having just gotten introduced to anime via watching Death Note in three parts on YouTube. Watamote was part of the first batch of seasonal anime that I followed as they came out, and I absolutely despised it.In case you’re somehow unfamiliar with the work, Watamote focuses on a high school girl named Tomoko whose defining trait is being a complete social trainwreck. Her brain is wracked with anxiety over every single social interaction, and the decisions she makes as a result of her anxiety end up being extremely embarrassing and cause everyone to notice just how awkward and weird she is. She tries so hard at everything she does but is so misguided that it all ends up being a disaster. As a high schooler prone to both social anxiety and secondhand embarrassment, Watamote fucked me up! I’d put on an episode and just spend the next 24 minutes dreading how exactly Tomoko was going to fuck up this episode. I dropped the show around episode 6 and moved on to greener pastures…the loneliness of this show is gutwrenching…until 2015 or so, when I felt compelled to un-drop the series and give it a fair chance again. “I’m older now”, I thought at the time, “so maybe this time the social awkwardness stuff won’t hit as hard.” It was about as rough, except I had learned to endure my secondhand embarrassment just enough to make it through each episode. I finished Watamote, gave it a low score on Myanimelist, and moved on with my life. Last year, something very surprising graced my tumblr dash. A friend talking positively about Watamote! According to them, the manga had developed swimmingly, and was on the verge of turning into a yuri harem any one of these days. Tomoko had a bunch of friends now, and things were going pretty comfily. The next time I needed something to read, I picked up the Watamote manga. The beginning of the Watamote manga starts off just like the anime adaptation, with a scared anxious girl fucking up over and over again and never learning. These chapters weren’t very fun to read and I’d seen most of it before, but one of the wonders of manga as a medium is that unlike anime, you can take it at your own pace. Instead of slowly and painfully reveling in each of Tomoko’s fuckups, I could just skim through the chapters that weren’t doing it for me and try again next time. I still can’t decide if Tomoko’s manga-dead eyes are more painful or less painful than her anime-dead eyes. As a girl with awful eye bags, I take this very seriouslySurely enough, once I got about 50 chapters in, Tomoko begins the gradual but inevitable process of making friends as an awkward person. You keep encountering someone and end up in a standoffish relationship with them, and then it eventually morphs into more regular hangouts, until suddenly you’re friends in everything but name with no idea how it happened. Tomoko makes friends with a girl just as weird as her, and surely enough, soon becomes the center of gravity for all the slightly misfitty girls in her class. I spent years convinced that Watamote could only do cruelty unto its main character, but it turns out that that was just a flaw of the anime.how to make friends when you’ve isolated yourself via the internet for years and forgotten how to do any meatspace human interactionsShort adaptations of long-running anime often fall into this trap. They’ll only be able to fit 3-4 volumes worth of content into their cour, so they’ll have to conclude at an inopportune place. Shonen adaptations can play around with pacing in order to end on a climactic fight, but slice of life adaptations don’t have that benefit. They just have to pick a random chapter and stop right there. Often times, they’ll go for anime-only endings that establish a cyclical or unchanging nature to the characters. The downside of this is that any slow and gradual growth that any of the characters have is eliminated in one fell swoop. When the Watamote anime ends, Tomoko vows to stop caring about how others view her, giving up and falling into the same hikikomori despair that ensnares her at the start of the show.I read through most of Watamote while I was just starting my job this summer. Stuck in an unfamiliar office environment trying my best to act like a composed woman when I had very little experience being either, I frequently made mistakes, had horribly awkward conversations and meetings, and all-around just messed up what should have been very simple social interactions. But this time, Tomoko’s mishaps didn’t feel like a personal attack on me. I was able to laugh alongside her, knowing that even if I was a bit of a mess, I was still so much better off than where I was back in 2013.Tomoko breaks the Secret Girl RulesOne of the things that Tomoko struggles the most with is Gender. Frequently she’ll get the sudden idea in her head that she needs to find a boyfriend, and to do so she’ll need to learn how to “be a woman” and make herself attractive with makeup and fashion. Even though Tomoko is cis, these are surprisingly trans moods – she’s spent so long as a shut-in that she managed to avoided all female socialization and has no idea how to do girly things that are socially expected of her. Her desire for a boyfriend never feels sincere – she never has explicit fantasies or desires or anything beyond just the ethereal concept of “having a boyfriend”. There’s an interesting element of compulsory heterosexuality going on there, and I hope future volumes attempt to address it. Tomoko displays a lot of questionable sexuality towards her female friends too, looking up their skirts and groping them for reasons she finds herself unable to explain but still compelled to do. It’s as if Tomoko was socialized more on anime than anything else, and as such feels moved to perform these creepy rituals and acquire her shoujo romance ending. fuck fuck fuck how do I be a girl againOverall, I’m happy to say that Watamote is good! My concerns with the anime’s unrelenting cruelty were healed with the slow growth of the manga, and I’m happy I had this manga to reassure me that even on days where I’m so awkward that I don’t even particularly feel human, we’ve all been there before. One must imagine Tomoko happy.
Dec 15, 2019 • Subscribe
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