Review of WataMote: No Matter How I Look At It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!

It's an interesting inversion of the "Hollywood Nerd" trope where a character is bullied, said to be ugly, but for the audience to sympathisze the character is made cute and not at all ugly but just wears glasses. It's a show about a character that is not bullied, is not ugly, no one ever calls it ugly, in fact the character itself and many others remark that the character is somewhat cute. The character is certainly not portrayed as a stunning beauty queen but nevertheless above average looking; a silent, cute student that isn't bullied, whom no one has any ill will towards that is justignored simply because he doesn't say a word in class. Somehow they managed to create an entire show about a character who rarely ever speaks to anyone and is morbidly afraid of doing so by just playing the character's internal monologue which offers a resemblance of conversation.

Some say it's a comedy but I haven't laughed once watching it and it's not like I thought it was a poor attempt at humour either; I didn't really see the attempt at humour. Pretty much every episode repeats a similar formula of Tomoko coming with a far-fetched plan to be noticed and popular only for it to fail because it's absolutely absurd and Tomoko can't seem to graps the basic thing that all he need do is go out and talk to people to probably be noticed and make friends due to being far too afraid of that.

So what would the appeal be? Some described the show as "anti-moe"; we're dealing with a character that many would consider to be terribly cute in its own deranged way; it's a moe slice of life show that does everything differently — instead of the cute, exuberant successful secondary school student we get a cute shut-in that lacks even the most basic of social skills and suffers from crippling social anxiety. I'm fairly certain that the only way one would possibly enjoy this show is if one think the main character is terribly cute for without it there's not much left to it. It's a slice of life show that thrives on the cuteness of its main character but does it in a different way than most.