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

This anime is about some issues that I'm personally very well acquainted with. Extreme social anxiety. Tomoko Kuroki is a not so average high school girl and to say that she struggles to talk to people is a huge understatement. We follow Tomoko through her various attempts at becoming popular and making friends. The hilarious reasoning behind the crazy things that she does in this anime are based on dating simulators which she loves to play. Let’s just say…dating simulators aren’t the most accurate way to learn how to make friends! Be prepared to cringe, but also to laugh your heads off! To cope with herextreme loneliness, Tomoko envisions that the happy friends around her are actually miserable, superficial and attention seeking. Though she says this, whenever an opportunity to talk to these 'unworthy' people comes up, her voice gets all frail, whimpery and quiet and she makes very awkward jerky motions with her body. If the anime left it at that, it may not be so cringe inducing, but the unique lifestyle of filling her spare time with playing dating simulators has made Tomoko very strange.

She is desperate to have a romance like the ones in her video games, yet her social awkwardness has the opposite effect. She tends to sexualise random scenarios to set herself up for some very weird situations e.g. when a guy tried to swat away an ant from her arm, she freaked out and believed that it was due to her undeniable allure.

There are only a few characters in Watamote, since the spotlight is on Tomoko. We have her best friend turned trendy and popular ‘Yuu chan’ whom Tomoko both despises, wants to be…and wants to be in a relationship with!? She feels some really weird attraction to either be like her and transform into a social butterfly and cling to the only friend she really has. Yuu is a bit dense though as she doesn’t really realise that Tomoko is still so socially awkward and exactly how dependent she is on their childhood friendship. The fact that she still continues to be Tomoko’s friend after she did some VERY strange and inappropriate things is heartwarming though!

We also have ‘Ki chan,’ a little girl that idolises Tomoko based on the cool stories she tells her about her fake social prowess. The lengths that Tomoko goes to keep up the facade that she is popular and trendy are insane, especially when she tries to give herself hickeys with a vacuum cleaner. One of the absolute highlights of the show. We have a cute helpful umbrella guy who appears later in the story and gets entangled in one of Tomoko's awkward situations. I wished that he had actually become a closer friend of hers, but he only featured briefly.

Tomoki, her brother doesn’t really pay attention to her and stays away from her so that her weird doesn’t rub off on him. The inability of Tomoko's mother to realise that her daughter was so lonely and that this was feeding her strange personality felt quite unrealistic. Though most of the reactions of Tomoko's class towards her weirdness felt pretty accurate, some of them seemed unrealistic also. Like they ignored her weirdness to an unbelievable degree! Imae is really the only one who shows up towards the end of the show who really shows any promise of actually becoming her friend. I was happy that they put some hopefulness amongst the social anxiety that is central to this show.

Though there aren't many characters, Tomoko herself is such an entertaining protagonist, we don't really need them! From her weird fantasies where she envisions herself as some heroic desirable protagonist that everyone fawns over to her necessity to compensate for her lack of human interactions via interactions with cats, plushies and of course her hilarious dating games. Her fantasies and over exaggerations about the way that people are treating her are both hilarious and depressing at the same time.

Watamote shows how your mind can either make your world appear like heaven or hell. Usually the things that seem like huge a social faux pas in reality are not that big of a deal. Our mind just tends to amplify the embarrassment. Tomoko’s mind did this very thing to a huge degree that lead her to acting really strangely in public and then grieving about her loneliness after the cringeworthy encounter was over. When you have an unusual personality, I don’t think Watamote is that far off in terms of the thoughts that run through your head and the crazy things you can do. Tomoko’s ability to make everyone else responsible for her being lonely and out of place is something that’s really easy to do and was captured really accurately in the show. Sometimes, when you can’t deal with your own weirdness, you must project your frustration onto others. This anime does a phenomenal job at showing the whole strange and unrelenting nature of social anxiety and the consequences of not fitting normal societal expectations. Though some may be disappointed by the lack of progress in the ending, I feel like it did service to what the show was trying to portray…resisting or changing your weirdness is much harder than embracing it and accepting that we are who we are.