3ET: Watashi ga Motenai no wa Dou Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui!

"This is my happy face."

Studio: Silver Link

Director: Oonuma Shin (ef: a tale of memories, Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya)

Main Cast: Kitta Izumi as Kuroki Tomoko

Writer: Yoshioka Takao (Zero no Tsukaima, Elfen Lied)

Music: Sadesper Record (Hanamaru Youchien)


Watashi ga Motenai no wa Dou Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui! claims to be a comedy. I think that's bullshit. I barely laughed during the three episodes I watched, but that's not to say it's not a good show. Or that it is a good show. Anyway, WataMote is a character study of Kuroki Tomoko. There's a reason only one person is listed as a main character. That's because the show is all about Tomoko and her special brand of mental illness. You see, Tomoko has Social Anxiety Disorder. How can I tell this? Because I have Social Anxiety Disorder. It's not nearly as severe as her case, but it was at one point, about a decade ago. And that's why I couldn't laugh at this show, it hit way too close to home and made me uncomfortable with its realistic depiction of her illness.

The first thing WataMote got right was Tomoko's inner thought process. There are things in her inner monologue that I have said to myself nearly verbatim. There is a part where she is sure that people from her class were talking about her when she was sitting alone in a fast food joint. There is a part where she ruminates over what to say to her friend she hasn't seen in a few months, hell she ruminates over every person outside her family that she talks to. And when she speaks to strangers, we see the pain drawn on her face before she squeaks out a reply. Half a dozen times, I felt a pit develop in my stomach because I could have screamed "THAT'S ME! I DID THAT!" Needless to say, I identify with Tomoko.

"I hate everyone and everyone hates me."

At least, I somewhat identify with Tomoko. The thing is, she's kind of a horrible person. Her younger brother takes the brunt of this, he deals with a her threatening to kill herself in episode one if he doesn't talk to her to help her conversation skills. Then, in episode three, not only does she cause him to catch a cold by locking him out of the bathroom, she takes shoddy care of him, jealous that he caught the cold and not her. She's also obsessed with the sex lives of her classmates, regularly calling them sluts and bitches when she has erotic fantasies of her own. She may be mentally ill, but I have a hard time identifying with someone as unpleasant as that. Although while I can't completely identify with her, I do sympathize with her. She's sick and could use several sessions with a therapist to help her start to sort through all of her issues. And honestly, if it turns out that this show is a giant flashback to her in a therapist's office, I'd be pretty happy.

With all of that in mind, I need to talk about the art, which itself does a great job in showing both how Tomoko sees herself, as well as the world around her. She has a wide range of facial expressions, and oftentimes we don't even need dialogue to know exactly what she is thinking. Also, the use of color, or lack of it, in certain classroom scenes shows how she doesn't see other classmates as people for the most part. This is then flipped on its head when she herself loses color in the show when she sees her friend looking more attractive than she remembers. It's a good use of visual language to give us insight into the inner workings of Tomoko's mind.

"Damn it, when did she get pretty, that bitch!"

There's a part of me that hates this show for pointing and laughing at Tomoko. But, I still passed WataMote for the simple reason that I have to believe that it can do something interesting with this material. I don't want to believe that a show could be this accurate about a mental illness, and just play it for laughs. I can only hope that WataMote is different and I'm going to give it that chance as I feel its depiction of Tomoko alone has earned it that much. We shall see what it does with it.