Title: No Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular! (Watashi ga Motenai no wa dou Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui!)
Genre: Comedy, Parody, Slice-of-Life
Publisher: Squire Enix (JP), Yen Press (US)
Artist: Nico Tanigawa
Serialized In: Gangan Comics Online
Translation: Krista and Karie Shipley
Original Release Date(s): October 29, 2013 (Vol 1), January 21, 2014 (Vol 2)
Poor No Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys Fault I’m Not Popular!. (Note: I’ll be using the abbreviated WataMote from this point on, just wanted to use the long name once). Maybe if I had read you before watching theanime over the summer, I might have had more fun with you. While I ultimately didn’t like the anime as it neared its end, it still had plenty of moments that were hilarious and extremely mean-spirited, and combined with the visual tricks up its sleeve, I would definitely not mind watching it again.
But after I was done reading Volume 2, I felt extremely unsatisfied. And essentially, the reason why is because…it’s not…funny. Most of the jokes that I saw in the anime had impact and life; the manga has little of that, and knowing that the manga’s basically peering into the life of an otaku, there’s not much to go on unless it decides to give main character Tomoko some goals. But she’s essentially around to be made fun of.
Tomoko Kuroki is a girl who has played hundreds of Otome games, made herself popular with so many people (especially boys), and with that experience, she plans on becoming popular in high school, even though she only managed to make one friend in middle school. Unfortunately for her, her gaming experience doesn’t prepare her at all, and she manages to be incapable of communicating with any of her classmates. How in the world is she going to be popular now? Well, we’ll just have to find out, and see whether or not she succeeds…or if she fails.
See, WataMote is a work that you can get into a discussion about, since this is something that has happened to people, where you’re so socially awkward that it’s painful to even interact with people. I luckily never had this type of problem back in high school. I wasn’t the biggest and brashest talker, and at that point I wasn’t supremely confident in speaking all the time, but I made friends, had a blast, then went off to college.
But there are people who manage to be that one person in your high school class that, for some reason, you don’t notice, or forget because they don’t stand out, or have qualities that force you to stay away almost on principle. In some ways, it can probably go deeper than that, and well for that, I have to give the creators (Nico Tanigawa is a two person team) credit for starting this discussion.
But in reading the manga version of WataMote, it reminded me of how the anime managed to make things interesting. For example, the first episode made me laugh like crazy; I hadn’t laughed (or cried) as much as I did since an episode of Gintama. It was about as close to perfect as an anime could get. But in reading the manga version, it’s shorter, it’s marred by the art style (I just can’t find it interesting), and somehow not all that funny anymore.
One perfect example of how the medium shift affected me was when Yuu, Tomoko’s friend from middle school who changed look wise compared to those days, ended up thanking her for cheering her spirits up after her fight with her boyfriend. In the anime, it was set-up perfectly, with the right timing, music, and visual effect to ultimately enjoy seeing Tomoko now just hate on her friend. The manga version, compared to that, is simple and decidedly less impressive.
Generally it doesn’t work like that where I have such a take on a manga after watching the anime (The World God Only Knows, Bunny Drop to name a few), so it’s unfortunate that this wasn’t as funny as I had hoped. If you’re wired for some type of mean-spirited humor, you might just be best off watching the animated version of WataMote.
