Hanners of WataMote 04

The Last Leaf is left for Hanners in WataMote:

Even if it hasn't frequently been the height of amusement for me, I've given WATAMOTE something of a free pass as it seemed to at least have its heart in the right place - however, this week's episode has me wondering whether I've been giving it far too much credit. For all of Tomoko's maladjusted misadventures, even I have to draw the line at a girl wanting to be molested, and this kind of male gaze fantasy scenario unfortunately serves the purpose of tainting the entire episode with [etc. etc. etc. with no end in sight — Ed].

While I'm secure in the manga-derived knowledge that the worst is yet to come and, but it's not going to develop on rape fantasies, Watamote really is not "height of amusement" for me either. The biggest failure of the whole thing is that the original manga authors (a typical duo of writer and artist) did not expect it to take off. When it struck a chord with the magazine's hikki otaku clientele, they had to continue it and they just don't know what to do with it all. They chose not to send the protag into a highly amusing and profitable self-destructive spiral to the bottom, but set her of a path of extremely slow progress instead (as evidenced by the chapter about her class introduction). The heart is in the right place all right, it's just a rotten one. Still, we have 44 chapters now, the anime uses up about 3 chapters per episode, which comes right to about 1 cour worth of content. And then what?

In case of Mahoraba is was worth it, but I'm not sure about Watamote.

BTW, someone (Ken?) was asking what's up with Kuroki-pere, is he around at all? The screencap should answer that.

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