Watamote ep7: it’s best to make sure you always stick it in the right hole

What a sad, sad episode. And I thought episode six was depressing. We’ve already been shown how lonely Tomoko is, she honestly hasn’t a friend in her school. And the bright lights of summer just expose her even more. It’s almost like leaving a vampire out in the sun, except she melts more slowly, so the death is longer and more agonizing.

It’s all just one terrible series of failures after another. She starts by spending the first few days just in her room on the internet, doing every nerdy thing she can to her satisfaction. But boredom eventually steps in and forces her to face a painful reality. She’s got nothing to do, no one to do it with, nowhere to go and has accomplished nothing in terms of becoming popular. So this leads to several flawed ideas to correct that.

The first day of her attempted transformation, she googles for ways to improve her chances of enjoying summer vacation. Though many of the proposed ideas she finds boring, weird or hokey. She eventually settles on the idea of starting a live stream and talking to people that way. This is the first example I see of a flawed idea. I see how it could work for her, online you can find all sorts of interesting people with similar ideas and likes to yours from all over your city, prefecture, country or the world. So her love of nerdy things would undoubtedly make her an expert or at least and interesting conversation with some people. The problem though is that she ends up psyching herself out and focusing on the negatives and the disasterous “what if” scenarios. It kills her idea before she can truly get started, and soon we see her brand new webcam back in the box. Chalk this up as another clear example of her shooting herself in the foot.

All this being said, I’m a bit of a hypocrite. I’ve only done a few Skype calls, and any video conferencing that I do with people aside from my family usually ends in me wearing some kind of disguise. I can’t help myself!

There’s hope yet for Tomoko! She finds a ticket to some live event for a voice actor in one of her games. And the event is the very next day. She’s super excited now because she gets to meet someone semi-famous, have them record any line she wants, and she actually has something to do and talk about during the summer! It’s a perfect coincidence!

This next part of the episode gets rather weird, as Tomoko has spent far too much time on her computer again, and is afraid to go to the bathroom before going to sleep because she hears a bump in the night. So she ends up waking up her poor brother Tomoki and making him escort her to the bathroom. Too much information is exchanged, Tomoki ends up having to wait for her to take a shower and everyone ends up going to bed past 4AM. Wonderful.

With the day finally arriving, Tomoko finally makes her big summer event for the voice actor, and she like many of the girls is contemplating what she’ll have him say into her personal voice recorder when her turn arrives. Tomoko realizes her choice in lines is very creepy, but she’s steeled herself to go along with that choice. Though her resolved and focus melts quite a bit when she actually gets close to the actor, who she now realizes is pretty hot. A hurricane of phrases runs through her head as her turns comes up. What she ends up settling on is about a dozen phrases all together. And the voice actor obliges!

The next day we see Tomoko has put her voice recordings to “interesting” use. She’s actually listening to the phrases and getting aroused by them. She’s gone the whole creepy fan route, and has even refused to wash the hand he touched. She uses that hand to gently stroke her hair and pretend that he’s embracing her.

Wow.

Tomoko gets the idea to take things one step further. She decides to add her voice to the recordings to make it seem like he’s talking to her. While this goes on, we see Tomoko’s mother sitting in the living room watching old footage of Tomoko and Tomoki lovingly playing with each other. When Tomoki returns home and sees this, he’s terribly embarrassed. With that bit of loving nostalgia out of the way, their mother makes her way upstairs to tell Tomoko to come and eat. What she finds is her daughter’s voice and some guy’s voice speaking in lewd ways when she comes in the room. Unfortunately for Tomoko, she plugged her headphones into the mic jack instead of the audio-out jack, and what she thought was a private listening session of her fantasies was actually playing out loud for the world to hear.

What shattering embarrassment.

Tomoko attempts to console herself by using her dirty, lecherous right hand to pretend like the voice actor is holding and caressing her. This is so pitiful.

That night, Tomoko bribes her brother into going outside with her while she plays with fireworks. Alone.

End of episode.

I was actually worried this episode might be a dud half way through. The day by day telling of Tomoko’s lay about summer for five straight days wasn’t exactly exciting or funny, though it did get the point across. The point being that it’s incredibly easy to just waste tons of time doing nothing at all. Thankfully, everything picked up once Tomoko went to see the voice actor.

Speaking of the voice actor, I know he was probably just being professional, but he really came off as more than that. He came off as professional but a great guy, too.
I’m sure people in that profession are well aware of the fantasies they fulfill and what perversions their voices are used for. But for the little bit of time we saw him, he gave off a great impression.

I guess my favorite part of this episode was the incredibly embarrassing moment at the end, where Tomoko’s mom caught her listening to what was essentially her homemade voice porn. Though I think the lasting legacy of this episode will be how she got off on the voice actor’s dirty words while listening to her voice recorder.

Further Reading:

• Episode 6
• I think what Tomoko experienced in this episode is referred to as ASMR
• Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) – Know Your Meme