Title: No Matter How I Look at it, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular Vol. 3
Author: Nico Tanigawa
Publisher: Yen Press
Language: English
Format: Paperback
Pages: 144
Genre: Slice of Life, Comedy
Publication Date: April 22, 2014
The Story
Volume three of Watamote places its focus on Tomoko’s school cultural festival. Even though she doesn’t really want to do anything, she also desires to be asked to do something to help out just for the sake of being noticed. She tried cutting fliers, but ended up having others come to help her anyway which leads her to slicing her hand with the knife. Yuu comes to visit her during the festival and for the first time, Tomoko has fun at high school. When Yuu hugged her, her reaction was hilarious. She actually spent the rest of their time together trying to get Yuu to hug her again. I’m not suggesting anything here, but I wouldn’t be shocked if there was a Yuu x Tomoko ship in the future.
The rest of the volume returned to its episodic format with Tomoko exploring more and more ways to try and become popular and having them all backfire on her. The only downside was that most of the shock value had dwindled from the first two volumes and some of the outcomes seemed more like bad luck than an embarrassing situation. For instance, Tomoko got hit in the head with a basketball and was sent home so she decided to play nurse to her sick brother Tomoki, hoping that she would catch his cold and be out of school for the rest of the week. However, she didn’t realize that colds usually take some time to flare up and hers did right when her three-day weekend started.
Characters
The only real development here happened during the cultural festival when Tomoko and Yuu were together. Typically, Tomoko’s dialogue is depicted as being scribbled handwriting and often messy to accentuate her shyness as well as her inability to talk normally around others; however, her dialogue had the same font as all the others when she talked to Yuu. In fact, Tomoko even mentioned that being with Yuu makes her happy. We’ve seen it in the earlier volumes as well, but it’s pretty peculiar that Tomoko can be herself around her friend. It just makes me believe that all it’s going to take is one person not named Yuu to become Tomoko’s friend and this cycle of mental torment will be over, but when that will happen (if it even does) would be anyone’s guess.
Final Thoughts
The comedy was a bit on the dry side and as I aforementioned, a lot of the shock value was missing from this volume. The series has seemed to mellow out some, but I can only hope that it returns to more edgier stuff in the future, although the chapter where Tomoko thought she was getting groped on the train felt more like the comedy we got in the first two volumes.
Despite this, volume three of Watamote didn’t stop me from laughing and while the Tomoko character is pretty relatable, it makes you wonder if there is anyone out there in the real world that just that much bad luck. Still a pretty good series worth checking out!
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This item was purchased for review.
