Manga Review: Watamote Vol. 20

Title: No Matter How I Look at it, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular (Watamote) Vol. 20

Author: Nico Tanigawa

Publisher: Yen Press

Language: English

Format: Paperback

Pages: 144

Genre: Slice of Life, Comedy

Publication Date: October 18, 2022

We’ve hit the 20-volume mark! This milestone edition of Watamote can be broken down into two sections… the culture festival and the introduction of a new character, Shiki Futaki.

Before we get to the culture festival, it’s time to pick your new seat! Everyone scrambles to try and sit next to each other but in the end, Tomoko just takes the typical anime/manga/light novel protagonist’s seat. Then, it came time to pitch ideas for the culture festival and Tomoko had the idea of coming up with a youth movie. Her idea is just a 5-minute film with a 30-minute intro. She wants to depict the perils of youth by live streaming someone running late and they’re the one who has the film with them. So, as they are live-streaming their hardship in getting to the festival, they’re going to stall with live acts like comedy bits… then show the 5-minute film when they get there.

When it comes time to present, Tomoko freezes and almost doesn’t make it; however, she spits it out and it ends up winning after a tiebreaker between her idea and a bubble tea café. Once that’s settled, the book then focuses on a new character. I’ll refrain from talking about it here because, for a new character, we sure learn a lot about her so I’ll talk about it in the next section.

Finally, the book ends with some short montages of the days leading up to the festival which looks to be the focus of the next volume.

Before I get to Shiki, I have to admit I was surprised that Tomoko regressed a little bit here. She mentioned how she was a loner and how she dreaded picking seats but now that she had friends, that was no longer an issue. Despite her making those strides, she could barely manage to speak in front of those same friends when pitching her idea and even less so when pitching it to the entire class. I know that anyone can get nervous speaking in front of others but when you’re trying to measure an introvert’s progress over the course of twenty volumes, this seemed a bit like a step back rather than a step forward. I guess there are still a few kinks to work out with her.

On to Shiki… aka Emoji Girl 2.0! Just like Ucchi, Shiki’s face is drawn emoji-style with two black circles for eyes and a triangle for a mouth. Unlike Ucchi, though, her face never changes unless a certain thing happens (I’ll let you discover it).

Shiki was simply a background character at first but slowly, people take notice of her. We see that she’s a gamer as she becomes determined to finish her daily quests in a mobile game. She also likes to go to the arcade and even uploads her gaming videos online. She’s athletic, too. She can be seen lifting weights and playing futsal. Despite the athleticism, her gaming habits and her facial expressions cause people to perceive her negatively. Some think she’s creepy and weird, others think she’s just a geek.  It’ll be interesting to see how she folds into everything going forward… even though introducing a new character this late in the series is just going to make my head spin even more with this already large cast that I’m starting to need a Wiki page to keep track of (still not as bad as Assassination Classroom or Tokyo Ghoul, though!)

This was another “tamer” volume of Watamote. I’m glad that we got to spend a lot of time with Shiki to get her introduced and have her storylines set up. She seems like an interesting character and the fact that we have two emoji girls now is just great. Tomoko still makes strides in her development even with a couple of hiccups that anyone can succumb to. The only thing that bothers me is we are in another series that’s using the cultural festival trope.

I get it. I understand. It’s a staple of Japanese high school culture. It’s just something that’s a popular subject over there so it makes for great manga/anime material. For someone who lives over there, they may find it interesting or even pull ideas from a story to use at their own festival. Here in America, it has the opposite effect as the trope just seems overused. I know… different cultures and mindsets at all that but I can’t help it that I’m not engrained in that culture so that I can only see it that.

That’s really my only complaint… and it’s a personal one rather than one that depicts the overall quality of the book. It’s another solid entry for sure and it looks as if we’re heading right into the culture festival in the next volume. Let’s see how this goes and how Tomoko’s movie turns out!

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This item was provided for review by Yen Press.