RebelPanda is not wrong in calling this the cringiest two minutes of the season:
I do wonder whether they and especially the commenters on that tweet realise that the cringiness is deliberate? You don’t honestly think you can be this embarassing with this much “sir this is a Wendy” energy by accident, do you? At least RebelPanda recognises the hard work the voice actor put into this. But it’s more than just the voice actor doing his work properly. This much cringe has to be planned out.
Some context. The clip is from episode four of Jaku Chara Tomozaki-kun. Tomozaki-kun is your stereotypical anime loser, only good at playing a thinly disguised Super Smash Brothers, to the point that he’s Japan’s number one player. When he meets up in real life with Japan’s second best player, he’s surprised to discover she’s Hinami Aoi, the most popular girl in his class, while she’s disgusted that he’s such a loser. He starts whining that real life is just a shitty game, but she shuts him down quickly. She points out that like any other game, real life takes effort to master too and that blaming it on your character status is lazy. More, she offers to mentor him in doing so.
So far this all sounds like your average otaku bait series where some misanthropic, pessimistic geek boy gets a hot girl to recognise his hidden talents, but there are two things it does that make it stand out. First, Tomozaki-kun has to work and work hard to level himself up. The show makes it clear that the onus is on him to improve, that he won’t get a girl friend just through his Smash Bros skills. Second, I can’t help but wonder whether Tomazaki isn’t on the spectrum somehow. He comes over as not quite neurotypical? Somebody who not only has never been taught how to interact with other people, but maybe never had the ability to grasp what he was being taught? That only now that Hinami has put it all in video game terms his brain is capable of grasping it?
In this context, the cringe makes sense. This isn’t some light novel author trying to do an earnest defence of being an otaku loser for an audience of, well, otaku losers. This is how somebody like Tomozaki would react if somebody dissed both his favourite game and especially the effort you need to put into it to master it. It’s awkward and cringy because that’s what he is. This isn’t a fuck yeah moment, this is embarassing for everybody, including the guy he’s defending. Just look at the atmosphere in the scene after the rant ends. On some level this is character development for Tomozaki, speaking up for himself and the game he loved, but the way he goes about it… Storywise I can’t help but admire this scene. But I still had to pause and walk off the secondhand embarassment halfway through though.
