Anime

Alright, I just got a chance to catch up on some shows and just watched this. I think others have already covered the surreal and absurd sense of humor that this show has. I decided to try to make some sense of the chaos. Usually, even in the most chaotic stories, the author is still trying to say something, so what is the message here? I have a theory, so strap in...

tl;dr - This show is basically The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. Let me explain...

The show starts out with a fourth wall break in the first 30 seconds with Koshitan speaking directly to us, the viewers. The work is extremely self-aware of its medium; chock full of references to other properties and fourth wall breaking jokes about timeslots and episodes. This basically means that Koshitan is acting as the narrator and POV to our experience of this story. This is important!

One of the recurring gags in this show is that Koshitan is basically acting as the straight man (or tsukkomi in Japanese manzai). She is the one reacting to the epic weirdness of Nokotan; everybody else is basically just living their life like Nokotan is just a normal girl. Remember that Koshitan is our narrator and point of view, so all these events that we see is how she is perceiving things. Similarly...

Whenever something potentially embarrassing about Koshitan comes up in conversation, everybody reacts to an extreme degree. Koshitan even makes a joke about how nobody reacted to a deer girl knocking down a door but they are obsessed over whether she is a delinquent or a virgin. If they weren't worried about Nokotan, then why are they worried about Koshitan's personal life? Well, remember that Koshitan is our storyteller.

So, my theory is that Koshitan is simply being an extremely self-conscious teenager. She thinks that everybody is watching her every action and word she says and will socially crucify her if she sticks a toe out of line. People aren't actually that interested in reality, but since we are getting the story from her perspective, they are super interested in her because she fears that they are.

Similarly, she sees Nokotan as the weird one that people should be freaking out over. To illustrate this, Nokotan is depicted as outrageously weird, because that is how weird Nokotan is compared to what Koshitan believes a "normal" girl should be. However, in reality, people in general just don't care about others that much. If you are a bit odd, then people will basically just let you be weird.

All this brings me around to Tennessee Williams. Back when I was in eighth grade, I had just moved to a brand new school (I moved a lot as a kid). I had gotten pretty used to the routine of making a new batch of friends at a new school because I had done it most years up to that point in my life (really, I moved a lot). However, one of the first things I read in my eighth grade English class was The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.

The bulk of the play doesn't matter for the relevant bit to this show (sorry, the tl;dr at the top is a bit of a bait and switch). What matters is that the main character, Laura, is an extremely shy girl that dropped out of school and is a shut-in, walking with a bit of a limp and a brace due to an illness. She meets with a potential marriage partner that was somebody she knew from her time in school, Jim. When they start reminiscing, he asks her about why she was always late to class. When she explains it was because of her limp, he is surprised as he had never noticed her limp or brace before.

To my 13 year old self, this was a powerful lesson that people don't pay as much attention to you as you think they do. In fact, most of them frankly don't care about you. Laura had let embarrassment from this limp cause her to completely withdraw from the world due to the anxiety it caused. Meanwhile, her crush in school never even noticed it.

Finally, to bring this back around to the show. To make an analogy to The Glass Menagerie, being a delinquent in the past is Koshitan's limp and she hasn't realized yet that nobody actually cares about it. So, as we are seeing the world from her perspective, everybody is hyper focused on her whenever anything about herself might get revealed. The hope is that Nokotan will be the means by which Koshitan will come to the realization that she can be herself and not have to project perfection to all those around her.

To sum it up visually, Koshitan needs to come to this realization: