Welcome to the NHK
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Continuing reading NHK ni Youkoso, the manga version. This is almost heavier than the obviously “despair” manga like Punpun or Kuzu no Honkai. The comedy makes it seem so light-hearted, but when you focus on Satou, it’s so dark how everything goes wrong for him.
The artist is quite good — it looks quite plain but it has interesting stuff going on and doesn’t make any blunders. Too bad he doesn’t seem to have any other promising manga.
Finished NHK. I thought the end was too confusing, but it was a good read nevertheless. The series was very different from the anime (and the book?), or maybe I just don’t remember because I watched the anime so long ago.
Reading a Welcome to the NHK thread on /a/, and it’s one of the most nostalgic things, not because I liked the anime that much, but because the thread is filled with people who strongly identified with Satou, and also it’s so much like /a/ used to be long time ago:
this show inspired me to un-NEET.
went back to school, got a career, moved out of home.
my life is still just as empty and worthless, except now i have to work 40 hours a week.
Nice.
Shitty /r9k/ tier blog posts about your sad lives are not anime discussion
These threads are for the oldfags on /a/ who probably watch little of any anime anymore. A common confession on /a/ is “I don’t watch anime anymore”. I realized it gradually, but at least for me /a/ is less about anime and manga, and more about people who devote their lives to media in a particular manner.
Other anime communities are absolutely intolerable because they approach the material so superficially, or their devotion is of non-intellectual kind. I think my praise could hold true for other 4chan boards as well, but I guess in practice /v/ always was too underaged, because games take less dedication than reading linear stories.
Being a hiki neet is like being a fucking aristocrat, fuck you ronery faggots. I miss those days, no Misaki came to save me, though.
Any similar anime to this series where an introverted male MC experiences a prolonged existential crisis and oscillates between detached numbness and an intense grappling with life itself in an attempt to extract meaning, only to realize the ultimate futility in all endeavor and that assigning any meaning, engaging in persona cultivation and metacognizing is an act of dissociation from ultimate reality itself and the logical conclusion of this line of reasoning is total inaction in which one lays in bed completely still, urinating and defecating on himself until he perishes from dehydration, then upon realizing the absurdity of this course of action decides to continue his existence and treat life as a sort of lucid dream in which he tries to enjoy its suffering and banalities while simultaneously longing to wake up by dying in hopes that his localized consciousness will dissolve back into the monad, thereby dispelling his illusory reality within time-space and returning to the eternal oneness of undifferentiated, ultimate reality?
The above got four responses, all completely straight: Azumanga, Mari no Naka, Evangelion, and Saikyou Densetsu Kurosawa.
It occured to me that Welcome to the NHK anime inadvertently portrayed nicely the experience of being left out. Watching the anime, I was interested in what was going on with the side character Yamazaki, who had dreams and work ethic, but instead we get are forced to watch Satou’s painful existence. But that’s just how it would for a real life hikikomori — all the exciting things are happening to others, but no matter what you do you are stuck with yourself.
Jitaku Keibi In or JK (自宅警備員), literally “Home Security Guard”, is a term used by hikikomoris to refer to themselves.
