I saw a lot of complaints about the way Watamote ended, most saying that nothing had changed at all and that Tomoko was right back where she started, doomed to a downward spiral of self-loathing and social awkwardness forever. I didn't see it that way. (A/N: Spoilers for the end of the show are in this post.)
That said, I am a glass-half-full kind of person, but hear me out. We spend the majority of the series realizing how broken a person Tomoko really is. At the beginning, she can't even look at herself in the mirror without wanting to throw up. Her far-fetched mental plans to get the social life that she dreams of fall flat, so she continues to isolate herself from others. She has a problem, but there's no easy solution.
And then the upper-classman character steps in. They're not close, but she doesn't look down on Tomoko or pity her. She treats Tomoko like a person, which was all that she really needed. It also helps that this is coming from someone who is a complete outsider to her life; unlike her family and one other friend, there's not much room for Tomoko to feel guilty to to negatively compare herself. The girl is a fantastic positive force in Tomoko's life towards the end of the show, to the point that Tomoko finally decides that she wants to reach out and make a friend.
Of course, this was completely ruined by anime physics, and Tomoko running away is where the detractors say that nothing changed. But think about it. Would Tomoko have tried this at the beginning of the show? In the end, she did reach out. It doesn't matter that she didn't succeed the first time. That was a huge step for Tomoko, and I think that she can only build from here.
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| Honestly, this was the moment where Tomoko should've realized that she was anime |
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