Sato made the mistake of insulting eroge games.
Sato is loathsome. By the end of this episode, the NEET shut-in who can barely talk to other people has a) spent a week playing porny Japanese games, b) woken up his neighbor three times in the middle of the night to get hints as to how to actually get the girls in these games, c) filled up his hard drive with so much Internet porn that he started to delete everything else off the computer, including system files he needs to make it run, d) promised to help create a porn game, and then spent the entire time he was supposed to work just going through boxes of tissues and e) when the enormity of iniquity is pointed out to him, he decides the only moral thing he can do is embrace his inner hentai and go to the local high school to take pictures of the girls from the bushes as they walk by.
This is our hero.
Pretty girl from the game.
One message that can be taken from this ugly chain of event is that, however horrible Sato is, he could be much worse if he had the energy and initiative. He had never really heard of eroge (erotic games) before his next-door neighbor introduced them to him. In fact, he hadn’t used his computer for much of anything before that – it never occurred to him that, instead of sitting around doing nothing he could be masturbating to stuff on the Internet. Now, he spends the entire episode doing it.
When he exhausts the games, his friend gives him CDs worth of images from the Internet. Sato is transfixed. It was as if he had never really thought about porn before, and now was a whole-hearted enthusiast. When he goes out onto the Wild World Web to find his own, the adventure in search engine use is portrayed as a wild sea chase, with Sato the brave captain of his libido-drive ship.
Brave pron captain
By the end of the trip, his hard drive is full, his tissue box is empty, and any sense that there was some quiet, sad dignity to his character is lost. The final straw, the photo session at the school yard, is enough to finally make his adoring underclassman run away in fear of getting caught.
When this same underclassman is fixing Sato’s computer, there’s an interesting visual trick. He’s sitting, Sato is standing, and there is a black slash covering part of the screen, obscuring Sato’s face. It is an obvious mark of shame – he doesn’t want to be scene being a creepy pornhound, but when he is fully discovered he, weirdly, embraces it and heads out for those real life shots. Why he would so readily embrace being a kiddy-chasing pervert is a mystery. Maybe Sato had been nothing for so long, being anything seemed better.
His impromptu photo session is interrupted by Misaki, who, without judgment, wonders if he is into little girls. He denies it, but when a sudden wind kicks up and hikes up the skirts of all the school-ager walking by, he is quick with the camera.
Misaki doesn’t mind; in fact, she says that makes him even better for his project. This, more than any of the porn
Caught in the act
or the eroge or his own horrible behavior, sends Sato running scared.
The above contains nearly no analysis, mostly just characterization. This episode defied analysis – it just wallows in Sato’s depravity. To its credit (minor credit) this episode seems to find Sato as distasteful as it should. While there are plenty of still images of near naked women, they are still, and not animated with the gusto that the hot chicks have gotten in previous episodes, inside Sato’s fantasy. The question this episode raises, though, is no longer what will save Sato, but is he worth it?
Probably not.
