SHOSHIMIN: How to become Ordinary

Episode 4

Even Kobato and Osanai realize they're doing a terrible job of being “ordinary.” That's an entirely different thing from deciding that there's no value in pursuing that goal and realizing that they're probably fine the way they are, but Kobato, at least, may be moving in that direction. And that may be a good thing for him; when he spends the first half of this episode outlining his theories and discussing the case with Kengo, it's the most animated he's been in the entire show thus far. He loves investigating and hypothesizing, no matter how mundane (the hot chocolate) or potentially dangerous (the bike theft) the situation. There's a quiet joy that radiates from his eyes and body language as he's writing on the board and bouncing ideas off of his friend, and while I know it's different looking in from afar, as we are with this situation, I want that for him. Is “ordinary” worth giving up what you really love?

We don't know what Osanai's feelings are on the subject, but it feels like, with this episode, the answer she may settle on is “yes.” Her situation seems fairly different from Kobato's; his oddity is being a know-it-all self-styled detective, but as he tells Kengo, if he was a fox, Osanai was a wolf. Although we don't have any concrete details about what she did in middle school, we can see that her default personality is comparable to my dog with peanut butter: once it enters his awareness, nothing can distract him. Osanai has a history of being tenacious to a fault, unwilling to let something go until she's satisfied. We saw hints of this before with the strawberry tarts (R.I.P.), where she wore Kobato down until he agreed to go with her so that she could secure two. That could be irritating, but it's not dangerous, which is emphatically not the case with the bike incident. This isn't about just wanting something easily obtained, it's about confronting a person who seems very willing to lie, steal, and cheat to get what he wants, and when she embarks on this quest, she's fully aware that he's not acting alone. As Kobato notes, how is a group of thugs likely to treat a girl like Osanai? The unspoken is, “not well.”

While neither Osanai nor Kobato seems fully capable of tossing aside who they were before, there's more danger in Osanai reverting. There's a temper that comes with her stubbornness, as we can see in her stiff, angry walking at the end when a woman accidentally douses her with water. Again, Osanai is hyper-focused on the person who wronged her, and we don't know if Kobato's texts tell her to come back because he can figure this out by the items left on the table work. Her attempt to tell Kengo that she's “Yuki's twin sister Maki” is laughable, but it does indicate that she's trying to find a way around actually changing. This raises the question of whether Kobato is likely to revert to his detective self because he wants to, or because he's trying to save Osanai from herself.

It is a little bit of a disappointment that we don't get more information about how Osanai used to be after episode three's blood-red sunset scene. But this story doles out its information at its own pace, and I think we can trust it to give us everything we need to know eventually. It does drag a bit, but it also seems to be setting up Kobato and Osanai as two people who may not have as much choice in how they present themselves as they think they do. It may turn out to be an embodiment of the aphorism about how the object of climbing a mountain is not to reach the top, but to enjoy the climb along the way.

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SHOSHIMIN: How to become Ordinary is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.