I know it’s a pretty crap season, but I think Ojisan ha Kawaii Mono ga Osuki. is a damn good show even if you’re not grading on a curve. I get that it’s a niche series, but niche series are the heart and soul of anime in many ways. It’s the sort of material the medium (and manga) can do very well. There always seem to be a few anime like this every year, and even as the overall quality level trends downward (which I believe to be objectively the case) we still haven’t lost that. Maybe it’s a rare upside to the massive bloat that sees 60-plus new series every season – there’s more chance for stuff like Ojisan ha Kawaii to slip through.
The drama at the office isn’t actually that dramatic, but that fits with the overall tone of the show. Moshino-san isn’t actually in love with Oji-san, she tells Usama. No, she just finds him “dreamy” and thinks of him like an idol she wants to fangirl for. Her “oshi”, Usama thinks (the same term Mitsutaka applied to Naruto’s favorite cat at the cafe). Apparently Mitsutaka is quite a popular guy generally speaking, judging by the reaction of the young woman next to him on the Shinkansen.
Next, Oji and Kenta go on a shopping trip to the cute goods “Fancy Shop”, and Mitsutaka is preposterously excited about the whole thing. As thrilled as he is to share his secret obsession with someone at last, he’s aghast when Kenta is a little too vocal in his enthusiasm. “Are you… open about this?” he asks tentatively, and Kenta confirms that he’s not – he just got swept up in the moment. Kenta isn’t as secretive as Mitsutaka – he works as a designer and his workplace is more accepting – but there are things even he closely guards, like his affection for the “Youchien Cubs” characters. And artificial distinction to be sure, but this whole thing is very much in the eye of the beholder.
The most judgmental – and suspicious – person in Oji-san’s circle is Naruto, of course. He and Oji go off on a business trip together, where the aforementioned Shinkansen encounter takes place. Oji-san is unnerved that Naruto peeks at him from under his sleep mask, but in fact Naruto only wants to cop some tips on how not to appear unsocial. After their meetings Mitsutaka only wants to go check out the local branches of Fancy Shop for regional exclusive goods. He finally realizes that Naruto is probably itching to go to a cat cafe and suggests they split up, but in fact Naruto (even he likes to share his obsessions) had been planning to invite Mitsutaka along.
It’s at this point that things get about as serious as they’ve gotten, as Mitsutaka runs into his ex-wife (who now works in this unnamed town). You get the idea that there are a lot of layers to this. The fact that his ex-wife is also his ex-boss is certainly a juicy detail – you know there has to be a barnburner of a story there. He’s hinted that she left him over his cute obsession, but it becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly that there was more to this than just that. The pair of them wind up at a bar nursing a drink, and one can certainly make a case that these two are seriously mismatched.
That may be, but the ex-wife definitely gets flustered at the (mistaken) idea that Mitsutaka is still interested. In fact he only wants to confess about his hobby – which he does – assuming the pair of them will never meet again. She claims that if he’d been honest from the beginning, she’d have dumped him as soon as she found out – but I have my doubts about that. My sense is that she’s much less over him than he her, and with her planning to move back to Tokyo it seems clear this part of the story is far from wrapped up.
