I know this isn’t a BL series but man, they’re really playing up the bromance angle hard. You feel like Kenta and Mitsutaka are sort of missing something obvious here, but maybe that’s just me having watched too many anime and read too many manga over the years. There’s certainly nothing implicitly “additional” in bonding with a friend over a shared interest of course, especially when you feel as these dudes do that you have to live a secret life because of it. I think the punchline here is that most people just wouldn’t give a flip. But having come of age as an anime fan in a time and place where it was considered a seriously weird hobby believe me, I do get it.
This week’s first drama for Oji-san is his desire to have Pugtarou with him at all times, and the impossibility of this for reasons. He hears a couple of young bros at the izakaya talking about belly warmers (the one ribbing the other hard over it), and realizes that Pugtarou ones exist. Could this be the answer? It seems too good to be true – and then he considers the bathroom. Or lounging around the house, or showing through the shirt at work. And this the Pugtarou belly warmer is consigned to the “what might have been” pile next to the belt, socks, and necktie.
Once more we see that Oji-san is irresistible to young women for some reason (I guess that really is a thing). He saves a distracted young office lady from stumbling into traffic, and she’s immediately smitten. They run into each other at that izakaya, and as she tries to work up the courage to approach him he drops his phone – on which he’s in the process of looking at Pugtarou goods. The screen shatters but that at least is the only thing she notices. He notices very little himself, not remotely picking up on her signals of interest. This might be a potential recurring character here, an alternative love interest to the ex-wife (though she’s definitely still into him).
The opposite sex is very much a theme here, though it comes in the context of Kenta-kun inviting Mitsutaka over to his place to squee over kawaii mono in freedom. Oji could hardly be more in schoolgirl mode over this, though on arrival he’s surprised to find that Kenta has pretty much nothing on display in his apartment. The subject of girlfriends comes up, and that’s the reason Kenta doesn’t want any unexpected visitors to see anything they shouldn’t. But his cute obsession did break up his last relationship so this is clearly an ongoing issue for him.
In fact Kenta is just about to get a new girlfriend. And Mitsutaka’s feelings about this can quite fairly be labeled as jealousy, I think. He’s rather brooding about this back at the office, but that only makes him seem hotter to Moshina-san. Bereft, he gets an email invite to the annual Pugtarou meet-‘n-greet that he’s always been too embarrassed to attend on his own. And in a fit of abandon he applies to the ticket lottery, a sort of carpe diem imposed by Kenta’s “rejection”. That will be an interesting experience for Mitsutaka no doubt, but by now he really should be pretty used to that sort of thing.
