The Nerd Queen
Every few months the Japanese anime industry churns out a batch of new shows, and I sift through the first episodes because most of it is terrible. I’m picky about anime, always have been. What kills a show for me is cheap animation, figures drawn with dead eyes and weird proportions. High school kids with superpowers saving the world for the millionth time. Mechas. I know everyone expects me to love all mechas because I worship Neon Genesis Evangelion, but the rest of them just don’t do it for me. Most of them are dumb.
This season I found something that had me watching week after week. Along with Non Non Biyori Repeat,
of course—nothing beats that show. It could stay perfect forever and I’d be fine with it. Himouto! Umaru-chan
is the opposite of it though. No countryside charm, no nature. This one’s about Umaru, who is sixteen, beautiful, gets straight A’s, and somehow has the hottest best friend in anime. Everyone wants to be her. She’s perfect. But there’s a catch.
The second she walks through her apartment door, that perfect blonde girl turns into a small, goblin-like creature in a sweater, face-first into a PlayStation, working through games and manga and junk food with the kind of commitment most people save for their jobs. She has every console, every game, every series. She’s a fully-formed arcade legend. She lives with her older brother Taihei because she can’t afford her own place, and she makes his life hell, constantly terrified someone from school will catch her in this state and realize the perfect Umaru is just a lazy otaku. Her whole life is a performance, and the stakes of getting caught are real.
The premise isn’t new—”Switch Girl” did it before. But what makes Umaru work is the detail, the actual love for the culture itself. She doesn’t just pretend to be a nerd; she lives it deeply, in that way only someone who actually gets it can show. Every scene of her trying to engineer a day of maximum laziness and maximum gaming and maximum snack consumption—it’s not played as a flaw or something to overcome. It’s just how she is, and the show loves her for it.
Most anime now wants high school heroes and world-saving. I don’t care about that. I want shows about people who want to stay home and play games and eat snacks, who want the weird, ordinary truth of wanting nothing more than to be left alone with the things you love. Umaru gets that. She’s not trying to change. She’s not learning a lesson. She’s just trying to survive being herself.
If Umaru had aired on mainstream TV back in the day, everyone would have loved her. She’s Shin-chan without the perversion—just the chaos and the desire to be left alone. Watching her, I feel seen in a way most anime doesn’t even try for.