some post-episode 24 totoko meta
The thing I think is most telling about Totoko’s character is that she has no friends.
Chibita and Iyami are the most likely people to have been her friends in Osomatsu-san, but they mostly seem to regard her with fond exhaustion in all of their scenes together and don’t demonstrate any of the boisterous camaraderie that’s visible between Chibita and Iyami themselves. Her parents treat her in the same way; supportive but not quite sure how to get through to her, and completely unaware of where she’s at as a person to the point they’re surprised she’s unfamiliar with the basic idea of jealousy. The sextuplets don’t even seem to see her as a person any more than the elderly neighbors who abandoned their local idol for real celebrities.
Totoko has no friends. Her support network has always consisted of people who propped her up and never really pointed out her flaws in a way she could work with to improve, and Totoko developed such a complex around that void that she’s completely incapable of changing herself to improve even the slightest bit as a person.
Even the show points out in the reflection episode she and Osomatsu co-hosted that she’s just as useless as the brothers. Totoko is just as much of a loser as all of them. Except now they’re (almost) all trying to make strides to improve themselves as people by leaving home and finding new ways to live on their own, seriously putting their entire lives into the endeavor.
In contrast, Totoko finds the man of her dreams and ends it the second he makes a negative comment about her. She goes on a flight abroad and heads home the moment she gets homesick. Her idol career actively fails and she sustains herself on willful ignorance for months. Totoko and Osomatsu are just as stuck as each other in their respective fantasies of what life should be like, how they should act, what should be a granted and what should be dismissed.
So when Osomatsu loses his built-in support network in one fell swoop, his entire fantasy collapses. Totoko’s is probably going to collapse just as quickly — for all that she thinks the sextuplets are a pain to deal with, they’re an integral part of her pretensions of grandeur, right down to how her relatively-ordinary character in F6 is just as destined for greatness and true fulfillment as all of the sextuplets’ idol selves.
Totoko needs the sextuplets just as much as Osomatsu needs his brothers, not so much for what they offer her as people, but for the sense of stability and everyday reassurance that she’s a fundamental part of someone’s life. She carries out the same routines with them every single day just as much as Osomatsu does, and when that’s over?
I mean, Totoko has no friends. She’s an only child whose parents don’t connect with her on any level and whose peers are all living lives full of things she didn’t know she wanted until she didn’t have them. Totoko is what Osomatsu might have been if he’d been that only child he says he wishes he was, and now both of them are on equally unstable ground. Totoko didn’t expect him to walk away at the offer of a casual date, the last real affirmation to herself that it’s fine if she lives like this her whole life, and Osomatsu didn’t expect his brothers to leave home, his final shred of belief that his lifestyle is going to work out forever.
Her part in the cast is and always has been crucial for how she plays off of the sextuplets and how her story bumps up against theirs. Totoko’s half of 24 was all about failure to recognize having any sort of flaws and treating goals like things that should be innately far-fetched; the brothers’ half was about those “losers” making those first few small steps to concrete self-improvement and a sustainable lifestyle that makes them truly happy.
Except Osomatsu and Totoko, who are still spinning their wheels and not making it anywhere.
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR SUBMITTING THIS META! aaaaaaaa, this is SO good!
pixelskylines
gummygunk
discoholicmusic
vaporwave
2087
izzy806
