The setup: In Episode 9: Welcome to a Summer Day, Kaoru Yamazaki manages to work up enough balls to ask out his crush, one Nanako Midorikawa, to see some fireworks but is turned down. This is enough to make anyone drink, but there’s more. The reason Midorikawa says “tomorrow’s no good” is that she has an anime audition at that time. This comes off as a contrived excuse for being too busy, a phrase Yamazaki knows all too well from a similar situation that traumatized him as a child. Fingering the nerves of that sensitive scar, Midorikawa’s rejection parallels the instance where Yamazaki’s childhood crush ends up going to the fireworks display with another boy after having said she had to see her sick grandfather instead. His crush and the boy she’s with at the festival are espied by young Yamazaki, who then pulls a Kamen Rider-esque mask over his head and stomps off heartbroken. After Midorikawa and her friends leave and all is clear in the hall, Yamazaki grabs an action hero promotional poster, pokes eyeholes in it, and puts it in front of his face like a mask (keep this in mind for later). Evening comes, and Yamazaki storms into Tatsuhiro Sato's apartment in full alcohol-induced vigor. Yamazaki has managed to drink his sorrow away and even get excited over the upcoming summer comic market.  This new found enthusiasm is spurred on by a boast he made during a drinking party to his classmates about how his current project, a "gal game," would put all his other classmates' projects to shame. To make good on the boast, Yamazaki must push Sato into the dubious realm of productivity (not something at which a hikikomori normally excels).  Sato does give his all to work on his contribution (the script) to the gal game, but his recent conflicted feelings about his hikikomori counselor, Misaki Nakahara, stop him in his tracks at every turn. That calls for another drink. And another. Frothing with Usahi (Asahi) beer and rage, and fueled by the past and present indignation suffered from the whims of women combined with Sato's inability to work, Yamazaki attempts to bolster Sato’s spirits and get his head on straight with a little chant that is one of the greatest moments in drinking...the dirty whore rant: Drunken Otaku: Welcome to the Drunken Rant – Welcome to the NHK Episode 9 was originally published on Ani-Gamers on March 5, 2012 at 2:09 PM. Unless you are reading this in an RSS reader or a blog aggregator that credits the original authors, this version has likely been illegally copied (or "scraped") from our site. If you believe a site has scraped our content, please contact us so we can take action against the offender.
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