Crunchyroll has rescheduled its simulcast for My Deer Friend Nokotan to Wednesday, in line with the early streaming schedule in Japan. Guess I won’t have to search up a fansub anymore. Going forward, I’m swapping when I cover this and Makeine. For some reason, Amazon’s simulcast remains the same though I imagine most people are watching the show on Crunchyroll and I don’t think Amazon cares.
The first half of Episode 6 is a lightning round of eighteen mini episodes, which the narrator claims to be in celebration of the show reaching its halfway mark. And here I thought My Deer Friend Nokotan couldn’t get any more sporadic. Actually, there is a fair amount of continuity throughout these shorts. In between all the random gags, you have Koshitan going over the Deer Club’s financials and realizing that they are in serious debt. Nokotan then decides to sell her antlers to get the club some money via Mercari and an infomercial. My favorite joke out of all these shorts is Neko falling for this infomercial and purchasing some of the antlers herself because of the bulk deal and the free shipping. Talk about relatable. Another favorite of mine is last one, where the gang decides to rip off BOCCHI THE ROCK!, only to then use instruments that aren’t remotely associated with rock music. That could very well be the closest thing we’ll get to a BOCCHI Season 2.
After the commercial break, the show transitions into summer and the girls likewise switch to the school uniforms for that season. On their way to school, the Deer Club notices that Nokotan has spots all over her body and her clothes. After some back and forth, the club figures out that Nokotan is just molting like a regular deer. I kind of admire this show for going fully into creepy territory for this gag, with Nokotan actually pulling her old skin and Bashame deciding to wear it herself. I’m not sure what I should expect from this show but very weird fetishes was not definitely on my bingo card. That really took me by surprise.
Probably the funniest joke in this entire episode is Koshitan expecting summer to get wild, only for the show to immediately jump cut to autumn and the narrator reveal that summer went perfectly fine. Koshitan has every right to expect crazy stuff to happen because her life has been upside down since Episode 1 so the show deciding to make summer so mundane that it’s not even worth showing is an incredible punchline. It also hilarious when you consider that someone went out of their way to draw the characters in their summer uniforms, only for those designs to be used up in just one scene.
At the end of the episode, Neko tries to plot the Deer Club’s demise with Chiharu and Kinu. To her chagrin, she learns that her friends haven’t been doing that in the slightest (though it wasn’t like those two were promising to do that in the first place). The trio then realize that Nokotan is also in the room because reasons. Nokotan then shows them a strange, ball-like creature made out of moving antlers that she found in the school grounds. Honestly, if this show reveals itself to be some sort of Cronenberg horror story, I wouldn’t be surprised. Nokotan thinks the creature is a tsuchinoko but she drops it when the creature doesn’t fit any of the criteria that she randomly comes up for it. Still, the girls decide to name it Tsucchi. I can see this strange being disappearing entirely after this episode as a joke but seeing as the deer from the Bully Maguire scene has shown up more than once, I imagine this non-tsuchinoko is here to stay.
Watch My Deer Friend Nokotan on Amazon and Crunchyroll
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