i can't believe this was the first time i ever rped karamatsu despite the fact that i've been cosplaying him and wearing a t-shirt with a print of my face in that cosplay on a regular basis for 8 years

my roommate just assumed i had and was very confused when i talked about this before the game started

honestly i've always been intimidated because he is the most popular in the fandom and also he's just like. so much. and despite that being exactly the type of character i used to play all the time i have a lot less energy now so i didn't know if i'd be able to pull it off

so a 2-week was a good opportunity to finally try it

i was extremely self conscious during intro weekend and was like wow idk what the fuck i'm doing!! but i think i eventually got there... though it also like

helped that everything got so bad so fast on the 2-week turbo timeline that he was not in dramatic sparkly mode for very long lmao

so most of the game he ended up having way more season 3 vibes, which is probably actually good since his canon point was after that

i've talked about this in my totty plurks too but they really all do just feel a lot more worn down and resigned by season 3 and i think that applies to him the most out of all of them

he was very often the butt of the joke in the first season, that role kind of shifted a little more to totty in the second but he still suffered, and he really doesn't have a whole lot of moments like that in the third that i can think of offhand

and he's still sparkly and over the top sometimes but he's also just a little more jaded and less willing to deal with shit

in the second season there's an episode that's all about how all his brothers push all their chores and requests and stuff onto him because he's the nice one who won't say no, and he goes out of his way to offer to do so a lot of times because he wants to be liked!!

but he fucking hates it actually!!!! and is just too timid to say no because he's really bad at dealing with confrontation, and to some extent i think he's also kind of worried about losing his place in the family if he doesn't have that role to fill since everyone is so good at ignoring him already

i feel like he and totty both get treated the shittiest in different ways

like with totty it's more of a vindictive thing because he's just better at existing in society than any of them are while with kara it's kind of the opposite and it's just a total lack of respect lmao

which isn't TOTALLY unfair because he's an embarrassing dork and kind of a dumbass but he gets way worse than he actually deserves

i mentioned this in chat but there's this one episode-- well to preface this there's no consistent format for how they make an episode, sometimes it's all one long segment, sometimes it's two different unrelated stories, sometimes it's a bunch of little one-off sketches that may or may not come with a longer one

and there's only a few episodes that are two parters where they're different stories but chronologically connected, and the karamatsu incident/ESP kitty is one of them

in season 1

so the first one is about chibita kidnapping karamatsu and holding him for ransom because he's sick of the sextuplets not paying their tab at his food stand

chibita calls their house to tell them he kidnapped their brother and they have to pay to get him back and like. choromatsu and jyushimatsu are at least a little concerned but osomatsu and totty are like totally unbothered and ichimatsu's ecstatic about it

and then their mom brings in a plate of pear slices and all of them forget the whole thing completely and just dig into these fucking pears while the phone's still off the hook so chibita and karamatsu are hearing this on the other end

and chibita just feels so guilty and awkward that he unties him and takes him out for food lmao

he tries taking the fake kidnapping thing a step further to try to get them to take it more seriously and that goes even worse and they just throw a bunch of shit at kara to shut him up and close the window and chibita's just like uh welp i give up bye and just leaves him there in the street

and that's the end of that one!

jesus christ

then the next one is like, this surprisingly touching story about this cat that understands human feelings and ichimatsu gets called out on his social anxiety and depression, and he gets mad at the cat and kicks it out, and everyone feels bad and works to reunite him with the cat

and it has a very sweet ending and all the brothers walk off into the sunset together

except for karamatsu who has been absent from this entire story! because he's still beaten up from the last episode! and he shows up at the end in bandages and crutches watching them all walk off together and he's just like WHAT THE FUCK!!!!!!

so that entire wholesome episode was literally just a setup for the gag of karamatsu's life sucking at the end lmao

anyway that episode is here on youtube if anyone wants to watch (if you're in america, rip otherwise)

and despite being treated like this he's still always going to extremes to give his beloved brothers the very best!!!! and almost always putting them first!!!

i feel like it's actually the second to last episode of season 2 where he first starts coming across as kind of tired and done and like the glittery bullshit is more forced, this is the one where their dad ends up in the hospital and osomatsu does the most ooc thing of his life and says they probably need to get jobs and kara's the first one to be like

actually that sounds like a pain in the ass and i really don't want to

once they all reluctantly agree that they probably do need to then he jumps up and does one of his little sparkly speeches where he's like LET'S SHOW THE WORLD OUR NEWLY AWAKENED SELVES, BROTHERS!!! but then in the montage after that like

most of the others are making some effort to look for work or training or something, but when he comes across this book about getting certifications he just leaves it there, and when the others are out doing things he's just sitting in the house by himself

idk what he even ends up doing, it shows him hanging out and drinking with some bikers at some point while ichimatsu's working for chibita so i'm like?? did you get a job with these guys??? what are you doing

but it doesn't matter because then a plane hits their house and they all die and go to hell

and go back to being shitty NEETs when they revive

anyway THEN IT'S SEASON 3 and he still has plenty of fun moments but he's also just less willing to take everyone else's shit than he used to be

this (uploaded to my domain so no country restrictions yay) is from the episode where he and totty fall for the same girl, and i think he's genuinely okay with standing back and letting totty have her at first, like, i don't think he's trying to be that manipulative, but totty's such an ungrateful little shit about it

that he's just like okay actually you know what? never mind fuck you i'm going for it

so i think at this point he's just really over the way everyone takes his kindness for granted and he expects at least some appreciation and decency in return

which brings us to pizza which is possibly my favorite episode segment of the whole show because i just love how mundane it is and how much they're all digging into each other's psyches over this hypothetical pizza

i highly recommend watching the entire thing because i think it's hilarious and it provides context but the karamatsu part specifically is at 7:07

where he's trying to be nice and not get into dumb arguments but they get on his ass for it and he just snaps

it's so good

anyway HE IS IN A VERY DIFFERENT EMOTIONAL PLACE THAN HE WAS IN SEASON 1 so like

i think in the game he was especially appreciative of the people who actually treated him nicely and respectfully and seemed to care about his feelings because he's been dealing with this crappy treatment for so long and is so tired of it

but at the same time his family's still his whole world even if that world SUCKS sometimes and he loves them and it was rough on him being apart from them too

man i love kara (milk)

cries i also love him!!!!

unbelievable that a plane crashed and everyone died because most of them got jobs

i feel like i could and would write equally long and detailed essays about him and totty but kara's the one i have more feelings about lmao totty's more thoughts

that is how their canon works

whenever there's a significant turning point where big changes are happening in the second to last episode of a season the season finale comes and blows up the whole thing and veers off into extra ridiculous gag territory

help

its not meant to be...

this was actually like a big thing totty was struggling with in scawwy that he talked to mumu about a lot lmao how he was like i have had so much character development here but i literally do not know if i will be permitted to keep it when i go back home

thats the saddest meta i've ever seen in my life

yeah..... it's part of why he just used his wish on her too despite being a selfish little shit, because he was like, if i wish for anything big for myself it'll probably just get wasted anyway

anyway on the season finale subject as long as i'm dumping links here the first 3:37 of this is part of the setup from the second to last episode of the first season and kara's just very cool in it

(don't watch the whole thing though because it's my edited version that pasted together the totty parts from later in the episode lmao)

since this was a 2 week i made a conscious decision at the beginning to just not even have him try to think much about the logistics of anything from an anime standpoint so he could just roll with it and have a good time for the first few days and i truly have no idea what he thought all the people there were

he just did not think about it

just accepted everyone being from different worlds with different mechanics at face value with no questions

once the time loop happened he quickly got really anxious and homesick just because he'd never been apart from his family for that long and given that plenty of anime gags involve things going on for extremely long stretches of time he was like what if we're stuck here for months!!!

even once people started dying he really never had any worries about permadeath for himself because he's died plenty of times, but he DID worry some about other people because he didn't know if it would be the same for them or not

and he's not very smart and not good at being independent so once people were dropping like flies the concern was not about dying himself but about whether he'd be able to fix the time loop shit if it came down to just him and that was stressful

so after a fun first party weekend he just got progressively more depressed and on edge and i think he came off as very Done by the final trial which i guess was a good reflection of his canon character arc condensed into two weeks

so idk i didn't expect i'd play him again after this but... i might......... we'll see...

trapped in my fucking muppet era for all of 2024

chskdjdkd Muppet era

I keep gaining more appreciation about the muppet canon every time you play from it

ghnjsdgk i'm glad and also i'm sorry

muppet era has eric in a vicehold

help me i actually went to the link i posted to the karamatsu incident/ESP kitty ep and this was the first comment

THEY REALLY DID...

NOT THE META MAKING IT WORSE

god lmao this barney conversation in chat is making me think like damn karamatsu is kind of the barney of his family actually

loving his family and trying to do nice things for them and they're just like you're cringe as hell please die

this episode where their mom is trying to pick one of them to send to a NEET correctional facility and she consults with choromatsu to get the brothers' opinion on which of them should go and he immediately says osomatsu which is totally the correct answer and their mom's just like

"??? i was sure you'd say karamatsu, aren't you always mad at him?? isn't he annoying?"

and choro's like... well... yeah but he hasn't actually done anything wrong...

the ic acknowledgement that they really are just assholes to him for no reason except he's embarrassing

fuckin help

Kara deserves so much better