What I think that scene does is kind of set up for her mother’s appearance as a ghost. It’s not really a comment on either Soujiro’s character or Konata’s feelings on his…eccentricities. The episode, through this conversation and similar ones they’ve had about this in the past, is trying to showcase how Konata is a fully-realized fusion/synthesis of her parents. Konata and her father are close in a way that teenage girls probably usually aren’t towards their single fathers, to the extent that I read Kagami as mistaking Konata and her mother not because of the way they look, but because of their body language with Soujiro. Konata saying “Either way, you fail as a person” is part teenage snark, part Kanata curbing his absurdities as I assume she did while alive.
Eventually you realize that Konata acts towards her father the way her mother did, while inheriting her looks, and her ability to understand/empathize with people’s quiets. She shares her father’s interests, and to some extent, his utter lack of shame in loving both what and who he wants. the line “I hope she doesn’t turn out like either of us” hits even harder because Kanata’s wish did not, in fact, come true…but the monkey’s paw curled and gave Konata the positive aspects of them both.
It makes the ghost scene all that poignant because Kanata sees the two of them and realizes that she is in fact still there through both her husband and her daughter. All of the otaku and family antics kind of establish that after Kanata died, the two of them gradually took pieces of her onto themselves to kind of compensate. Soujiro took on her role as a parent as best he could (turning her into a hopeless gamer to the point where her entrance into Tokyo University could be all but guaranteed by nothing more than the prospect of his buying her a new gaming console or PC, one that he’ll be using just as often as she does if not more, was a stroke of genius), while Konata took on the role of her father’s minder. Soujiro evidently feels that Konata is enough like Kanata for him to be unconditionally proud of the young woman she’s become. Her ghost is able to return to her family because she’s not completely gone.
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u/shosuko Mar 11 '25
How do you say that, when she literally goes to the beach wearing her school swim suit and a tube hoping to find a match?