[Spoilers] Alma-chan Wants to Be a Family! - Episode 3 Discussion

This week, Alma-chan gets her first friend!

While out in the rain, Alma came across a delinquent-seeming girl who turned out to be searching for her lost puppies (all of whom were named after contemporary Western movie stars). Being a powerful robot who is still learning about human social conventions, Alma was not put off by the girl's delinquent energy, so she used her robot powers to help locate the puppies.

After discerning that the final puppy returned home on its own...

Alma met the girl's grandmother and found out that the girl's name is Hana ("flower" in Japanese), which totally contradicts the delinquent vibe she is trying to cultivate.

Interestingly, it seems that the mangaka for Alma-chan live tweets during the broadcast airing of the episodes, and he tweeted this:

Hana-chan is a total grandma's girl, so her fashion sense and hobbies are influenced by her grandma
By the way, her grandma is a cool rocker type who rides a large motorcycle even after turning 60
#Alma-chan

Anyway, this experience led Alma to decide that she wanted to go to school so that she could be around Hana more, whom she now considers to be her first friend.

Hilarious social interactions ensued, including the boys teaching Alma an indecent phrase, and Alma (unintentionally) revealing embarrassing details about the daily lives of her mom and dad via videos that she's taken.

After Alma reported to her parents about how school went, the episode ends with a couple shots that imply that shit is going to go down in the next episode...

So, with all that said...

I managed until now to avoid saying that I was incredibly thrilled with this episode because Hana was voiced by Saku Mizuno, who I consider to be one of the most important people ever to exist because she voiced Ryo Yamada in Bocchi the Rock! I suspect that she may have been typecast for this role because she's a dog lover IRL.

Also, Sakupi and Alma's VA actually did a Valorant livestream together earlier this week, and I assume that the timing of it was no accident.

https://twitter.com/seiyu_esports/status/1978457201338708370

OK, one more interesting thing that the mangaka said before I end this post:

#Alma-chan
In the original work, the mob classmate characters weren't depicted very strictly, but in the anime, they have proper character designs and names set for them.
The twin-tails with buckteeth in the trio of girls is Miyayoshi-san
The long-haired gentle one is Hino-san
The petite one is Yahagi-san.
The one who was scared of Hana-chan in Part A is Iida-san
For the boys, the leader type with the hat is Hirai, the ones who said "poop" together are Tani-kun and Tsuda-kun.

I just thought it was interesting that the mangaka didn't come up with distinct names and character designs for the classmates, but the anime staff did. (Please note that the above was auto-translated, so the proper names might be wrong.)