Fridge / Oreimo

aka: Ore No Imouto Ga Konna Ni Kawaii Wake Ga Nai

All spoilers are unmarked.

• Saori Bajeena. At first she may seem to be little more than a Shout-Out to the alias Char Aznabel takes in Zeta Gundam. Then cut to a scene where you don't see her face and she is flanked by two maids, showing her as a rich Ojou. Then it hit me; Quattro Bajeena was the alias Char used when he joined the AEUG, so that he could hide in plain sight and still achieve his goals. Now replace the goals of showing humanity the error of their ways with; wanting to buy anime, manga and eroge. Saori is being true to her ideals in the same way that Char was. Well played...
• At first the opening song to the series IRONY by ClariS seems to be the kind of peppy anime song you would come to expect from a genre that shows the Otaku day-to-day life, much in the vein of Genshiken or similar shows. Then when you actually understand the words the song becomes brilliant. If there were a nation for Tsundere this would be its National Anthem.
• Kirino is a Model Student, a track star athelete, and has a well paying job, she is everything the stereotypical good girl is. However she is a Literal Closet Otaku, seriously; she hides all of her eroge, anime and little sister items in a secret closet she hides behind a shelf unit.
• The reason Kirino could get her first novel published even though she had never written anything before it is because it was pornographic. Or at least borderline.
• Manami Tamura. At first people were either cheering for her or criticizing her since she wasn't as remarkable as the other girls and because her defining trait was 'normality'. No wonder a lot of readers/viewers—if not all—were seriously caught off guard by the complete 180 of Manami's prominence in the Kousaka siblings' Cold War and ultimately the indirect instigator of the series itself!!
  • Another thing worth mentioning is the Odd Friendship she shares with Ayase. Maybe it's because of the Nice Girl tendencies Manami and (occasionally) Ayase share. Turns out they're not so different, what with varying degrees of Moral Guardian tendencies and Bitch in Sheep's Clothing attitudes. While Ayase acts out her mean attitude more openly to protect Kirino, Manami prefers the Manipulative Bitch method to subtly talk the Kousaka siblings into changing themselves drastically.
• Why is Kanako, despite declaring otakus as weird and/or disgusting, pretty easygoing and accepting when it comes to her cosplay job? It's mostly Hates the Job, Loves the Limelight, but then Fridge Brilliance kicks in when you find out later on that Kanako's sister, Kanata, is an otaku as well—to be specific, the author of Kuroneko's favorite series Maschera. So while Kanako may find anime and manga hobbies weird, she's ultimately okay with it.
• Episode 8 is about a light novel being made into an anime. Oreimo is a light novel that was made into an anime. In the episode they discuss "making each opening and ending different" and indeed each episode has a different opening and ending. The author also turned down the first offer to make this franchise into an anime.
• The siblings coming together in the ending. It's right in the title!
• It's pretty clear to attentive fans that she is indeed projecting her fantasies onto these fictional characters once you hear her backstory and her audiodiaries. The "wholesome" side of her obsession was originally about cute little sisters, how she saw herself, and how she always wanted her brother to see her as cute. The eroge obsession was always about forbidden love between little sisters and their older brothers, something that she admittedly started to get into after Minami scolded her when she was younger. It is stated in her audiodiary that she was searching for a way to romance her loved one, telling herself in the future to never give up searching, and ultimately directed it AT the loved one assuming that they would be listening. Her Eroge obsession being based around this would be a potential source for answers as she even writes down all the branching choices, their results, and knows when the endings are unrealistic and impossible. In Season 2 Episode 15 she wanted to use her new Eroge as a reference of what to do with their future romance as she doesn't know what happens yet or the ending. In the afterstory she even starts to branch out to other genres(en masse at that) since she has succeeded and no longer has a mental reliance on the prior genres.
  • (continuation of the latter) The ending of them stopping their public romance was an answer she came up with after she deemed it impossible to maintain the relationship publicly. They however successfully continue in private and in the afterstory it is expanded upon to such an extent that it implies they are very happy with their romance(Kirino bragging to Kuroneko about possibly(?) sex with a ''strongly'' jealous response from Kuroneko. Kirino even dropped the Tsundere act to Kyousuke since she no longer needs this self-defence mechanism in his presence. It also appears that their romance is "imitating idealistic real world romances", albeit incestuous, and says that he has plans about taking it farther(inferred proposal and confirmed afterwords plans).
    • (Final continuation) If anything, Ayase is the bisexual since Kirino has reasoning for her enjoyment and angrily berates Kanako's suggestions of same-sex attraction, whilst Ayase is strangely gleeful at these suggestions and Yandere protective of Kirino. It's more or less a trope in itself that there is always that 1 female friend with questionable motives around the same sex.