After the great performance Kessoku Band put on in the previous episode, episode 6 of Bocchi The Rock! presents Bocchi with a different problem altogether: getting five people to buy tickets to the upcoming live. Her mind goes into overdrive as she realizes over and over that the four people in her life (this includes the family dog, Jimihen) are not enough to make up the numbers she needs to fulfill her portion of Kessoku Band's quota for the evening.
Bocchi is too embarrassed to accept her mother's offer to help her sell tickets, and pretends that everything is alright even though she is secretly suffering from the band's initial success. However, a chance meeting with a stranger just happens to put everything on track for Bocchi in more ways than one.
The Dog Doesn't Count
Bocchi short-circuits a little when she tries to count the people she can depend on to be there for Kessoku Band's first live performance. She counts her parents, little sister and Jimihen; her Shiba Inu, but Bocchi's mother gently reminds her that the dog doesn't count, not to mention her 5-year-old little sister who obviously would not be an appropriate attendee. Bocchi lies to her mother, claiming that she has several friends at school that she can invite at school, but that's far from reality.
To make things worse, the other band members quickly sell their assigned tickets without breaking a sweat, sending an already-stressed Bocchi into even greater despair. She thinks about how it'd go over with her fellow band members if she could only make up 2 of her obligated 5 ticket sales. Like usual, Bocchi spirals as her vivid imagination goes wild, showing her the worst, most ridiculous "possibility". Ashamed of her unnecessary, embarrassing lies, she quickly flees the scene to go to her band practice, but she's unlucky to run into a collapsed stranger. Before she can leave the unpleasant situation, the drunk lady begs Bocchi for help, asking for water, hangover medicine, miso soup with clams, and a host of other things.
Drunken Master
After helping the stranger, Bocchi tries to take her leave, but she asks for her name and starts talking to her about how great drinking is. Bocchi's discomfort isn't even a consideration, since the older lady is so drunk she only realizes that Bocchi is much younger than she is a while into the conversation. When she notices Bocchi's guitar, Hitori tries to lie about it, claiming that she's not worthy of playing it and was on her way to selling it at a pawn shop; however, the older woman tells Bocchi not to give up on playing the guitar. She reveals that she also dabbles in rock music, which makes the nervous Bocchi even less capable of regular social interaction as the premise of interacting with an older rocker makes her anticipate the kind of bitter treatment rookies tend to get from bitter oldheads, regardless of medium. However, the happy-go-lucky stranger quickly snaps up the opportunity to show her junior rocker a thing or two.
She shows Bocchi her very own bass, telling her that she and her band had an awesome live performance the night before, and that she got too drunk at the after-party, hence the state she was found in. She also tells Bocchi about her "Happiness Spiral", which is dependent on her heavy drinking habits, which hilariously sends Bocchi's overactive imagination into a short bit about an adult Bocchi's own battle with alcoholism and the pressures of adulthood. She asks Bocchi what she was up to before they met, and after hearing her out, the strange lady is strangely sympathetic but also outlandish in her support – she brazenly suggests that she and Bocchi do a street performance to help her sell the tickets.
Kanazawa-Hakkei Street Performance
Naturally, Bocchi is flung into a universe of anxiety by the premise of performing outside, in front of strangers; however, her drunken senpai is adamant, going as far as to distribute the flyers Bocchi made in anticipation of Kessoku Band's first live performance. The stranger is confident and dexterous on her bass, but Bocchi's anxiety gets the best of her; however, a very supportive onlooker cheers her on, giving Bocchi just the boost she needed to start playing the guitar well. Her strange senpai notices how quickly Bocchi recovers from her mistakes and rectifies her flaws, and the experience leaves Bocchi satisfied as some onlookers come to purchase some of her tickets. After the commotion, she has only one ticket left, but her new friend tells her that she'll be buying Bocchi's last ticket, but the purchase leaves her having to ask Hitori for money since it took from her train fare, which rounded out a very good introduction for the new character, who remains nameless.
Concern For Hitori
The unexpected outing with a stranger takes Bocchi away from the Kessoku Band practice that she would have attended otherwise, leaving her band members to practice without her. This gives them a bit of time to talk about their friend. Since Ryou and Nijika go to a different school, they ask Kita how Hitori acts at school. She tells them about how withdrawn Hitori is, which makes them lament and worry about her because they've come to know how fun and interesting she really is.
It's pretty clear that the bonds within Kessoku Band have begun to form, and Kita especially has a different kind of relationship with Bocchi since she learned how to play the guitar from one-on-one practice sessions with her. What Bocchi's absence from band practice reveals in this episode is how valued she has become by her band members in such a short space of time, despite them not knowing about her Guitar Hero identity. They also realize how high a hurdle the five-ticket quota is for Bocchi, but she soon tells them that she managed to get it done somehow when she texts them an apology for missing practice. It would appear that there's no need to worry about Bocchi – she's getting along just fine.