In the first season of Squid Girl, many of Squid Girl’s amazing abilities are made common knowledge. This includes her ability to sneeze ink, her super strength and also… her incredible learning ability which sees her coming to speak and understand the English language fluently not long after expressing her inability to speak it. She haughtily laughs, saying, “It’s easier to speak than Japanese-degeso! They say the one who masters English is to become the master of all! Now the world invasion will be a piece of cake!” To add insult to injury, Squid Girl is capable of grasping mathematical concepts of high difficulty with ease after a single glance at the various rules. Scary!

One of the many eccentric characters Squid Girl meets upon coming to the surface is Sanae, a polite girl, at least before she meets Squid Girl and falls in love with her cuteness. Sanae becomes obsessed with Squid Girl and it makes Squid Girl visibly uncomfortable to be in the same space as Sanae. One moment in the series has Sanae trying to take photos of a non-compliant Squid Girl, who tries her hardest to smash the camera in Sanae’s hands, but to no avail – Sanae’s ninja-quick reflexes and inhuman speed leave her unscathed, with an impressive gallery of shots of her favourite little invader.

4th wall breaks aren’t always comical; however, this particular one is hilarious. The youngest Aizawa, Takeru, has art homework he needs to complete and in order to do so, he needs a subject. He then settles on drawing Squid Girl for his artwork, which turns out looking exactly like her. He then says, “I don’t know about this. It looks like she’s a manga character” – which is exactly what she is. Takeru’s sisters, Eiko and Chizuru, both comment, saying that it’s great and looks just like her. It did.

A common practice in anime which reflects some element of Japanese culture is the crafting and placement of teru teru bouzu. These are ghost-like dolls which are placed outside the window on a piece of string in order to bring good weather. Having done this and gone to bed, the Aizawas are fast asleep, except for Takeru, who wakes up in the middle of the stormy night to the eerily contorted form of one of the teru teru bouzu they’d hung up. He was so scared the animation style changed in order to accommodate all of his terror.

After seeing how people were completely preoccupied doting on a dog, Squid Girl is jealous and demands to be treated the same way. So the Aizawas get her a leash and collar and teach her to sit, to shake and to roll over. During all of this, Squid Girl’s biggest fan, Sanae, is having her heart melted by the sheer cuteness that is the dazed and somewhat confused Squid Girl acting like a dog.