Puss & Boots
All through episode three, Ninamori can't stop going on about the school play, a production of Puss and Boots. I remembered hearing this story as a kid and having it read to me, but I couldn't remember exactly what it was about. Well, the gist of it is, the third son of a miller gets the worst inheritance out of all his brothers - a talking cat. However, the cat is very clever and quite a pretender and basically tricks the king and his daughter into believing that the miller's son is the (fake) Marquis de Carabas (hence the name of the third episode of FLCL). He brings "presents" (rabbits, partridges) to the king from the "Marquis" and one day, he tells the miller's son to bathe in the river. The king and the princess happen pass by and the cat claims that the son is the Marquis, who has been bringing the king all the gifts, and that he is being drowned and thieves have taken his clothes (which the cat actually hid earlier). The "Marquis" is given clothes of the king's and the princess falls in love with him. After some more lies and scheming on the part of the cat, the Marquis becomes a real prince when he marries the princess.
What you need to know for FLCL is, through the cat's claims that the son is actually the "Marquis de Carabas," he actually becomes the Marquis, and then the prince. But if you want more detail, you can look on Wikipedia or you can read an annotated version here.

Anyway, Ninamori plays the prince (Marquis, whatever), the lead of the play, and Naota plays the cat (which he is NOT excited about at all; he thinks it's really embarassing and skips the rehearsals all the time). It was supposedly the class alltogether that voted for everyone's roles in the play, but actually.. Ninamori has a little secret. She rigged the votes so that she would play the lead, and Naota would be the cat. It partially has to do with the fact that she has a crush on Naota (she tells him the truth about rigging the votes when she stays the night at his house, and then kind of starts.. coming on to him O_o), but also because, in the story of Puss and Boots, she has found her very own truth to live by. (There's another reason why she makes Naota the cat, though, but I'll get to that in another section. ;))

Ninamori thinks - according to the example of the miller's son in Puss and Boots who becomes the Marquis de Carabas - that if she lies to herself and everyone else, and pretends to be mature, that she will become mature. Her lie will become the truth. That's why she says that everything is "no big deal." That's why she puts down her classmates all the time. She honestly believes that if she acts grown up, she will grow up, and everything will be perfectly fine. Maybe she feels so isolated by being the mayor's daughter that she thinks the only way people will like her is if she's someone else, someone more mature, an adult; if she acts like one, she'll become one; this is what the miller's son did, he pretended to be the Marquis and then the princess fell in love with him. That's not true in practice at all, of course; the more she tries to act mature, the more ridiculous and immature she sounds. "My parents are separate people. If my father divorces my mother, or gets arrested by the police, it doesn't matter to me." I mean, come on. But from the play, she thinks that if she acts the way she wishes she was, in the hopes of winning people over, she'll become that person, and then everyone will like her, and then she'll be able to be happy.

It's important to note yet another reason why the play is so important to Ninamori. Naota, after finding out that Ninamori rigged the votes so that he would have to play the cat, is still really pissed off and asks Ninamori why the play is such a big deal to her, since no one's going to come see it. She yells back that she wants everyone to see it.. Naota assumes it's because she wants to show off, but then she says it's because her parents are going to come see it together. Which I think is probably one of the most honest, unrestrained, uncalculated things she says in the entirety of episode three. The truth is, Ninamori is really upset about everything going on with her family and it does make a lot of difference to her if her parents get a divorce. And eventually, she gives in to the way she really feels and stops lying to herself and trying to be someone else. But only after she inherits Naota's cat ears and gets possessed by an evil robot, of course, because this is FLCL.
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