That's what everyone's saying. I don't see it.
Considering the escalating degree to which the matter has been bugging Ataru lately and her having pretty much hit critical mass right in the previous chapter I'll be extremely surprised if this isn't her finally coming clean.
Plus I'm tolerably certain that even in Japan you can't just up and form a company with somebody without first getting their name (and probably that weird seal thing they do there) on all kinds of red tape, which as far as I am aware has yet to happen.
Not "even in Japan"... ESPECIALLY in Japan. There is a reason why there are workplace comedies about people who work in public service and why the default "what are you gonna do with your life" thing in many school manga is, "Well, I could always take the civil service exam?" That's because the bureaucracy in Japan is just about peak insanity. A podcast done by a group of expats living in Japan who recently moved their studio to a new apartment, with the backing of a major entertainment company that sponsors them, detailed the process of signing the paperwork for something like an apartment lease and it sounds like a freaking nightmare. (One of the examples was that, despite one of the three being half Japanese and a native speaker of Japanese (He's lived there since he was eleven and could already speak fluently then), they had to have a translator there to read the entire document to them in English. When one of them, I forget if it was one of the officials or the leasees, made a mistake on a date or signature on something like page 26 of the document, all of which had to be signed and dated, instead of printing out THAT page and redoing it, they printed out the entire document and, yes, started reading it from the beginning... EDIT: Thinking on it, I think it wasn't even a lease, but one of them signing up for a membership at a fitness club/gym. I remembered that because it included rules like "You must not run on the treadmills. Only walking is allowed." Looks over at the guy behind them running on the treadmill... Okay then... sign that rule... rolls eyes... NEXT!)
The reason that the storyline in things like Ghosts in the Shell can't really be taken out of Japan is that they are not so thinly veiled attacks at the overweight bureaucracy and inability of the government to actually do anything even in emergency situations.
I would say, based on what we know about the characters and the scenes of their high school years that have been shown, it is pretty clear that Ataru has finally at LEAST chosen to come out, if not actually confess her feelings.
last edited at Jan 3, 2022 6:16PM
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