Regarding chapter 36: from here on out, the story will occasionally be interspersed with entries in Hinami's picture diary.
For the most part, these entries are set in previous chapters and detail what Hinami did that day as well as how she really feels without any joking. They provide the overarching narrative that I'm sure many readers were looking for, as well as context for what is going on in the background (meta layer) of the story.
This first one clarifies a big thing: Hinami is nearly omnipotent when she's in the gag manga world. I won't call her 100% omnipotent because she also doesn't call herself that (she says she has power akin to that of a God or 神に等しい力 in Japanese) and if she truly was omnipotent then she wouldn't have had to resort to kidnapping the author. Perhaps we could say she has localized omnipotence that's limited to the manga world.
This also addresses the continuity issues people were often commenting about. It's not that this is just a silly gag manga where nothing matters and time gets reset every chapter, it's that Hinami is an all powerful being that can bend reality. There is narrative continuity, in that at the very least Hinami remembers what happened before and is aware of time moving forward, but the laws of physics/causality/etc in the manga world just don't apply.
We know she can cheat death, transform herself and others at will, ignore physics, and bend reality as a whole. This would also explain how she was able to manipulate time to send the postcard back to the past to warn herself at the start of the manga.
Lastly, this entry clearly gives us the main motivation behind Hinami's actions: she wants her life with Tsukino to go on forever, and the story ending means putting an end to that.
This does bring up a question that I legit don't have an answer to: is Tsukino sentient like Hinami? Or more broadly, what makes Hinami different from the other participants in this manga?
It's quite apparent that Hinami has very strong feelings toward Tsukino (whether you think it's just a platonic thing or she legit wants to have her science babies), but we've yet to see if Tsukino is just some sort of npc or if she's a special character similar to Hinami but without omnipotent power.
Given that Hinami likes her so much, to the point where she's willing to break out of her world and kidnap her world's creator, I can't help but think Tsukino is special too. It's possible Hinami and Tsukino are the only 2 people "alive" in this world, whatever that may entail, which kinda makes this story a bit depressing.
They truly were roommates.
last edited at Apr 27, 2025 8:29AM
