^I understand there's some meaningful phenotypic differences in earwax composition - IIRC Europeans and derived have "wet" and East Asians "dry" type - that make it lot less of an issue there, though.

Reckon Kaede is just about [screaming internally] and having to bite her tongue in order to not call these useless friends bloody idiots to their faces and would probably dearly like to lock them in a room until they stop being silly gits and talk things out properly...

Being a nice person and the Best Girl, though, she settles for not-very-subtly prodding Konatsu towards hopefully useful directions instead.
Or literally dragging, as the case might be. o3o

My best guess is that was simply a means of feeling out Nanoha's relationship with Chidori in a manner she could readily BS off as an off-colour joke - and going by that rather satisfied-looking smirk she made at Nano's startled reaction whatever hunch made her do it in the first place was amply confirmed.

It's probably telling that when she comes see Chidori again the next day she essentially starts probing for her side of the relationship right out of the gate, which seems somewhat atypical behaviour (Igarashi appears to be one of those people who prefer to talk 'round the actual topic and only come to the point after circling "like cat a bowl of hot porridge", to butcher an old proverb, for a while). She's also rather conspicuously refraining from the affectionate body language she originally used with Chidori both from first meeting way back when and the previous day before the meddling kidsNanoha & potential new club recruits barged in (may be her default behaviour with other girls, but hard to tell given the nonexistent sample size we have of her interactions with ladies not called Chidori) and instead almost seems to make a point of staying at an arm's length.
If I were to make a guess she put whatever plans she had on hold until she could get a better idea of Chidori's specific relationship situation; would imagine the last thing she wanted to do was repeating her previous fatal error of blundering into ill-advised decisions without a full grasp of the context and what the Hell she's actually doing.

Guessing Higashiyama had a blast digging up suitably ancient references, not unlike Cool Kyoushinsha with Maid Dragon...

My read on Igarashi is she only realised Chidori was serious about their relationship (and not just "playing at love" as Morishima-sensei memorably put it) during the break-up confrontation, and the depth of her own actual emotional investement in it only later still - whence the belated too-little too-late olive branches.

It doesn’t make her a bitch to the end of her days.

No but at this end of this arc yes.She know she had a BF but still act flirty toward Chidori and end up hurting her because shedoesn't bring up the BF.

Clueless teenagers fucking up their relationships is novel and unusual how exactly?

Let's not punch people in the face just for being assholes.

TBF when you're fighting off monstrous assassins on a regular basis the norms of polite society probably tend to get a little fuzzy...

B R U T A L I T Y

...did those two ever even talk to each other, anyway...?

No, they don't even meet each other.

When did that ever stop a shipper?

Point.

...did those two ever even talk to each other, anyway...?

It’s certainly possible, as we have seen, to explain that as something other than pure selfishness, callousness or malice-

And insisting on explaining it solely as those strikes me as downright boorish knee-jerk demonization. I'm trying to give the author more credit than spending this much effort writing a mere cardboard villain you know...

Can't vouch for English usage since I'm not a native speaker, but the concept of "hard-boiled crime story" and its intimate association with the particular brand of cool encoded in the noir aesthetic has certainly been used for a very long time in my language.

TBF Inko's clearly leaning more on the more "animesque" John Woo take on the theme...

"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence."

“It doesn’t matter what you meant, it only matters what you did.”

...which wasn't exactly, ah, torturing a puppy with blowtorch and chainsaw as it were.

That notion is also bollocks right in the face of it; case in point, the moral and legal distinction between say accidental manslaughter and premediated murder...

last edited at Aug 30, 2019 6:58AM

"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence."

It's much older actually...

a fuckin P A P E R T R I M M E R

Yeah. That's horrible. Imagined myself for a moment, a crow size version of me undergoing a slow-death-inducing-torture. And corvuses are fucking amazing. Some humans are psychopaths thinking humans can just toy with other members of the ecosystem.

Just sayin' but the cultural notion that this kind of thing is fundamentally unacceptable is really recent. Like, about postwar or so.

Smooooooooooth operator...

I didn't recognize the cover on page 1 at first glance, for a bit I thought it was Prism's. That would have been the perfect cruel joke.

That's because Prism is by Higashiyama Show while Vampeerz and Stretch are by Akiri, who is clearly not just Show wearing a fake mustache, but a totally different person.

(Ned actually is Zed's evil twin brother mind you)

Well about the Russian girls, mamahuhu has some videos showing them as pretty hardcore lol That might be a Chinese view on Russians though. Again, this is a humor YouTube channel we are talking about, so take everything with a grain of salt...

TBF the parts of Russia the Chinese have direct contact with are that country's remote, sparsely-inhabited "Wild East" frontier with similar background of fierce natives and rugged pioneers - aside from the Cossacks and other at least nominally state-backed vanguards (who were encroaching on Chinese and Manchu territory already by the early 17th century) the vast Siberian frontier also became something of a traditional refuge for runaway serfs. The hand of Imperial authorities was light in the faraway corners of the realm and the locals tended to be more interested in what useful skills you had than asking stupid questions about where you came from...

last edited at Aug 29, 2019 4:28PM

What was the point of this character showing up?

so that we could bask in her magnificent hotnessshaking up the status quo a bit and obliging the main couple to do some self-reflection is my bet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I reckon she was ultimately mainly uncertain and confused about a whole lot of things, and her dropping by on Chidori in no small part had the goal of trying to clarify things for both of them (AKA sort out her own feelings and try to clean up the mess she made of her relationship with her "cute kouhai").

...Nanoha's pretty bold when she knows she doesn't have to keep it a secret from everybody for a change, isn't she? :v

last edited at Aug 29, 2019 1:58PM

@random^. That's a pretty plausible reading, and I wouldn't be shocked if we were to eventually get evidence (i.e., Igarashi's POV) to support some or all of it.

The reason it's not my own first-order reading, though, is that Igarashi's shocked reaction to Nanoha's claim-staking announcement really seems to be genuine--"Y-you're dating, as in a relationship? But you're both girls? . . . You're really, / Truly dating?"

https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/hana_ni_arashi_ch46#15

Either she's a consummate actress, or that expression says that it's the first time she's actually considered a real same-sex relationship, which would definitely rule out any romantic intent behind her return to school.

(And of course, as I seem to be saying ad nauseam, it makes those "more than friends" chocolates highly problematic.)

EDIT: Just to clarify the overall point, my read is that we're still getting contradictory signals and until we get something more definitive, it remains up in the air as to what Igarashi thinks she is/was up to in regard to Chidori.

Mind you, she could also just be flabbergasted by both Nano's brazen declaration and the bout of sitcom flirting/bickering that ensues... and ofc if she still had some faint hopes of restarting something with Chidori, well, she's probably experiencing a bit of a sinking feeling as the rug just got conclusively pulled from under those.
Somewhat uncertainly asking for an essentially redundant confirmation does not strike me as unreasonable behaviour for someone trying to hastily regain their bearings in such circumstances.

My interpretation of the way that following little sigh of hers and later quiet moment are framed is they're ones of resignation; "there's no room for me here anymore is there?" She then proceeds to apologize to Nano for her earlier probing and tells a few bald-faced lies to nip further drama in the bud before bailing; that reads to me like she can tell her ship's sailed for good and it's time to turn 360° andwalk away.

Guessing Chidori - who unlike Nanoha knows Igarashi was telling a pile of white lies - also rather wonders how much sempai originally intended to say but decided not to, though.

last edited at Aug 29, 2019 1:16PM

Near as I can decipher Igarashi originally intended to try and reconnect with Chidori, possibly even romantically, but clued in on there being something going on between her and Nanoha about as soon as the latter arrived on the scene - just about everything she says and does thereafter appears to be trying to feel out the nature of the relationship between the two. And once she gets her answers (in the most unambiguous terms possible to boot) she apparently resigns herself to the facts, bows out and quite noticeably proceeds to lie through her teeth about her past history with Chidori for the latter's benefit; the way she spins it seems calculated to wrap up as many loose ends, and pre-emptively defuse as many possible causes of tension, as possible in the circumstances to leave Chidori a clean slate with Nanoha.

We also never learn what she meant with those Valentine's chocos and that whole "mistake" line; apparently she summarily scuttled whatever plans she had to elaborate upon those as soon as she learned Chidori's now in a serious relationship.

Not like she'd be in much of a position to try and challenge Nanoha anyway. On top of the starting handicap she has due to her previous sour-note parting with Chidori she's implied to reside out of town nowadays (presumably for college or such) which would make serious participation in some kind of love triangle a bit of a logistical non-starter...

last edited at Aug 29, 2019 12:19PM

BTW it depends on where in Asia. My gf is from northern China and over there girls are pretty tough, probably due to Russian influence.

Near as I'm aware mainstream Russian culture goes for decidedly demure "traditional femininity" model though. More likely that's a legacy of the various (now mostly Sinicized) steppe peoples of the area, who nigh-universally had relatively egalitarian gender roles by olden-time standards, and the by necessity more rough-and-ready "frontier society" of the comparatively harsh transitional zone between the steppes proper and regions more conductive to large-scale settled agriculture.