ハヤテのごとく！/Hayate no Gotoku Chapter 423 Review

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

Ah-tan is surprised to find Maria cooking sausages for Nagi when it is night. Ah-tan wonders if Nagi is really working hard. Maria says she is, citing the fact that her endeavors this time have gone on far longer than normal. However, Maria also cites how Nagi usually messes up and that Maria will be there for her as usual.

Meanwhile, Chiharu tells Nagi that at her current production rate of 2.5 pages a day, she won’t make it. Nagi knows this all too well, especially since she not only has to finish drawing her manga, but have the covers done, editing done, and the publishing. Even though she’s getting sick, she knows she cannot stop as stopping would mean losing Hayate to Ruka. Nagi thinks this should be motivation enough to make her work faster, but it isn’t going like that. She feels the ache in her heart and considers Kurosu’s words about conclusions being reached before someone realizes it.

Nagi thinks of how Hayate has told her that he’s protect her in the past, present, or future, but she also considers Ruka’s feelings too. Nagi feels there’s no reason for Hayate to root for her to win, which is probably why he hasn’t even called to check in on her. The days go on and Nagi continues to work and worry. She feels her manga work is crude and that she hasn’t changed at all. This leads her to depressed thoughts that she can’t defeat Ruka and that none of this really matters since even if she tries, it wouldn’t make anyone happy. She feels she will now lose Hayate.

Eventually, she snaps, slamming the desk and shouting that she may as well not finish it. That causes her bottle of ink to fall off the desk she was working at and onto the finished pages on the ground. Maria and Ah-tan rush in to find out what happened and Chiharu asks to get something to wipe off the pages. Chiharu is surprised that Nagi hasn’t moved to try to save her work. Nagi says she’s had enough of that manuscript.

Thoughts/Review:

It is always nice when Hata-sensei doesn’t worry about putting jokes into a chapter and just pushes forward with the story. That’s what we got here.

While one could certainly say that Nagi’s inner dialog could be cliched angst, to me, it felt very real and not overdone. Nagi is reaching down within herself and facing things seriously. She’s working quite hard. However, she also sees that her own work still isn’t good enough.  She’s being quite hard on herself, especially since I think the pages we’ve seen of her manga are vastly improved over that Brittany crap. But compared to Ruka’s previous work, Nagi is right — it isn’t good enough.

Regarding Hayate, he has repeatedly made the promise to protect Nagi in the past, present, or future. So far, he’s done that, including his unexplained trip back into the past to save Nagi’s life when she was a child. It is true that Nagi has worried about losing Hayate before, but in those cases, it was due to her own selfish actions.  Here, Nagi’s worries are based not because she’s done something selfish, but that she’s not good enough. Hayate not calling her (and I’m going to venture a guess that whatever he, Hina, and Kurosu are doing is preventing this) only adds to Nagi’s fears of losing him.

The element that stood out to me is that she doesn’t harbor resentment at Ruka should Ruka win Hayate. She knows Ruka loves Hayate and Nagi understands what it would mean to Ruka to marry Hayate. Nagi doesn’t want to lose Hayate, but if she lost him, maybe losing him to Ruka wouldn’t be so terrible since Ruka and Hayate have parental abandonment and massive debt in common.

The obvious conclusion that comes from Nagi spilling ink on her manuscript is that she’s going to just quit and have done. Discounting the fact that from CTMEOY, we know that Nagi created a good doujinshi manga and that she ends up back in the mansion, I still don’t think quitting will happen. I say this because of a similar story in School Rumble, where Harima accidentally spilled ink on another manga-ka’s work he was tasked with finishing, so he ended up doing his own manga. Also in School Rumble, Harima had a similar deadline with love on the line, and he barely made it. So I figure Hata-sensei will follow that same route and have Nagi start over with a new, better manuscript that she just barely finishes in time.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how things go. ^_^