ハヤテのごとく！/Hayate no Gotoku Chapter 387
Hayate the Combat Butler chapter 387

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

In Akihabara, Wataru’s new doujinshi shop opens and only makes ¥1500 in sales with three customers. Saki becomes very concerned that Wataru is very depressed about things and not his normal, ranting and raging self when things go wrong.  As such, she decides she has to do something.

At Mikado’s castle, Aika escorts him to a room where the old man is up and waiting, along with Ah-tan. Hayate wants to know why Ah-tan is there, which Mikado promises to explain later.  However, their first order of business is the Sanzenin inheritance.

Before Mikado can get started, Hayate gets a call from Saki. Hayate ignores the call and sets his phone to vibrate. Mikado attempts to start again, but Hayate’s phone starts vibrating loudly. Again, it is Saki calling. Hayate tries to ignore the call, but Saki keeps calling. Mikado tells Hayate to just answer the phone and tell Saki he’ll call her back. Hayate does this, mentioning that he’s currently talking with Mikado. That ticks off Mikado, who knows that Saki will start calling him. Sure enough, that’s what happens.

Aika starts playing a game on her phone while Mikado tries to get off the phone with Saki. He tells Hayate that Saki is reporting that Wataru is depressed due to the store not doing well. Mikado attempts to speak of the Sanzenin inheritance, and the core of the plot for the manga, but Saki calls Hayate, wanting to know if Hayate’s talk with Mikado can end in three minutes. Mikado is furious, stating he needs to set a mood and explain things. However, Mikado realizes that it is pointless and decides that they can have this talk in a couple of days.

Hayate takes off to help Saki, leading Mikado to wonder if Hayate is haunted rather than being very unlucky.   However, Aika tells Mikado that she and her fiance are going to Tahiti for a week, so she won’t be available.     With Aika unwilling to make any changes to her schedule, Ah-tan decides to leave.

Thoughts/Review:

Ho!ho!ho! Oh, Hata-sensei. Art thou having fun with us fans whom are longing for better plot progression? Me thinks Hata-sensei doth get a perverse pleasure from tweaking us in the nose.

You know, when I started reading this manga, I wasn’t even aware of any real plot to speak of. I accepted Hayate’s various extraordinary abilities, such as taking huge damage but remaining mostly unharmed, to be comedic fodder, giving Hata-sensei an excuse to make Gundam jokes (since the Gundam mecha unit was virtually indestructible) as well as providing a means to do action-comedy stuff. The flashbacks to Ah-tan were just stuff to set up the romantic-comedy stuff. In fact, everything done as far as I was concerned was to set up comedy.

It wasn’t until the Ah-tan flashback chapters that I realized that Hata-sensei had an actual story in mind with a real and suddenly interesting plot. Hayate’s extraordinary abilities were there for a reason. Ah-tan was there for a reason. From that point on, Hayate the Combat Butler went to the next level for me, becoming more than a gag manga, but a manga who’s plot had me genuinely interested, even if it did plod along at a snail’s pace.

I know I have recently expressed my desire to have more plot-driven chapters.  I’m guessing that a decent number of Japanese fans have done the same, leading Hata-sensei to poke us in the eyes in a comedic fashion.

…the story will not always go as you wish.

This is the reality of this manga.

Well, that certainly has turned out to be true. *lol* Here I was, expecting some nice bit of plot advancement, but instead, we got Hata-sensei poking us in the eye, then slapping his arse and laughing about it. ^_^;

So, am I angry with Hata-sensei?

No.  In fact, I found this chapter pretty funny on two levels, one being Hata-sensei’s thumbing his nose as fans who are hungry for more plot-driven stories.

The other funny thing was the humor of the cell phone, and Hayate’s cursed nature so that he’s going to get repeated calls at the worst possible times. I admit, I laugh out loud at the whole phone gag stuff, simply because it was funny on its own, but I also saw that Hata-sensei was stalling for time (this before reading the final page and the side-panel remarks).

I guess this means that we’ll be dealing with Wataru’s shop for now, though it is highly possible that Hata-sensei will do something else to fill in the time for the remainder of this year until everyone goes on their New Year’s vacations in Japan.

Bad, bad Hata-sensei. ^_~