@ Miki: I agree that female friendships are very complicated and sometimes play out more like romances than anything else. Ai Yazawa does an amazing job of depicting that dynamic. It’s one of the reasons I’ve found the series so compelling.

Hm..I never thought it that way. To be honest, I thought that with Ren, it was a sort of obsessive dependence love, but Hachi to Nana is friendship. So deep a friendship it’ll always leave a mark no matter what. And Hachi grounds Nana to a point too, and when you add all that to Nana’s already obsessive behavior…It’s normal she’d react that way.

Hachi’s somehow like that too, but she thinks of Nana more as an idol. I can’t imagine what’d happen when Hachi realizes that Nana really isn’t as strong and perfect as she is….(And this conflict’s been hinted in the ending monologues). Girl friendships are complicated, I guess… I seriously can not wait! I think Nana and Hachi’s relationship is really the highlight of this story for me.

Didn’t Viz drop Nana because the situations were going to become more “adult” to the point they couldn’t just blur the nipples? I never would have imagined it was because of low sales…