Top 5 Hinagiku Moments No. 3

Here I pick my personal Top 5 Hinagiku Moments up to and including the Athena saga. As this post would be quite long if I make all five rankings into one post, I would just split the post into five. Please visit the other posts for other rankings!

Rankings are to be released according to the following schedule:

No. 5 – 18 April 2010
No. 4 – 25 April 2010
No. 3 – 2 May 2010
No. 2 – 9 May 2010
No. 1 – 16 May 2010

So here we go with this week’s ranking!

No. 3 – The Heady Feeling of Freedom

The best birthday present.

Yep! This scene is ranked as 3rd by me! Surprised?

It is not that the scene is no good, but to me there are scenes even better than this. After all, it has been some 160 chapters since this scene. If there is no more scene surpassing this, then Hina would not be so attractive as a character.

As one of the “must see” scenes in the series, this scene made a clear announcement to the world. Hinagiku, the fan favourite, has formally joined the competition for Hayate’s love. At that time, the Hayate-Nagi relationship was nothing more than a butler-mistress relationship. Readers might think that Hayate-Hina was the romantic pairing Hata was seriously considering. Well, things had become a lot more complicated since then, and we are not sure now whether Hata would still want to end the story with Hayate-Hina pairing…

No matter what, this scene concluded the internal struggles of Hina, which lasted a month in the story but almost a year in the real world. She was confused with her feelings towards Hayate ever since the freedom marathon race. She thought she hated him, because he set her up during the race, and exploited her with her greatest fear. Yet she can’t help but noticing Hayate, being upset when she thought that he was going out with Ayumu, and started dreaming about him when her birthday was approaching. She wanted to know why, but she failed to come to the correct conclusion, until this night.

Hayate never apologized for his trick in the marathon race, but, perhaps coincidentally, he redeemed himself this night. He made Hina angry with him because he made use of her fear of heights, but this night he helped Hina overcoming her fear of heights – perhaps for the first time in her life. Hina started calling him “Ayasaki-kun” since the marathon race incident, and after this night she stopped calling him that. It meant that at this night, Hina forgave Hayate for what he had done, and with the anger gone, she clearly noticed her feelings: She loved Hayate.

Perhaps this scene was the first time in history that Hayate was doing something sensible comforting a girl. Hina suggested that she began paying attention to Hayate when she “felt” that there was something similar between them, and that “thing” was their family background. She looked to Hayate for answers of her parents running away. He failed once, but not again this time. Yes, he did not offer her an answer, but at least he reminded her that her current situation was not that bad. This shows that Hina really read people well. At least she found the person who could bring her out of her sorrow and overcome her fear.

Hayate did not pay much attention to her calling him “Hayate-kun” again next morning, but he did remember this night. During their dinner in Athens, in all the depression he was suffering, he still managed to recall the night of 3 March when he was watching the night view with Hina. I consider this as evidence that Hina really means a lot to him, romantically.