Hayate no Gotoku! Volumes 51 and 52 – Maria

Hi folks! It has been almost a month since my last post. How have you been?

You might have already read series review posts from a lot of bloggers already, so you might be curious about the lack of such posts here since the series concluded two months ago. I won’t blame you for thinking “Doughnut Gunso was being lazy” again (because I was), but a part of me was saving my final verdicts until I read the last two Tankobons.

It is not a secret that Doughnut Gunso has not been impressed by Ch. 568 – the final chapter. I have already said that I felt the conclusion was rushed, unconvincing, and – as per Hata’s norm – left more questions than answers to the readers. And since I did not get an ending that I liked to mask the problems of the finale, I would not have any kind words in my review. But then, if I had gone berserk and sworn murder, Doughnut Gunso would be labelled as a whiner. I don’t want to be seen as a whiner, so I only had one choice: to remain totally silent.

Now that the Tankobons were released on 16 June 2017, it would be a good time for me to break my silence – to make reviews again, and perhaps to finally deliver my final verdicts. However, as I screamed on my Facebook page a few days ago, I found myself stupid enough to have forgotten about pre-ordering my books. I finally made my pre-orders today, but Amazon said that it would take about 5-9 days for delivery. So, at this moment I have no choice but to rely on online resources.

It means that we are at the mercy of the scanlators, who have the power to decide what to release and what not. It is not really realistic to expect scanalation for the whole Tankobons any time soon, and the best bet is that they would release the stuff by character. As such, my reviews on the Tankobons will be written by characters as well.

(I might move the crap above to the catalog page of the Volumes 51 and 52 series later) 

Things I found recently revolve around Maria, which is understandable. After all, most major characters have made at least a cameo in the final chapter except her. Current releases seem to address the three major questions remain for Maria:

1. Where has she been since resigning as Nagi’s maid?
2. Who exactly is she? Does she even have a surname?
3. What happened to the promise of an expensive purse as her birthday present?

So let us go over them one by one. Obviously the following write-up is based on what has been released at the time of writing, so it is entirely possible that some stuff below (or even above) will be edited in the future.

1. Where has she been since resigning as Nagi’s maid?

A few (14, to be precise) “supplementary pages” on her story were added… somewhere, including three whole pages of cherry blossom. Chiharu and Kayura then talked about Maria’s departure. They speculated that Maria left Nagi because she wanted to fulfill a wish by making a gamble.

Note: this is not one of the “three whole pages of cherry blossom”.

It sounds exactly as cryptic as in the supplementary pages, but we can make a good guess. We know that Maria wanted Nagi to grow up so that both of them could have a life independent of each other, and she might also want Nagi to resolve her misunderstanding with Hayate. So maybe Chiharu and Kayura meant that Maria had made her bet by exposing Nagi’s insecurities and thus forcing her to grow up.

Perhaps this is one of those times when the ends justify the means, because had Maria lost the bet, she could have actually brought an end to the world as we know. Still, Maria won and smiled like a boss, while Nagi won and held Hayate’s hand.

Not even Mikado lives here any more.

We then followed Maria to an abandoned Sanzen’in Mansion – of course, Nagi (moved to the Violet Mansion) and Hayate (went disappearing) were no longer living there any more. Maria talked of selling the Mansion as she wished that someone else would live here again. At the end, she decided to see “them”, to talk to “them” and to see what kind of present “they” were giving her. By this point, it seems clear that she was talking about Hayate and Nagi.

2. Who exactly is she? Does she even have a surname?

For this, what we have now is a text profile with a huge headline: “Maria is Hayate’s elder sister”. And yes, it means that her full name is “Ayasaki Maria”.

According to the text profile some guys who quote the text profile, Maria was a child Shun had with another woman. They decided that they did not want the baby girl so they abandoned her. Apparently Hata thought that it was a good idea (or trope) for Hayate to fall in love with his own elder sister (remember, in the beginning Maria was Hayate’s primary love interest), but the idea fell into an abyss later on as Hata lost the perfect timing to make such a big reveal.

To be honest, this whole thing sounds like total bullshit to me.

3. What happened to the promise of an expensive purse as her birthday present?

The promise seems to be fulfilled according to the promotion art of the Testimonial Exhibition.

This stuff costs 24,800 yen.

So here you go.