Aren't we ignoring the most obvious reason here (at least when we are already assuming there is a second supernatural entity involved? Doesn't Nagi's erratic nature before her death seem suspiciously like possession? If feel like we are even framing it in similar way.
we haven't seen a fuzzy get possessed ye, but maybe nagi's fuzz also isn't natual and comes from possession like kasumi's.
You're right and I may have blindly written the possibility off. But there's a few things that trip me up with that explanation. On a meta level, this flashback wants to raise questions but I don't think it wants to confuse with if we're even seeing Nagi. It's her full reveal after all. And it doesn't seem she was physically suffering like other possession victims have. The group wouldn't have agreed to give her space if there were more to Nagi's decline than her attitude shifting, and any health issues should have been attributed to her cause of death beyond a simple fall.
I've been thinking back to
this page before the concert. How it's certainly Nagi speaking through Ange. Here Nagi puts emphasis on how raw Non is. Not just that she's a brat, but that she gets away with being her honest self all the time. She resents that Non gets to live so immaturely. If we assume this is representative of living Nagi, that she was burying similar feelings behind a fake angelic smile, then she must have been hiding a lot.
So maybe her abrupt shift in character was simply issues pushing her over the edge and being unable to fake it anymore. And with how close she was to Honami, Honami became Nagi's primary outlet due to being similarly immature. Maybe Nagi even finds death just as liberating as Honami does (being her silly self at school) but in the opposite direction. I'm not calling Nagi evil (I already did that last recap) just that she might truly have a dark side like how many characters in this manga have hidden sides waiting to be seen.
Nagi did have the ghost seeing eyes from
her earliest chronological appearance. It's unclear exactly how long ago DeLphi debuted/Nagi died but auditions were 2 years ago according to their ages at the start here. So while Nagi might have gotten her vision from trauma, if her change in attitude came much later it's hard attributing both to the same possession. Not impossible, but hard. And unless she's still possessed as a ghost (which I have seen done before and is neat to think about) the simple explanation is she's losing control like Honami does when stressed and showing sides of herself that might even scare her.
I dunno I've been known to get stuck on the wrong trail before. It's why I like seeing what everyone comes up with untangling the plot.
I want to reiterate my highly improbable baseless speculation from the end of volume 5 that Michi and Nagi are sisters and their mysterious ghost, ghost-seeing, mom is somehow the root of all this.
I don't think Tear discovering the body is necessarily enough to write off Aizawa dying at the Obon festival, especially given how much mysterious build up it's had. Here's some ideas for how Aizawa dying at the festival with Michi but Tear still discovering the body could work:
- If Michi's memory loss was triggered by seeing Aizawa die, or whatever ghost-related stuff happened that caused Aizawa to die, then it should still be possible that Michi left without remembering that Aizawa died.
- Tear was coming to meet Aizawa right as she died, and Michi didn't want to be seen alone with a dead body.
- Michi came up with some sort of spur of the moment plan after Aizawa died for dealing with Nagi, and that plan involved someone from DeLphi discovering Aizawa's body.
I try not to cry wolf every chapter but I'm always waiting to see how Michi's mom fits into this.
Her intro was so out of left field and yet it feels increasingly like DeLphi was hit by something unrelated to the group yet related to Nagi. Something to fill in that intangible dread that's been loosely binding the idol and unexplored spiritualist sides of the story together since before we even knew Nagi beyond "that ghost haunting DeLphi."
There's such a temptation with an amnesiac protagonist to tie their past into every new character (I certainly tried with Masaki) but it wouldn't surprise me if Michi's connection to Honami runs deep enough to reach Nagi. Either way their inevitable meeting's going to be eventful.
As for Tear finding Honami at the festival, it's true it can be justified. I'm confident next chapter will cover more of Honami's death than we saw of Nagi's so we'll have to wait and see. It's what prompted this flashback after all, and what might give Michi clues for the next step of investigating.
