For those who are still doubting my argument about the translation of Miku's line, see for yourself the original Japanese text (excluding the heart symbol, for obvious reasons):
Breaking it down to its components and translating each one in order:
- 美紅: Miku's name
- なにか: something, somehow, for some reason
- 言いたかった: wanted to say
- 感じがする: have a feeling
- けど: but, however, although
- なんだっけぇ → drawled out form of なんだっけ: what is/was it?
Under normal circumstances, to get "Miku feels that she wanted to say something, but what was it?", you would only need to insert either the topic marker は or the subject marker が after 美紅 to get a grammatically perfect sentence with that meaning. In other words:
美紅はなにか言いたかった感じがするけどなんだっけぇ
or
美紅がなにか言いたかった感じがするけどなんだっけぇ
The only reasonable way that you could get something like "Miku feels that Sou wanted to say something" is to insert Sou's own name into the sentence as the subject (with Miku's name becoming the topic).
美紅は蒼がなにか言いたかった感じがするけどなんだっけぇ
And before anyone brings up "but Japanese has context-based omission!", that only works when the sentences are cohesively linked in their context, e.g. they're part of a conversation about the same topic/subject. The sentences of Miku's internal monologue in this page, on the other hand, are contextually unlinked; the first one is talking about how Sô is praising Miku, and the second abruptly shifts to wondering about an unrelated matter (namely, Miku's interrupted attempt at complaining about Sô being hugged
en masse by almost all of his other female classmates).
This therefore necessiates clarifying the topic/subject from a grammatical standpoint, and while IRL conversations may ignore this and smooth over any potential confusion that may result, narrative considerations make it preferable to avoid causing such confusion in the reader in the first place if it's not intentional (e.g. to exploit the ambiguity for the purposes of a mystery/crime-solving scenario). Also, this is an internal monologue, not speech, so such grammatical omission would be largely superfluous to begin with.
And besides, why omit Sô's name but keep Miku's own
and not append a topic/subject marker after the latter? Both should be equal in terms of omissibility; if one is omissible simply because of its use on the internal monologue's first sentence, then the other should be just as much.
@GreC_89 @BB-62
