Them Are Fightin’ Hearsay! – Chapter 9, Act 2, Strip 29

Well, Youichi seems to have recovered his cool – and that’s quite an achievement, because he was severely shook the last time, and because it’s quite a lot of cool that he had to recover.

You see, cool is one of the key traits of a yanki. It’s not a good look to lose it, and when you have it, you gotta have as much of it as possible. And, yes, that means going beyond the point where it’s weird, ridiculous or unbelievable. It doesn’t matter how far too far you take it, more cool is always good for a yanki, just like more dakka is always good for an ork.*

It’s a heavy burden having to maintain so much cool, but it’s made easier by the fact that it only needs to exist on the outside. Yankis need to project cool, it doesn’t matter if they’re wracked by inner turmoil at the very same moment. Appearances matter. Exclusively.

So, yeah, Youichi has recovered the outside appearance of cool, while his insecurities concerning girls remain intact, but unseen. That much remains unchanged, and it doesn’t bode very well for Operation Climax.

But, fortunately, another thing that remains unchanged are Youichi’s intellectual capabilities. I don’t know whether it’s from all of that projection of coolness, but Youichi’s brain hardly ever reaches ideal operating temperatures. That makes him fall easily to deception and provocation, and he stomps off into exactly the direction Operation Climax wanted him to head in. It’s not for the right reasons, and not in ideal mindset, but it’s movement and it is in the right direction. Progress.

And it’s all thanks to this mysterious purple-haired yanki with the very heavily, but very superficially, scarred face. Who might he be, and is he even aware of how instrumental a part he is playing in an arranged romance plot? And is he possibly related, in some form, to a group of Mexican crossdressing advisors? It’s hard to tell, with all of these new people showing up in the strip in such a completely unprovoked manner…

More on Thursday.

* Which is far from the only parallel between orks and yankis. Not going to elaborate, but I think it’s obvious enough, anyway. >_>