Okay.
I won't deny that I took the reworking of one of my favorite AquaKana chapters rather badly at first.
However, now that I've calmed down, I think it's a very interesting choice. Hopefully, it's a real clue that the anime will take a different path from the manga.
Like The Apothecary's Diaries, the OnK anime is one of those anime where every single panel is faithfully animated. Some scenes may undergo minor changes due to the animated adaptation, but nothing more.
Here, however, we are talking about an 18-page chapter where TWELVE pages have been eliminated.
This is obviously a deliberate choice.
They completely removed the scene at the end of which Kana "friendzones" Aqua.
However, I don't think the events described on these pages caused this choice.
First, to avoid the "friendzone" scene, they would've also had to eliminate the meaningful moment when Kana talks about her abandonment trauma, and Aqua acts like a clumsy, honest guy who says he doesn't hate her — quite the opposite.
Second, nothing is more "Future canonical couple" than a misunderstood friendzone moment.
This chapter, along with many others, obviously screamed "canon!" at the top of its lungs in the manga.
So, no, I don't think all of those pages were deleted.
It's not due to staff negligence either, since the anime has always animated every scene in the manga.
And not to "avoid misunderstandings" based on the belief that the anime will want to make AquaKana canon—well, canon with a future, given that with Aqua's death, they were canon in the sense that "the feelings were mutual, but he croaked."
This interaction between Aqua and Kana has been deliberately and significantly moved to another episode.
For now, all we can do is wait and see what happens.
The most ironic thing about the "Kana is a whiny little girl who can't do anything" bullshit is that she literally has the skills of a self-sufficient woman.
She has been living alone since she was a minor, she knows how to pay taxes and bills, she has learned to invest her earnings in foreign stocks, she makes all the purchases by herself and runs her house.
Take a closer look 👇🏻
This is the expression of a guy who loves a girl.
He loves her so much that he searches for her everywhere for over an hour in a metropolis of over thirty million inhabitants.
And in the end, in a classic romantic trope, he senses that she might have gone to take refuge in a place they both remember.
So the guy makes THIS expression because he remembers that he didn't allow himself to love her, but he loves her, and thinking that she went to that place, that she still considers it important, makes his heart ache.
If Mem texts him to ask where he is and tell him to come back already, then it means that Aqua has spent hours wandering around the city looking for Kana.
Mem is concerned because she knows how obsessed Aqua is with Kana. She knows this loser would search every inch of Tokyo, a city of 37 million people, until he found her.