Just to go back to that Nao topic that I seem to be obsessed with, I just wanted to note one more thing about the Kanji for her name. The character for her name in how its used means something similar to ordinary, which reminds me of how Maya describes herself. But the character can also be used for Naosu, which is a verb meaning "to fix" or "to repair." Could it be that Nao is actually a healing force in the story and has only been misunderstood to be an agent of chaos?
Probably not, but it won't stop me from positing its possibility!
It’d be difficult to propagate any meaning of 直 to other girls as many kanjis carries multiple meanings that might stem from the same concept but ultimately are not interchangeable.
For example, when used in names, 直 more often than not represents the parents’ wish for their kids to grow up to be frank, straightforward, candid, or good kind of direct. These, along with “ordinary and common”, might all come from the concept of
straight, the immediate meaning of 直 as a standalone kanji without other context.
It’s probably ok to extract meaning if it were other cringy kanjis that generally have less room for subjective takes. In the case of Nao, we not only need to cherry pick which meaning to move forward but that meaning would have to be described using only certain English words of choice, making the whole thought process a lot harder to be correct.
