One more question /o/
On 39% there’s this sentence: 「ホーンテッドアイス」と、おどろおどろしい字がはりついたふたを、ぱかりとあけた。
I can’t find anything about ぱかり, it seems that it’s connected to opening all the time, but I have no final conclusion, so any help is appreciated /o/
Edit: Can it be ぱっくり? 
Maybe. I also thought it might be based on パカパカ, which Jisho says means “clip-clop; clippety-clop”, which I think could describe the sounds of the lid being taken off the container.
Yeah, I was wondering about that one. The closest thing that seems to make sense that I found was ぱか which is an onomatopoeic word for opening the lid of a container:
I am not really sure about the りと part though. I could swear I’ve seen it added as a suffix in various onomatopoeic words, but I can’t seem to find any explanations or examples at the moment =._.=
と is how those kind of words are connected. I think it’s actually the quoting particle, though I’m not sure (since it represents a sound, etc., you’re “quoting” the sound.)
@Carvs posted some “rules” about how you can “build” mimetic words, and one of those is that you can add り/ん/っ, so that’s definitely what’s going on here.
That’s how I got from ぱかりと to ぱかぱか. It looks to me like what you found is the same word, too.
To add to that, quoting from Hamano (hiragana mine):
/N/ (ん) indicates that the action involves elastic objects or is accompanied by a reverberation.
/Q/ (っ) on the other hand indicates that the movement is carried out forcefully or vigorously in a single direction.
/-ri/ (り) […] indicates ‘quiet ending of the movement.’
So yeah I agree it’s probably ぱか (single movement as opposed to ぱかぱか multiple movements) + り (she didn’t tear it away forcefully but opened it quietly) IMHO.
Wheee, here I go!
Slowwly making my way through this (Thanks everyone for the notes you’ve left. 
)
I’ve seen とき used a few times in a way that I don’t quite understand, for example on page 55:
一歩一歩すすんでいたときだった
Also back on page 50:
恐怖のあまり、気絶しそうになったときだった
My understanding is that ときだった means approximately “it was a time when ~”. But that translation feels awkward for both of these sentences. Is there a different sense that applies here? Thanks!
(My apologies if this makes no sense because I have no context at all…)
Would the translation be more plausible if you phrased it as “at the time when ~” or simply “when ~”?
I could swear that we talked about this construction at some point but I can’t remember which thread and I can’t find it. D: Basically, from what I remember, we decided it was kind of a suspense-building technique. In English it would be more like “Right when X was happening…something else happened! (
)” It translates awkwardly because in Japanese, the first part is its own separate sentence, whereas in English, it probably wouldn’t be (or it would end with an ellipsis, rather than a period).
So it is using the “at the time when” meaning - just imagine an ellipsis at the end of the sentence. “It was at the time when X was happening…when (whatever’s in the next sentence happened)”
That makes sense, thanks so much.
Hah, only took me nine months to get back to this…
