#umenobi

ok, so the first thing is that we have to keep in mind that nobimaru is a fucking liar who intentionally does things to obfuscate his true personality, so you dont need to take how he acts as literal. in fact, a lot of how he behaves is...almost obvious in how fake or forced it is, especially in later arcs.

secondly, we do have word of god from aimoto saying that "their relationship is developing positively for both of them", (the umetaro bday qna goes more in depth with their relationship) so on that level i can at least say this isnt 100% being pulled out of my ass. it sounds insane when you look at how she describes it as compared to the manga but thats just like, how it is with nobimaru

but tldr, nobimaru fucking with people comes in 2 flavors: malicious and benign. there are occasions where he is genuinely and actively harming people and everyone involved is aware of it, like when he went to kill kaede and akagi. he was still :) and made his little quips, but you can tell from both him and the way people around him act that everyone is well fucking aware that he came here to cut the cameras

(id have to have a lot more time and space to get into nobimarus behavior and textual cues we get irt it in general but. nobimaru here is not being friendly he is ready to kill)

however, hes also just...kind of a little dickhead. the moment he allies himself with inugami + the others, he makes remarks everywhere from about inugami's suffering face, to taking up space in their travel compartment and demanding inugami go tiny because he "never imagined his long legs would backfire here!" to shaking tarouta upside down to free kabane, before making a remark that "it looks like someone shook him up and down violently, what a terrible thing to do". nobimarus just a fucking cunt. but you can start to tell when he means it good-naturedly and it can honestly tip you off to when he favors someone as opposed to characters he treats more distantly (his very professional demeanor with most of the SIU, for example) or maliciously.

so not only do we have umetaros perspective with framing like the kabedon scene and his flusteredness over nobimarus praise and eagerness to please, but we can generally glean that while nobimaru is a fucking cunt, his cuntery with umetaro isnt really done maliciously, and its an indicator that he likes umetaro more than say, hinata or kaede, whom he addresses as subordinates. nobimarus insistence on having umetaro around is another thing, as nobimaru is more than capable of completing missions solo and often would benefit from it, but he seems to just enjoy making umetaro watch him be cool. in a volume extra, the characters "types" are revealed, and nobimarus type is "someone who will fall down to hell with him", so its likely that his teasing is part of that test and umetaro, someone who can read his real feelings (which, kudos man, even im flummoxed there), can pick up on that.