So the lesson Francis brings us here is “Don’t bother trying to save your sanity by removing toxic people from your life, because when you make new friends they will just be worse.” Nate, for his part, will instantly abandon the character growth he’s flirting with, as befits a status-quo-is-king series.
The only mystery is why this didn’t happen years ago. Of course, since this is a stuck-in-time status-quo-is-king comic, the plotline will be resolved and ignored within two weeks.
If by “problematic” you mean “unsuccessful”. Meddick’s comic was the only part of the planned Robotman franchise that went anywhere. I can’t find any exact info on why Robotman was ultimately removed, but it’s implied Meddick preferred to have 100% his own original characters in his strip (probably for legal more than creative reasons) and the syndicate finally relented. Monty wasn’t even in the original comic but quickly became the focus after Meddick introduced him. I too am amused that Meddick ultimately went back to having a robot character around.
Looks like she may be using の, which is phoneme “no” in the Japanese hiragana phonetic alphabet.