I just noticed red 'r's popping up in the 'emerge --ask' output. Looking at the man page, I failed to find them. Looking at the source, I found they were recently added by commit db2e6f61. The man page was amended as well by that commit, but only in the short documentation to the "--pretend" flag, not in the longer and more prominent documentation in the "OUTPUT" section. I would kindly ask you to keep these two descriptions of outputs in sync.
How's this? http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/portage.git;a=commit;h=8fa3fd5fa3a9a6c7c847da90b0ec88758dd16e43
This is fixed in 2.1.11.51 and 2.2.0_alpha162.