This Week in Anime

So Your Favorite Manga is Ending...

Nick
Lucas, we tend towards the cynical here but I think we're pretty justified this time. The signs and omens are all around us, and if we don't heed them we're all but doomed. A dreaded time is approaching:
By which I mean a big-name manga is ending next month and people have some feelings about it.

We've already talked about the potential future of JUMP with these two heavy-hitters ending, but now that those endings are already or right over the horizon, people are a lot more up in their feelings about them. There have been tears, anger, disappointment, and some weird discourse about cuckolding that we don't need to get into, and it feels like some folks need a big therapy session as they learn to say farewell.

Also if it wasn't obvious, we're going to be spoiling the hell out of several series.

I think starting with the most recent titles is a good starting point. With a series as big and of the moment as Jujutsu Kaisen, the news that it's only 4 chapters from ending (at the time of writing) has gotten people very vocal about how the manga's been going. I've seen some people upset to see it ending because they love and will miss it but those voices have largely been drowned out on my feed by people angry because there's no chance of a satisfying ending—or else relieved to put the manga out of their misery.

You can count me among the people who are just glad it's ending. I started falling out of favor with JJK during the much-lauded Shibuya arc, and it's been diminishing returns to the latest chapter, which featured a long-awaited reveal that I couldn't have cared less about because we've got 4 chapters left.

I enjoy a bit of ridiculous bullshit to liven up a big shonen fight, but by the time Todo arrived, we had been fighting Sukuna for over a year of publication and I was DONE. Whatever attachment I had to this cast had long since withered under the constant fights of the Culling Game where a bunch of inconsequential new characters took the spotlight from the ones I cared about.

To the larger point of this piece, the last couple of years of JJK have been divisive at the best of times. While you can assign some of the volume and intensity of folks' opinions on this final arc, I think it's also just the fact that a lot of fans have been reading this thing week-to-week for years. While JJK isn't quite what I'd call a long-runner if they hopped on board with the anime, that's still four years of following this thing. That much time will only make one's feelings more potent.

They launched this version of it at least—the original version of their Simulpub setup had fewer series and published like a digital anthology magazine, similar to the JP print version, and that started back in 2013. Fittingly enough it's how I was able to read our other big departure for 10 years.

Let me tell you, the difference between 6 years and 10 years feels a lot bigger than it technically is. I have spent nearly a third of my life thinking about, talking about, and eventually writing about this series. It still doesn't feel real to know I won't get another chapter next Sunday. At the same time, it feels right. Whatever the series' faults, it stuck around long enough to say what it wanted to say with all its heart and dedicated its final chapters to capping off the characters and themes in genuinely thoughtful ways.

Unfortunately, it then got subsumed by angry people that it didn't instead spend that page time on pairing off all the characters and having them make ugly OC children.

It's a series that's been near and dear to my heart for ages. In some ways, it feels like the story's own ideas about heroism as a concept developed and changed in parallel to my own. I have written honest-to-god fanfics for this thing that none of you are allowed to see. It's had its faults in storytelling and pacing, but earned a lot of respect for how it chose to focus on its central themes at the end, rather than the typical Shonen Jump epilogue where everyone has kids and bad adult haircuts. But since it doesn't have Deku and Uraraka kissing it's a failure in some peoples' eyes.

Severely low to nonexistent. I can imagine both getting more side stories or spin-offs, maybe some one-shots or bonus chapters to promote later seasons of their anime, but Kohei Horikoshi and Gege Akutami have been clear and adamant about wanting a definitive ending for their works. And I pray that holds true because look at how dog water Boruto is.

That's the big bad villain of the story and the greatest threat the Ninja world has ever faced: a guy with studded leather hair and toes.

We might as well move back in time a bit. Naruto's last few years of publication were rough, where it seemed like Kishimoto was out of ideas and just wanted to load up as much lore as possible while dragging out the final war. The result was a final battle that jettisoned all the established villains so our heroes could fight an interdimensional alien lady and it turned out Naruto and Sasuke were the reincarnations of the Ninja Messiah.

It sucked. The series has never let that dumb moon magic go.

If nothing else, it still had some ideas and characters it wanted to cap off, and they hadn't been ruined by what came before. I still think the last 200 chapters of Naruto are a mess, but that final chapter managed to get some emotions out of me.

There's probably none you can find where every fan agrees the ending was good, just due to how long these series run and how varied expectations become with time. But for my money, the ending to Haikyu!! is pretty much impeccable.

Oh for sure, I loved the way it ultimately wrapped things up. Though, as a latecomer who devoured the manga in two sittings after the anime, I'm afraid I don't have a ton of long-term attachment to it. I got to devour DiD as a full-course meal. For stuff I read simulpubbed, it's like going to the same restaurant every week for years only to see it suddenly shut down. Even if the food had declined in quality and the owners let the place go, it's still got that sting of loss, y'know?

Ah yes, the arc of the Jump Axe cuts swiftly and cruelly. Steve and I already covered the hows and whys behind the series being cut short, but knowing why God decided to make you sad doesn't do much to mitigate things. Join me in mourning The Last Saiyuki sometime.

With those endings, it's more a case of mourning lost potential than saying goodbye, like with series that run to their natural end. At the same time, it can be fascinating to see how they choose to go out. I can't say for sure if Blue Flag was canceled or ran its course, but it embraces the idea of ending in a way nobody could see coming. It's a romance where no one ends up with who you'd expect, and by the end of it the cast is in such different places that it feels like catching up with old friends you haven't seen in a decade, but it makes it work. Also, I'm pretty certain it's the first Jump/Jump+ series to end with the main character gay married.

It's excellent, and while the ending is a bit of a shock at first, it ultimately ties together the story's questions about how our personal choices decide our future possibilities.
But if we want to talk about series with abrupt endings and long-term attachment that slowly degrade into a sunk-cost fallacy...well, I hope you didn't bring any ammonia because we've got a whole lot of Bleach sitting in the corner.

You can't pretend that the last 6 years of Bleach didn't happen. They're even adapting the final arc into an anime. While I'm inviting some very annoying people to yell at me for this, I feel confident saying that the way the Thousand Year Blood War storyline played out in the manga was one of the worst long-term storytelling disasters I've ever followed. It was like watching the Titanic sink but it took 5 years.

It's surreal to see post ending Bleach fandom rewrite history because I was there. I was in the forum and Twitter trenches, and even people who still liked the arc overall couldn't deny that its ending was bunk. It's a rushed, poorly explained conclusion to the fight followed by a hollow epilogue that had so little to say that the only thing anyone cared about was getting mad at the canon ships.

For the record: Rukia settled so hard for Renji. It's honestly embarrassing for her and kind of pitiful for him.

It's just... bad. It doesn't give a satisfying or thematically appropriate conclusion to anyone's story. It rushes through the final confrontation with the last boss, with the same frantic urgency as a series canceled in 20 chapters. There's a lot of discussion about how Kubo was dealing with health issues, creative burnout, and grappling with troublesome editors through the last days of Bleach, and while I sympathize, that doesn't make this ending any less of a slog.

Going back to your joke about it ending at Aizen, I wonder what the series' legacy might be like if it had concluded before the Fullbringer arc. There would have been some lingering questions, and the finale would have been majorly bittersweet, but I'd probably think of it as closer to Naruto's ending, where my fondness for it supersedes its flaws.

I think that's really what defines an ending for me, and how I look back on a series. No story is perfect, and endings aren't the only thing that matters. Still, you can conclude in a state that preserves what I liked about your story, to begin with, I'm satisfied.

Probably the better option for a Togashi series. If Bleach's ending was rushed, Yu Yu Hakusho's straight-up didn't happen. They skip the back half of the final arc and summarize it for us.


That was largely the result of Togashi's health problems, but it's still infamous as a total non-ending that only works slightly better in the anime.

At the same time, I sympathize with fans who want to have some kind of ending. I'm still highly skeptical of Berserk continuing after Kentaro Miura's death, but I want to see what his successors do to eventually wrap up that world.

It's understandable, but at the end of the day, I think we are all better off if we're able to accept saying goodbye. Probably my most vulnerable moment as a reader was when I put off reading the last volume of Tsuredure Children for nearly a year. I had come to love the series, and each new volume was a blast of joy in even the darkest parts of my life. Letting it end felt like losing a loved one, as weird as that sounds to say about a 4-koma comedy about several dozen teenagers failing to date.

And ultimately, as much as it stung to say goodbye, I laughed my ass off to that last volume and came away with like a dozen double-page spreads of these adorable romantic failures finally achieving catharsis.

All good things come to an end, but that's only ever a single finale in an endless ocean of stories. If nothing else, we should all prepare to say goodbye eventually. Except for Detective Conan. That little twerp will outlive us all.