So Your Favorite Manga is Ending… – This Week in Anime

With the recent end of My Hero Academia and impending conclusion of Jujutsu Kaisen, Nick and Lucas spoiler-tastically talk all about manga endings—the good, the bad, and the utterly insane.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.

Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead. Jujutsu Kaisen, My Hero Academia, Naruto, Boruto, Haikyu!!, Delicious in Dungeon, Ginka and Gluna, The Last Saiyuki, Blue Flag, PPPPPP, Bleach, Yu Yu Hakusho, Tsuredure Children

Lucas

It’s easy to give into our worst instincts during tumultuous times, but it’s just one major manga winding down! The manga industry and the community around that media can navigate this change tactfully! Let me just Google “Shonen Jump Manga Ending” and I’m sure I’ll see people being completely normal abou- oh!


I forgot My Hero Academia ended last month. OH GOD! The weebs are weeping!! This is so much change in such quick succession!!! They needed their emotional support otaku to help them navigate all of this!

Gah! You never let me talk about the cuckolding discourse, Nick! Oh well, we can save that for a different column.


But I am down for a communal therapy sesh! And, thanks to Shonen Jump‘s (and much of the manga industry’s) scattershot approach to approving and often quickly canceling new series, we have a wealth of titles to choose from as we explore a phenomenon particular to this fandom. Should we start with a big one or do you have a smaller, more personal pick in mind to start us off?

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.

Wait, you’re telling me you didn’t appreciate Todo’s epic return or his newfound fondness for percussion instruments??

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.

It’s a bit too early for a postmortem on JJK, but BOY does it like to set up characters and dynamics popular in other shonen manga without putting in the legwork to make these relationships feel believable.


And while I love that Akutami sprinkles real-world issues into the manga—like bullying, the failures of the Japanese legal system, and the United States policing the world for resources with its military—by the end none of these ideas had room they need to be fully explored.

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.

Wow, manga-reading Zoomers really couldn’t catch a break this summer! Two series that were a lot of people’s introduction to anime and manga wrapped up within a few months of each other. I’m not much of an MHA guy, but even I feel for these kids.

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.

I’m working on a big ol’ My Hero Academia retrospective for another outlet and, without getting into too many of my feelings on the series, it is incredible how it felt like the face of the anime and manga world for a good part of the late 2010s. For western readers, it offered an easy introduction to anime at the height of superhero media’s popularity. I think anime and manga would have a lot less mainstream media attention today if MHA didn’t pop off the way that it DiD.

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.

To anyone out there who hopes that My Hero Academia gets the Boruto treatment, no you don’t! As someone who grew up while Naruto was king of the anime mountain, I promise you don’t want an ill-conceived follow-up to your favorite franchise.


Though, that does beg the question, what do you think are the chances that MHA or JJK get sequel series like an increasing number of other shonen greats?

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 Kōhei 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.

I know this is a little tangential but I’m mad enough that I don’t care! The thematic core of Naruto was how intergenerational violence creates inherited trauma that leads to perpetual cycles of conflict and hatred. Only by overcoming this trauma and forgiving the decadents of past perpetrators can people grow on an individual and societal level. Boruto doubling down on a race of super aliens responsible for all of Earth’s problems completely misses the point of the original work and exacerbates the worst elements of Naruto‘s ending! (end rant)

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.

I get wanting &TEAM 7 to have one last hurrah together and fight a super baddie, but Madara was RIGHT THERE and worked so much better as a final villain with his well-explored backstory and pretty fleshed-out descent into his extreme beliefs.


But after those shenanigans, Naruto and Sasuke finally get their big fight and it ends with them becoming extreme blood brothers, so I think Naruto‘s ending was about as good as I could have hoped for when all is said and done.

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.

You can miss me with pretty much anything post-Pain. Or, if I’m really in a discoursing mood, anything after the Chunin Exams, which, for my money, is about as good as any traditional shonen manga can hope to be!

That inspires another interesting question, though. Do you think any manga, long-running or otherwise, has stuck its landing? With most of these series plagued with rougher finishes, it might be helpful to give folks examples of endings done right.

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.

That would explain all the excitement I’ve seen for the anime to cap off with the next film! I can’t speak to Haikyu!! personally. My go-to example of a great manga ending would have to be Delicious in Dungeon.



Some will say that it was a bit rushed, and I love that there have been a few side stories after the fact to fill in the gaps, but it was both surprising while managing to encapsulate everything that made the entire series so great.

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?

Especially when one of your favorite spots is boarded up for no reason. While a lot of solid mangas have been cut short with little explanation, the one that probably hit me the hardest was Ginka and Gluna, a fantasy adventure series that felt like a rare treat considering One Piece‘s dominance in that genre.

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.

I’m sure there are countless boring Jump series that have been cut in under a dozen chapters that we’ll never remember, but MAN there have been some tragic cuts in the past few years! I morn for The Last Saiyuki and so many other weird/novel Jump titles that were nipped in the bud before they could reach their full potential.

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.

I’m not sure if I’m prepared to defend this hot take, but unexpected manga endings are low-key some of the best manga endings! While they’re rarely thought out, they almost always take some big signs and I respect that! I bounced off of PPPPPP, but respect the hell out of it for ending with the protag sucker punching his shitty dad!



Also, while Blue Flag is a blind spot for me, I appreciate the queer rep and feel like I have to check it out now!

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.

What? No! Bleach ended cleanly with Ichigo’s fight with Aizen! Or, the series will be redeemed whenever Burn the Witch picks back up! That one weird maybe one-shot chapter where Dad-Ichigo meets up with some new and old soul reapers will redeem the series whenever Kubo follows up on that chapter’s cliffhanger ending!

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.

You either die a hero or live long enough to yadda yadda~ But I agree, and think that Bleach is maybe one of the worst manga endings in recent memory. Thousand Year Blood War was downright incoherent by the end, and I feel like I’m having a stroke every time I hear/see people hype up the anime adaptation. All of these half-baked plans to continue the series are also as sad as they are frustrating and feel like desperate attempts to claw the franchise out of a poor grave of its own making.

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.

I couldn’t agree more, but I’ve already taken enough flack from strangers over social media for saying Bleach‘s ending was, in fact, disappointing and there’s a lot of corroborating work on the internet that backs up my based take! Super Eyepatch Wolf made two videos about how Bleach blew it!

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.

Bleach is a testament to how a handful of good ideas wrapped in kick-ass packaging can rocket a series to fame, but that’s not nearly enough material to fasten a parachute for a landing, and that leaves fans left to mourn the wreckage.

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.

Yeah~ Off the top of my head, we wouldn’t know what was up with Ichigo’s Dad being a soul reaper without the Fullbringer arc and beyond, and a lot of dudes who were made out to be badasses wouldn’t have had the opportunity to live up to their hype. But, at the very least, there wouldn’t be any plot holes that couldn’t be filled with a couple of epilogues.

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.

Same! And that’s why I’m cool if a series like Hunter X Hunter never gets a “proper” ending. To me, this manga is the embodiment of creativity, enthusiasm, and adventure. I’d much rather spend the rest of my life imagining what happens next for these lovable characters than having their stories wrapped up in a slapdash bow.

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.

This is why I can’t be too critical of Togashi’s output or how YYH ended. Sometimes a manga is finished when the author’s done with the series and, while that isn’t always the most satisfying for a reader, I can respect an author ending something on their terms like that.

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.

I don’t think it’s weird at all. Especially with how long some manga can run. Finishing a series is arguably a bigger undertaking than starting one. Doing so involves moving from one part of your life to another. That can tie into the broader ways that people’s lives change. It’s normal to be affected by something like that, and I think everyone has grieved no longer having a piece of media that acted as a psychic anchor for them in their lives.

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.

Sounds like Tsuredure Children went out on top and I’m happy for you! And I can’t think of a better way to close out this column on closure than with that bit of positivity.