To Your Eternity

Stop at 116, it’s seriously an incredible manga. I, on the other hand, tolerated the next 75 terrible chapters for around 13 good ones. Not worth it. Yes, friends we made along the way, but man it hits hard when it’s about eternity. This is an existential story about someone who can’t die having to find meaning on it. Tragedy after tragedy, you can tell it just sucks to be immortal the way Fushi is, and I loved it. The only way to remember people is by turning into them and feeling their emotional baggage on you. It’s about the ones you love leaving somuch of themselves in you. The author knows how to do these everlasting themes the justice they deserve. Each little arc, each little character that lives through it was phenomenal. Tears ran down my eyes a couple of times. Hard not to cry when it’s so much about death and its inevitability. You can take this series as bit of a serial, with each season dealing with a new cast of characters with only one overarching, developing one at the center, but done so well that you stay invested in each one. It’s also a mystery about what even the main character is and why he was created. Both things motivated me to read it in a flash. It gets you, and it got me to keep reading through the bad stuff, which is just awful. We gotta address the bad more. Before the good segment ended, it managed to cathartically wrap up everything the main character went through. So much sadness, so much hardship in a massive battle against the main villains. All out war, not in the classical shonen style where it’s too many characters all at once. This manga knows (knew) how to keep it small, and concise so the audience never loses track of anybody. There’s hereditary baggage, generational problems, societal issues, religion. Everything explodes right at the end, into a beautiful ending that grabs everything you know and uses it to maximum emotional perfection. The ending was perfect, there was even narration, and time passage, and it was done, except… the mystery wasn’t solved. You can chuck it up to not mattering, hell, it doesn’t really matter by the end. Not entirely. It’s probably the only reason the next 70 chapters exist, and I hate them. There’s one fundamental problem with the story. The catharsis and new thing that happened before the cutoff, chapter 116, manages to erase all stakes going forwards. The importance on life gets erased in the present era, and it’s turned into just killing the big bad, and making a slightly slice-of-life story out of it. The message was entirely diluted because of something that should’ve ended the story perfectly well with a mystery left unresolved. An entire HUGE arc went by, terribly. The next one didn’t promise much either, making an entire world from futuristic scratch that did not work at all to interest me. One, and only ONE storyline was worth it. The scientists almost at the very end of the last arc, which is only the resolution of the mystery introduced there. The ending was pretty good, but my God, not worth 70 bad chapters. I can’t stress this enough; no good ending warrants that much tolerance from a reader. I can’t say to skip to the most sensical part, chapter 199.2, because there’s still a lot of context and evolution missing. It’s not good, but it happened, and not knowing it makes the actual ending worse. If you wanna know the real ending to the manga, you have to thread through everything that was wrong with it. It’s a great bookend at least. Just follow my advice, stop at 116. Nothing after that is worth the time you’ll waste on it. 6/10. If 116 was the end, I’d give it a straight 8.5/10, but it’s not.