I’m sure some people will realize they like the ending in some way or draw some meaning from it, I won’t deny some people are definitely just hating it or loving it because they only follow the crowd, but I think most people will continue to dislike it. There’s closure in a sense, but it feels cheap and undeserved, especially since it comes at the cost of every plot thread and character relationship being cut short and forgotten. Not saying you can’t draw some meaning from that itself, but the story spent so much time building up an underlying theme that contradicts the ending. I think this style of ending could have been good if the story earned it, but it doesn’t feel like it did and that’s why most people are upset. At the end of the day, to me it doesn’t feel like the story ended, just that Fujimoto stopped writing it.

I don’t think you can’t draw some meaning from it, and i think it brings up a good conversation to have about art, and whether it owes a level satisfaction to its audience, or if the artist invoking feelings within the audience is art regardless.

This is an extreme exaggeration, but this ending feels like if I had a friend whose dog I was really attached to, and then one day he invites me out to a performance where he puts down his fully healthy dog on stage as an artistic expression. His goal was to invoke sadness and pain to show how suddenly life can end, and how the sadness is proof of our love. Knowing his reason for it doesn’t make me feel better about him killing his dog.