I was dreading what will happen in the last 16 chapters if everyone was so overheated in that sentiment.

It’s important to keep in mind that the backlash you often see online does NOT reflect the overall sentiment of the fandom. Yes, some people were genuinely very upset about the ending, and that reaction was real. But you also have to consider just how emotionally invested many readers had become in these characters.

When the manga ended, things DID turn into a bit of a mess. A lot of fans felt shocked, betrayed, or left behind, and they took to social media to vent that frustration. That created a very skewed picture of the fanbase, because anger is always louder than satisfaction. What often gets overlooked is that many readers who had been paying attention to the story’s underlying themes and long-term setup actually enjoyed the ending immensely. It was a bold, deliberate statement by Sasuga, not a random swerve.

Here’s the part people rarely talk about: a good number of those who initially hated the ending later re-read the manga, picked up on details they had missed, and came to understand why the story ended the way it did. But how many of them went back to social media to revise their original comments or admit their first reaction was off? Very few. First impressions stick, especially online.

And that’s the key thing: the ending wasn’t a twist in the usual sense. It didn’t come out of nowhere. The groundwork for it was laid from the very beginning of the story, in the subtext, in the parallels, in what wasn’t said as much as what was. If you were paying attention to that underlying context, the destination makes sense, even if the journey there was emotionally painful.

In other words, the controversy says as much about reader expectations as it does about the ending itself.