Umm… your spoiler tag/markup didn’t work, and I came across this in all… 😓

It was a mid ending. The concept overall was fine but the pacing was horrible, it felt terribly rushed after arcs that moved fairly slowly.

Like kaguyas ending was ridiculous, he wrote himself into a corner and needed a kind of deus ex machina with the helicopter moment, but in the overall context of that work it was mostly fine because it was a gag manga that for some reason needed to get super serious for 10+ volumes

This was different. The ending was overall structured okay. I think he was hammering home the whole “entertainment industry is deception built on destruction” theme but unlike kaguya, or onk previous arcs, that had time to flesh out, he apparently decided that he was ready to move on and pushed this ending through quickly. As a result there’s a bunch of unsatisfying bits where we don’t get much emotional processing in lieu of just quick montages of characters reacting (mengo pulling more weight in this final arc than ever tbh), we get tons of unresolved plot lines and plot holes (what was on rubys dvd/why did she need a separate dvd? What was the significance of the brackets around the titles which was actually something that aka said would make sense by the end? Etc). The entire nature of aqua dying ends up with plot holes; why couldn’t he have solved this any of a million other ways that are fairly obvious with even mild scrutiny

The theme itself, aqua dying, etc, aren’t bad though. Those parts can all work, but they would only work in a scenario where the ending was written with more care and not rushed out so aka could take a longer break before he starts his new manga next spring.

That all said it was also doomed to be received poorly because all the waifu nerds were only going to approve an ending that validated their pick and aka seemed pretty hellbent on the “aqua dies” route, which invalidates all of them. I do wonder if that was a factor as well. Just based on the nature of his work he clearly has struggled with online criticism and if you read the commentary about onk during its run the waifu wars were hardly complimentary to him. It’s not a good look but I wouldn’t be shocked if he was like “fuck this fanbase, I’m done with this shit” because onk twitter was pretty toxic at times, especially to mengo