Well, gee, that got sad, and a little messy.
Magu-chan: God of Destruction, Chapter 77: “He Waits Dreaming.” By Kei Kamiki, translation by Christine Dashiell, lettering by Erika Terriquez. Available from Viz.
I mean, that’s kind of the point that this series has promised since about the midpoint: people die. It’s depressing in an awful way. It’s as chaotic as the chibi gods of this series, upsetting a routine that, maybe naively, you think will just progress and stay constant, without end, like a manga like this one that you didn’t think would end, or a dream like Magu has at this chapter’s end, or a death you didn’t see coming.
Still, we progress, we’re not alone, and if we’re lucky, there are others that we can reach out to because we feel like they understand and empathize, if not sympathize, with what we’re going through.
And for that reason, it feels like having Magu not learn all of this, or feel like no one else can sympathize with him, and just walk away from others, only to end up back with Ruru’s likely descendant far later, either feels artificially depressing, rather than satisfying and earned, or feels like an even sadder ending because, while the other gods have managed to connect with various humans in different ways, Magu’s sociopathic aspects prevent him from really engaging with more than just one person at a time.
Yet some glimmer of hope persists. Let’s get this out of the way: I’m less crestfallen about this final* chapter (note the asterisk) of Magu-chan: God of Destruction ending when the Shueisha editors keep pulling me along with a promise (hence the asterisk) that this isn’t the last story as Jump Giga will publish one more story in spring. (Viz: please include it in your Jump subscription and in the final digital volume of Magu-chan.)
I see this series is again pulling from the Gintama playbook and refusing to just end: it keeps going. And I’m fine with that. Given how this last chapter works out, with the dreaded time skip, that means there are enough stories to tell about Ruru and her friends to go from her high school years to her passing. If Kamiki and a publisher wanted to keep making one-off stories checking in on these characters, I would be up for it.
But as I said, the dreaded time skip rears its head, so now I get to rant about that storytelling device–and how Magu-chan’s last chapter largely avoids the inherent flaws of time skips.
I think time skips are one of the laziest ways of creating a mystery in a narrative, as the mystery they dangle either is so inconsequential that it is hardly worth the artificiality, or leads to fan theories that are often better than what is ultimately confirmed. For example, Young Justice shows how to do a time skip poorly: it sets up those dull mysteries, and worse than that, it’s a refusal to let the audience see the growth of the character along their journey, fast-forwarding past stuff I want to see, then going back to flashbacks with stuff that I don’t care about. It’s one of the most cynical ways I have seen a series rush to fill up its run-time with all the characters and plots from the comics that a creator wanted to get to.
“But didn’t Naruto do the same thing?” Yeah. And somehow that worked for me. The only major annoyance I have is that, for all of the development Naruto as a character has during the time skip we didn’t see, he remains essentially the same character even after the time skip–making him still recognizable, albeit annoyingly still less mature than I would hope he would come across.
I guess I could make a similar complaint about the time skip in One Piece with regard to characterization, although that time skip had two successes. First, it empowered the characters in a believable fashion (this much time passed, therefore, their skill sets improved as well). Second, it reinforced the crew’s bonds, where it somehow feels like no time has passed for them, making it heartwarming that they still retain as passionate a set of relationships with each other regardless how long they have been away from each other.
Magu-chan gets away with its time skip if only because, as the last chapter, it can stand to break rules. It’s a “cake and eat it too” scenario: we get to see how the two main characters turn out, we can fill in gaps along the way, and as I said there is nothing stopping more stories about what happened in-between from being told, by Kamiki or fan writers.
But what happened in-between for characters not named Ruru and Magu is less clear, and that requires approaching an uncomfortable detail: this is a messy ending.
Magu-chan has been a messy series, for good and bad. It kind of reflects all that goes into it: characters have messy hair, the chibi eldritch beings are a messy mix of gruesome and adorable, and story arcs and stand-alone stories alternate so frequently that readers get bothered by the pacing and call the whole thing “messy.”
And these three details, amongst others, are all encapsulated in this final chapter.
The messy hair? We only recognize Magu’s new partner is Ruru’s descendant because of the similarly messy hair. (Or, it could be Yuika’s descendant, given my colorblindness and how similar Ruru and Yuika looked.)
Messy chibi eldritch beings? Magu pretty much keeps his same size throughout, and while we don’t know whether anything changed for the other gods, if they aren’t running around spreading chaos around the world, it’s likely their sizes didn’t change much, barring Muscar who somehow gets his bigger humanoid form back. It’s almost as if this was the inevitability of his plot–that he would get that body back–and it still remains awkward how the last few chapters didn’t just let his larger body remain as is.
And that last part is reflective of how the series has been considered “messy” for alternating between arcs and stand-alone stories. We see in this chapter that Muscar got his body back–and I say this without any bitterness, I don’t care how that happened. I don’t. It just did. We already saw that he could do it before, so if enough time has passed and he has done it again, I don’t care. But what I do find perplexing is that other mystery: what convinced him to work with Izuma, Uneras, and Nosu Koshu to re-imprison Magu? Why did Muscar give up? And that’s where things do indeed get messy in this finale: there are so many stories not yet finished.
This final* chapter–and, again, an asterisk on that word “final,” as we got one more story coming–is a summary of adventures we likely will never see officially told in their completion, leaving us with questions:
Who is that other god Muscar and Akamura recruited? (And isn’t it sad we don’t see Akamura or that other god with older Muscar later, implying they are probably dead or just estranged?)
What were Naputaaku’s adventures that led to a restaurant successfully named after him? (I’m not entirely convinced Naputaaku succeeded at forming his restaurant, so much as someone else named one after him–but I don’t want to take the starfish’s victory away from him, so I’m fine just assuming that “The Mad Eatery” is indeed his restaurant.)
What challenges did Izuma face in ascending to knighthood, and what happened to his sister, Seira, and the other knights?
What happened to Ruru and Izuma’s other classmates?
Who is Ruru’s husband and the father of her children?
(The chapter trolls about whether Ruru’s future husband Ren: he already has a bland enough design that her husband could just as easily not be him. Plus, given the toxic “nice guy” stuff around him, as if he’s entitled to a relationship as the childhood friend, I’d rather he not end up as Ruru’s husband. If we’re not going to show him actually becoming a better person, and being a better person being its own reward regardless whether he marries Ruru, I’m just as happy assuming, no, he didn’t end up with her. At least we got some good gags with him in this chapter, such as refusing to take the bus to school because his sister is on it.)
These questions, at best, can be answered with “leave the audience wanting more.” In that regard, they are successes. Less successful, I worry, is where Magu ends up, and what that says about staying static.
I’m not sure Magu physically staying the same, even years later, upon Ruru’s death, and then his re-awakening, works for me. As I said before, Ren’s argument that Ruru should be like Magu and Naputaaku, just going through the motions and being “happy,” does not work if nothing changes and if he didn’t get to return to his former size and didn’t get to take over the world. But that could be the point: Magu would not have been happy with that larger size and taking over the world. Magu has rarely had the self-awareness that Naputaaku had when he realized returning to conquering ways would do him no good: that’s why Naputaaku likely achieved restaurant success on his own terms while Magu never took over the world.
It’s not that it’s unbelievable, though, just not what I think works for me. If Magu did get bigger–assuming he didn’t already, and we didn’t see it, because of the same reason we keep making Muscar small again–then he would not have depended on Ruru, and that would have changed their relationship. And Magu ultimately didn’t want the world: he wanted to be with Ruru. It’s a rushed conclusion for him, and it’s not as if this series hasn’t rushed some things before, and it’s not as if there is not enough in the text to justify that being with her is all he wants.
Then again, having Magu make a new friend in Ruru’s likely descendant undermines a lot of that message. We just emphasized how much Ruru meant to him–and now this new kiddo shows up as the replacement goldfish? And, worse than that, it seems like Magu instantly or already has forgotten anything about Ruru? A small panel just showing Magu gazing up at Ruri and mispronouncing her name as “Ruru” would be enough to emphasize that he still remembers his first friend, or if he doesn’t, that enough of her memory or his love for her remains. I know that the panels literally before this moment had Ruru say that her memories will always be with Magu–not so different than having those memories burned into his eye as he said about the group photo–but just that one extra mispronunciation would have sold it. Heck, if he was going to end up tending to Ruru’s descendant, why would he disappear without a word from her family and not continue to heend But this is the ending we get, if only so that we don’t end on the bleak idea that he accepts an eternity dreaming that Ruru is still alive rather than facing reality.
I can’t say that I want this lighthearted series to get more real, but it feels like a missed opportunity to the audience. We get an imperfect ending that seems to say, vaguely, that yes, people pass on, it’s sad, but the feelings and knowledge they imparted onto us can remain with us, if we choose to accept it. Magu accepted those feelings and knowledge in reaching out to Ruri; I don’t think the story makes that as clear as it could have. It’s hard for me not to keep turning back to the topic of mourning, but I do expect art of this moment in our time, in the face of a global pandemic, to do better at addressing mourning and loss in more inspirational ways, in ways that show us a path for progress. I didn’t quite get that here, and that requires admitting that Magu has never been a character who progresses but a character who is cyclical in nature, repeating his earlier cycle with Ruru now with Ruri. I had said before that the greatest strength of Magu-chan was having static characters; as this series wraps up, I don’t think static characterization is good enough for a conclusion. With Yupisusu as the series narrator who can literally repeat time over and over again, I almost wish the narrator intervene to comment on that cyclical nature: it could have been deep, like how we saw the cyclical nature of the series at the end of Chapter 75 and the start of Chapter 76, a good thematic end to this series.
At least we got to see Izuma shedding tears and Muscar cooperating with imprisoning Magu, so that is some dynamic characterization. I just wish we could see the same for Magu, Ren, Kikyo, Yuika, and so many other characters that I really want to see again soon. It would have helped show rather than tell us that Ruru and Magu did a lot of work to help destroy people’s sadness, more than just one scene of them cleaning up the beach.
Oh well: time to wait for that spring 2022 chapter and whatever headcanon I can brainstorm. Too bad I’m not much of an illustrator, though–I’d need Kamiki or someone else to draw those ideas.
And speaking of the artwork, I do think it is effective, albeit still with minor details that I personally would have liked to have seen changed. As I said, more scenes of Ruru actually working to help others would be nice beyond the beach cleaning, especially if her kids were helping her. I enjoy the cover image for this last chapter, even if it feels like it could suit any chapter and is less of a “goodbye” compared to the collage we got last time.
And speaking of collages, the memories Magu has in his dream, all from this run of the manga, would have required more work to draw original artwork of Magu with an older Ruru, but I would have appreciated seeing his good times with her being beyond the middle school years.
I don’t know whether I’ll ever write a series retrospective on Magu-chan, especially as I have plans to write about the chapters I didn’t talk about on this blog before. But for now, I can say that this series has been worth reading. When it comes to serialized narratives, I tend to prefer re-reading the same chapters or re-watching the same episodes, out of order, not throughout for the entire plot, skipping stories that don’t suit my mood at the moment, whether they are too real, too intense, too depressing, or, if things are really serious, even too funny. I do not look forward to confronting a time where I would read this last chapter again to get through mourning loss. But while I don’t want to return to this chapter again, I do appreciate how well this series combined slice-of-life shenanigans, humor, and largely thought-provoking meditations on mourning and loss, all while being a comedy tapping into Lovecraftian horror. I’ll miss the lack of new chapters of Magu-chan; I will enjoy re-reading a lot of the series.
Derek S. McGrath 