Just a conversation between two strangers in a bar (and the bar is obviously fictional), so please sit with me.
Don't worry, you can forget about this when you're done reading.
I'm not trying to change your way of changing, this is just a reflection for myself that I wanted to share. I might be a bit drunk, hence the bar allegory.
Well, let's begin.
Three decades of uninterrupted serialization leave a mark that is not reflected in the color pages of Shonen Sunday magazine, but in the shadows of the publishing back office. The portrait that emerges is not that of a manga artist enjoying his creative twilight, but rather that of an author caught between the legacy of his masterpiece and the lingering affection for his most personal work. The energy that drove the early arcs of Conan or the playful elegance of Kid's initial heists has mutated into a kind of professional inertia. We are not facing an author who hates his work that would be unfair to say. But we are facing an artist who has lost much of his original enthusiasm.
The clearest symptom is structural exhaustion. Maintaining Detective Conan as a semi-global multimedia franchise (manga, weekly anime, big-budget annual film, spin-offs, anniversaries) has generated a palpable wear and tear. Within that ecosystem, Magic Kaito occupies an uncomfortable place. It is Gosho's cherished work from his youth, perhaps his most genuine creation, but it has been relegated to being a "satellite" of Conan. Like the moon to the Earth, MK would be the moon bright but without its own light and Conan would be the Earth, the center of everything, because it is like the Earth: humans once believed the Earth was the sun.
The problem is that Gosho feels a scarcity of resources not financial, but mental and creative.
The simple act of balancing both worlds imposes an overload on him. There is no fluidity, only a constant juggling act where Conan's ball is made of steel and Kaito's is made of delicate glass.
The author holds on, he remains standing, but he does so from a defensive stance and out of inertia, not from that spark that led him to draw the first magic trick under the moonlight.
For years, fans clamored for the unification of the "DCMK" shared universe between Detectives and Thieves. The publishing house saw a gold mine in the crossovers. Gosho, surely, saw an initial opportunity to celebrate both of his legacies. However, the result has been diametrically opposed to expectations: the merger has generated more internal conflict than satisfaction.
Instead of being a creative breather, uniting both series has become a source of blockage and pressure. Gosho does not have a clear plan to integrate them organically; he finds himself in a narrative dead end from which he cannot move forward without contradicting himself, and from which he cannot retreat without angering a portion of the fandom or the editorial department.
There is also an unsustainable imbalance. On Gosho's scales, Conan absorbs everything. MK, with its erratic publication schedule, receives very little in return for the popularity it brings to Conan's special events. The author is aware of this creative injustice, and that awareness only adds weight to his already overloaded backpack. He has lost control of the monster he created; authorship is no longer a throne, but an uncomfortable seat in a car driven by editorial inertia.
And in that context of exhaustion and forced unification is where the most controversial and symptomatic twist is born: the kinship between Kaito Kuroba and Shinichi Kudo.
Far from being a "gift" to the fans or a long-planned masterstroke, the evidence points to this revelation being a structural measure, a drastic solution to bind the universes together irreversibly. It was a decision made out of the necessity to justify the characters' coexistence on the big screen, not from a place of genuine emotion or overflowing inspiration.
For Gosho, this connection has become a true creative torture.
The reasons are clear:
He hasn't known what to do with that twist after introducing it. The idea was left abandoned on a narrative desert island. It didn't bring the expected inspiration; on the contrary, it extinguished the little joy that remained.
Self-Censorship and Blockage: Gosho himself has created a barrier by stating that "what appears in the movies does not appear in the manga." With that declaration, he has tied his own hands. He knows he cannot develop the kinship in the main canon without breaking his implicit promise to the reader. It's a dead end.
A family bond of that magnitude should be a pillar for the future of the series (the legacy of the Kuroba/Kudo). However, Gosho perceives it as a poorly placed column, something that threatens the integrity of the structure if he tries to move or remove it.
That is why, from my point of view, the subject of the cousins is not a narrative victory, but the most visible symptom of profound exhaustion. It is a patch applied in haste that now oozes ink and which the author prefers to loftily ignore, pretending it isn't there, confined to the limbo of the movies where he doesn't have to deal with its consequences in the main plot.
Conclusion.
It is easy to sit on the sidelines and judge the plot twists of an author with a thirty-year career. However, when observing the complete map, one cannot help but feel a deep melancholy for Gosho Aoyama.
In the end, it is his manga. He has the unquestionable right to burn his ships, to turn rivals into cousins, and to prioritize the machinery of Conan over the magic of Kaito. But even so, it is very sad to see how it has ended up.
It is sad to see an exhausted author, lacking the spark of yesteryear, pushing a stone uphill not out of passion, but out of obligation and pressure. It is sad to see how the unification of his two worlds, which could have been a feast of creativity, has become a trap from which he cannot escape. And it is especially sad to see how such an important family bond was reduced to a forgotten footnote, a twist that seems to torture its creator more than the readers themselves.