Magi, complete (ch369)
I stayed up all night reading the last ninety chapters or so. Years late, but what a ride.
Overall, I think it’s one of the better long manga endings. It still has the usual problems, but they are not as bad as usually. Mostly, I think, because what I assumed would be the last arc was actually two arcs, Fantasy Capitalism and then Sinbad’s Wild God Ride. Most of the wrapup for past arcs and characters is taken care of during capitalism adventures, with the world tour for setting up the trading posts, so once we hit the long stretch of escalating ending bullshit, there’s less to cram in.
Sinbad’s wild ride into the sacred palace was so batshit that it became fascinating.
There’s definitely some weird points in where the characters were taken, and depending on who you favor, you might get pretty mad, but I liked it more or less. At the very least I don’t want to actively disown the whole thing, which is a huge leap forward from the usual state of affairs, haha.
The things that did bother me about the ending, more or less escalating in annoyance:
Arba carrying on as a child doll(?) feels incredibly weird given the character’s history. Most of everyone else got addressed somehow, but she just kinda drifted along making weird comments.
Morgiana. Look at the endgame lineups and it’s a sausage fest. I always knew Otaka cared the least for Mor out of the main trio, but man it got blatant. Also, the romance between her and Alibaba never really clicked for me (even if it’s logically fine and inoffensive). The constant talk about marriage was annoying.
No one managed to break free of Sinbad’s rukh rewrite. They tried multiple times, and yet it never worked. This feels very annoying, given the free will message. Also, I don’t get why, since you could break free from Solomon’s rewrite (Falling).
Sinbad’s stated motivations change constantly, so many times. You can probably explain it away, more or less, and he gets called out on being contradictory once. But I think there were probably a layer or two too many motivations in there.
The thing with upper dimension gods was A Mistake. This is like, the biggest mistake, I would say. It confuses Sinbad’s motivations even more, it leads to the most draggy parts of the last arc, and then it never gets closed out. They decide to contact alternate dimensions (...not good, but whatever), but then the last chapter epilogue doesn’t mention it at all! Like, at all. The entire plot point about “there are even more gods out there, any of them could reach in and eat the world or rewrite everyone’s minds at any moment, this is why Sinbad wants to become an even greater god” gets completely dropped once David finalizes his position as final boss. I assume it was to turn Sinbad’s motivations sympathetic again, since his other two major claimed motivations were “greed, I want to go as far as I can go, regardless of whether anyone agrees with me” (which would have been an interesting foil to “everyone should find their own way to live!”) and “because I want the world to follow the path of destiny I see” (which was fundamentally also motivated by wanting the best for people imo) and also to give us the crazy “everyone wants to die and won’t even protect themselves” scenario, but I don’t think it’s worth it.
I personally really hate “and the magic goes away” endings, so them breaking the dungeon and djinn system really got to me (even though the world afterwards was still pretty magical). Also, the djinn are actual people, so like what happened to them.
The only problem is that I don’t like the most “canon-based” ships for my fave, and there isn’t much fic to begin with. It’s very sad because Magi is a very interesting series.
