MANGA Plus by SHUEISHA
I followed this one since almost the beginning, catching it when it had five or six chapters out I believe. A way too abrupt and premature of an ending I'd say. The jokes had been getting weaker and staler over time, but as a sucker for exactly this type of a story, an episodic urban fantasy slice-of-life horror comedy, there really isn't anything like this out there for me.
In the tier list thread I made a year ago:
Tier list of the manga I'm currently following
Title. I could definitely read more, but I don't feel like getting the mangaplus app just yet, and since I make a point of reading every one-shot Shueisha publishes, I have a backlog of almost twenty of those, anyway:feelshaha:.
incels.is
I rated this one a 9/10. I wouldn't have done so now, I thought about making another thread like that and now I'd rate it 8/10. The first 10-15 or so chapters definitely felt somewhat funnier than the rest, though the rest was still good. The ambiguous canonicity of multiple chapters due to most of the extras and even at least one regular-looking chapter belonging to the non-canon "light novel verse", and the overall uncertainty of what had actually happened in the main story was definitely becoming an issue over time, since the past events actually mattered and were called back to in the story.
I also wanted to talk about how the series never actually made clear whether Kugutsu was just attracting the anomalies, or outright creating them, which had two vastly-different implications for what was happening. We knew for sure that alternate dimensions (Kisaragi Station and Inunaki Village, the way he got the talking dog to go along with his plan when they were in the latter was saying that if he dies, the latter will be stuck in it as dimensional travel will become impossible, not saying that without him the dimension and the talking dog himself will disappear) and parallel universes at least existed even without him, but we didn't know anything about ordinary anomalies. In the Nibiru Arc, it was outright said that his death wouldn't make any anomalies disappear, but it wasn't confirmed that they could exist and appear in the world without him.
(And speaking of the Nibiru Arc, I have no idea what to think of it. It's the only arc in the manga that completely shelves the comedy aspect and is just a horror/thriller as Kugutsu and his friends get increasingly targetted and society starts unravelling due to the incoming end of the world. A lot of plot threads and mysteries get brought up... and then it all just gets reset, nothing happens, nothing gets resolved, and everything goes back to normal despite all of it having actually happened. I guess it could've been an allegory for COVID, and how everything and everyone went crazy and now society just pretends it never happened, but that's probably just me trying to excuse it.)
However, this criticism became moot when I actually read the final chapter. The chapter honestly feels like a bit of a meta-joke where the author was having fun with it as, since this was the final chapter, of course this was where he(?) decided to introduce a bunch of new characters, some of whom were heavily implied to also have their own occult adventures proving that all of it isn't just about Kugutsu, with one of those characters outright dumping a crapload of lore and dabbing on Kugutsu by revealing where his abilities come from and what they are, outright stating that he's summoning/attracting anomalies instead of creating them and that this character also has such powers, if not greater ones... only for the only thing all of that leads is all of those new characters being knocked out by Mokume after she gets drunk and starts puking while trying to run away somewhere to do so in peace.
(Btw, I like the theory that Mokume herself is an anomaly/urban legend, though they obviously don't work.)
That scene was I think the first one in like five chapters, if not more, that actually made me audibly laugh, and overall, this final chapter just reassured me that I couldn't rate this lower than 8/10, and that this definitely still had some juice that would've been worth being squeezed out. Which we unfortunately won't be getting anymore.
