Hello! And welcome back to Otaku Thursday. You know…something has been on my mind a lot recently. And when I say it has been on my mind a lot…I mean that it never truly leaves me. And that is the anime/manga known as D.Gray-Man. Now, I’m sure some of you have heard of it and perhaps some of you are wondering what the heck a gray man is. While I can’t quite answer that, I can say that D.Gray-Man, as an anime, was a phenomenon back in its hayday. But it faded away over time after long hiatuses. And now? Well. It’s the most frustrating thing. Because no. It has not ended yet and also no. I don’t know when it will. Which means that I am in a state of love and hate with this manga. I’ve been debating for a long time whether I wanted to make a rant post about it and finally, here we are. So buckle in, cause I have a lot to say.
So. Like I said in my opener. D.Gray-Man, at its height, was a shonen powerhouse with over 200 episodes of content and a weekly manga chapter in shonen jump. I had originally read it when it kind of had its first preview/test launch in the magazine. I remember being very drawn into the story–the edge of darkness and the drawing style really pulled me in. It was refreshing to have a gothic feeling manga grace the pages amongst One Piece, Naruto, and Dragon Ball Z (or whichever Dragon Ball they were on at the time). I then didn’t really find myself investing in D.Gray-Man again for a long while though–mainly because I stopped buying shonen jump volumes. But I think I started getting into it again around the time the second volume was released in the US. But once again, I bought the manga, read everything I could, and then fell out of it again. It wouldn’t be until the anime had finished at least its first 100 episodes before I would then find myself drawn back into the world of D.Gray-Man, and this time for good. I watched it like crazy–and I DO mean like crazy. Gosh, I was like the worst. I think I finished catching up to the anime in like two weeks or less. I think my problem prior to this had been as simple as that there wasn’t enough content at the time to feed my addiction for the show. Anyway, it was so good.
But then it started going on hiatus due to the author’s health and it began fading away from people’s attention. The manga kept going away and coming back, playing with out emotions. Until one day it went on a LONG hiatus. At this point, I honestly gave up on it–I took the L and thought, y’know, we got a good story for how long it lasted. I would’ve been perfectly fine if it ended for good unfinished. UNTIL it baited us and came back. Yes, because D.Gray-Man made an epic return and people were super excited. Until they released the schedule for it. D.Gray-Man would only come out a few times a year. That’s like 2-44 chapters a year pretty much. Now, I still could’ve been very happy with this if we got some decent chapter lengths. That’s not what we received though. No, some chapters were 20 pages. I don’t think we’ve had any shorter chapters than that, but still. In my opinion it’s not enough content, especially because recently the average is two chapters per year.
On one hand, I’m super grateful the author is trying their best to finish D.Gray-Man. Part of me is really happy we are still getting chapters at all. I’m really happy that the story is trying to progress so that we may see an end one day. But I’m also just like–irritated that it means we have storylines that were started years ago and we haven’t seen. Or CHARACTERS even. Like, I have not seen a glimpse of Lavi for years in the manga, and he was not in a good situation when I last saw him. So like, I do feel some resentment that it is continuing at such a slow pace. Because now I feel like I’m always anxious on whether it ever truly will be back both times a year. Or if it’ll eventually fade away again. And I wish I could just be happy it was back and that was it…but I just feel baited.
Honestly…I could rant a lot more about my love/hate relationship with D.Gray-Man. I could go so far into detail, I could spoil a lot of things for people…but I’m not going to. I just am not feeling that vibe right now and also I would rather wrap up this post quickly. So yeah…it’s not much…but I have super strongly mixed feelings about D.Gray-Man. I hope you liked this more muse like post and if you didn’t–welp. We’re going to be back to some other fun content next week because starting on June 12, we’ll be celebrating pride on our blog with Niji Nights. I hope you’ll join us in celebrating! And until then,
Stay weebtastic,
xoxo
Luna
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