【Oshi no Ko】 - Vol. 16 Ch. 166.5 - Volume 16 Extras

[Thyme.Minister]

Yeah. You can always write a story where a tragic or emotionally difficult ending only adds to the depth and meaning of the story, leaving you with a difficult but pleasant impression. For example, Romeo and Juliet does a pretty good job of conveying the message of how blood feuds are detrimental to our heirs. Here, you literally feel like all your investment in the story was wasted, because Aka seems to deliberately ignore any opportunity to resolve the ending more safely or wisely, simply killing Aqua for shock value. And judging by the change of the ending in the live action or some retroactive changes in the bonus chapter, he himself realized this, albeit very late.

For me, I think he was too brainwashed by the hype surrounding Ai's death, and while he could have easily changed the ending after the manga went in a completely different direction (like when he left Akane alive despite his previous intention to kill her after her suicide attempt, when that scene caused a scandal), he just tried to repeat it in an even bigger form, expecting to get an even bigger hype around the ending than Ai's death did. He even teased it in interviews. But in the end, he simply overestimated his writing skills and the level of emotion fans would get from it. It's no wonder people started attacking him during the final arc itself, and he even ended up temporarily leaving Twitter during the publication of the final chapter. If you look at his current manga, it goes into twist after twist and shock value even further.

the death fakeouts with characters like Akane and Ruby were so dumb, and it made me question if Aka was just not taking the concept of death seriously anymore, despite the heavy implications surrounding Ai's death and forgot what made her death so important and thematic. Ruby's and Akane's "deaths" were just cheap cliffhanger bait to get people talking, no substance whatsoever.

And then Aqua just dies. and then we get a useless character narration from the Crow Girl (who was completely irrelevant this whole time) where she has to melodramatically explain to us who Aqua "was", as if to insult the readers' intelligence, like we couldn't infer on our own who he was just by, idk, reading the story?

I just watched The Glass Half Full's analysis on OnK, and I thoroughly enjoyed his breakdown of the series and the circumstances surrounding its downfall.