@sakalol
I trust that article, but I honestly don't know how much we can trust what Fujita says at this point, lol. Idk the specific phrasing of what he wrote in the recent volume release, but "entering the final arc" is essentially no different from what he said back in 2018, 95 chapters ago. To put it into perspective, he wrote in a blog post "Right now, the story should be gearing up towards the moment just before the final climactic arc" at a time when the series was practically *half* of its current length. Lmao. It was reported back then that he said there were "just one or two more mountains to climb" in the manga, but by now it's evident he probably meant that those were only the mountains he needed to cross *before* reaching this final climax.
At the time of his blog post, the manga was in the middle of the "survivors escape arc", so since then, we've covered Deido's entire backstory, a volume of fighting culminating in Kaerikuro's major character reveal, 2 volumes covering the survivors meeting up with the rest, another 2 volumes covering the Kirita sisters' development and Rokurou's ghost adventures, and THEN volume 18 started.
And while I agree volume 18 seems like it's setting up for a final arc, we're already nearing the end of volume 20 and the pacing is clearly not in a hurry to reach the ending any time soon! We dedicated 3 entire chapters to a detour with Takoha and Kaerikuro in the past, practically an entire volume at this point dedicated to this conflict in Deido's atelier, and at the very least we STILL need the Kirita sisters to end up fighting Oujin at some point, unless all that dramatic setup was just a misdirection.
Like, I'm by no means calling the pacing slow or bad. I think it's awesome that he gives things the space they need, and I definitely haven't felt bored lately. But I'm just expecting the series to end before another 5 volumes at least. Of course I'm a little biased because I don't want it to end soon, but I'm fairly sure we should take this sort of announcement with a grain of salt, heh.