xxxHOLiC Manga Chapter 181

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

Watanuki finds himself in the dark and assumes he is dreaming, but figures it is better than the dream he had been having where Yuuko-san had disappeared. Yuuko-san’s voice corrects him and says that this is reality, causing Watanuki to face the voice. He finds Yuuko-san held up by tendrils of darkness. Watanuki finds he cannot move, which Yuuko-san explains as being the result of his being out of time. She reveals that her existence is the result of a wish made long ago and that she should have been gone. For the sake of two worlds, a choice was made and so Yuuko-san is now moving in her own time. Watanuki rejects this since he had no say in the decision that is affecting someone he cares a great deal about. Yuuko-san understands but tells Watanuki that before he was born, she was already dead. Watanuki protests this, citing that he met Yuuko-san and that she helped all sorts of people and non-people. He further cites how he changed because of her and cries, to which she simply says “thank you.”

Thoughts/Review: So, how does one see in the pitch dark anyway? Just curious. ^_^

The strangeness continues with Yuuko-san’s existence being down to a wish. Over in the corresponding Tsubasa chapter, the wish is explained in greater detail, but to be honest, the explanation just had me shaking my head, mainly because things feel like CLAMP didn’t have an end-game plan and when they decided to end Tsubasa and xxxHOLiC, they had to make something up to tie up the loose ends.

Sometimes writers can get away with this kind of writing and I cite the recently-ended remake of the American sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica as an example. They didn’t have an ending in mind when Ron Moore started the series up again, but by the end of the third season, he had an ending and subsequently wrote things to move to that end. That left some “what the…?!” moments when some shocking revelations were made, but then as the final season played out, things then fell into place and all was well.

With CLAMP, I sense that a lot of people are going, “WTF?!” as they read xxxHOLiC and Tsubasa. Instead of things naturally falling into place, things just feel forced and the writing feels like, “can we get through with this already?” The fire of when Tsubasa turned dark is gone IMO and the things that made xxxHOLiC so interesting are gone. I think that CLAMP needed to come up with an exit strategy and they did the best they could based on where the story they’d constructed took them.

I will follow this to the end because that’s the only way I can fairly assess their stories. We’ll see what happens and when this manga will come to an end.