I remember seeing a headline a while back that Love of Kill was ending soon, but those articles pop up often, so it’s in one ear (eye?) and out the other for me a lot of the time.
But then the second half of Love of Kill is such a swift change of momentum that I didn’t need to know Love of Kill was completed to be able to tell that the ending was imminent.
First, though, Love of Kill continues right where it left off: with the battle on the island. Ryang-Ha and Chateau have reunited, and soon they come face-to-face with Donny. It’s a confrontation long in the making, and without ruining the surprise, it’s not a bad idea for readers to go back and reread some of the previous chapters in this arc. Fe mentions that they thought the outcome was obvious (and had been set for quite a while), and Fe is right in that the ending doesn’t rely on a obscure or minute detail that requires intense scrutiny. But well, with such high stakes thrills recently, that aspect slipped my and assuredly many others’ minds.
Fe also mentions on this same page of their retrospectives they “truly regret” the story didn’t get a chance to dive deeper into Donny’s relationship with Chateau’s father and the Sparks. If Love of Kill ever gets a spinoff, it seems like this would be what Fe would focus on. Otherwise, I imagine the finale volume or the author’s Twitter has a lot of info. It seems like the backstory was skipped due to the lack of the two main leads — and that they wouldn’t care about such explanations anyway.
But perhaps that would have been more interesting than where Fe takes the manga in the second half. We as readers know why Ryang-Ha makes the decision he makes, but as a result, the manga spends quite a bit of time on a brand new character: an old woman named Lucy. And now a new crisis appears.
Yes, the story skips ahead after the Donny drama, and fans don’t feel like they’re rewarded after having Ryang-Ha and Chateau separated and in perhaps their most difficult situation yet. But in the space of one chapter, Love of Kill goes from wrapping up perhaps the most important arc of the manga to rushed ending crunchtime, with abridged versions of what happened post-climax to Donny and the gang. A bonus short story touches upon some of the final moments of the island, and that’s the sort of content that should have been weaved into the main story.
I can’t say I was thrilled with how the final chapters of the Donny arc played out, but my disappointment with the second half of volume 10 just cemented this as my least favorite entry of the series to date. The art is still great (and I laughed my butt off in the bonus anime announcement celebration short story), but it’s like Fe drove the Love of Kill story bus off the interstate and across people’s yards to catch the next road instead of taking the smoother, more gradual exit.