When it comes to bugs, it turns out that there’s no such thing as overkill as the bug inside Otaro once again comes back from near death, regains its strength, and tries to wipe out everything alive. Ran’s continued insistence to shield and save Otaro may have lead to the death of everyone she holds dear, and the end of the world, if a miracle doesn’t happen soon.
As to be expected of a series that was disjointed earlier in its’ run, Ran and the Gray World ends in a messy place and not the “good/thematic” kind of messy either. Most of the main events of the story wrap up in volume 6; as every reader expected, Ran’s continued insistence on trying to save Otaro has created even more trouble and after multiple previous, herculean efforts to try and crush the bug, that is now as part of him as any other body part, it was in many ways hard to take this fight and the stakes seriously. If the bug had kept jumping bodies, or if it hadn’t looked like the bug/Otaro had lost every previous fight only to come back, maybe this dragged-out conflict would have worked better. But, like a shōnen villain that comes back from the dead too many times, I was practically yelling “get on with it!” at the page.
And I would continue yelling “get on with it” at the beginning of volume 7! For reasons that I’m not quite clear on, Aki Irie decides to start the extra-long volume with several side-stories about other characters’ pasts, like Ran’s mother and father (though I should probably be glad it’s not another utterly random chapter, like the one about the neighbor with the sentient hair). Again, the digital volume 7 is 304 pages, 100 pages more than the digital volume 6, so it’s not as if Aki Irie needed extra pages to fill out the volume, and side-stories are normally at the end of a volume because of how much they disrupt the flow of the story which was my issue with them here. My one guess as to why Aki Irie did this is because she needed to keep Ran off the page for a little bit; at the end of volume 6/beginning of volume 7 Ran is recovering from the final fight and I could see pulling the story away from her as a legitimate storytelling trick to make the audience feel the passage of time similar to how the characters in-story do. But again, this is only a theory and if so I’m not sure it was pulled off terribly well. I did like the character profiles that were at the start of volume 7, showing each major character as both a child and an adult, but having those pages at the beginning of a volume felt far less out of place.
There were a few other odd choices in these two volumes, mostly concerning romance but different “odd choices regarding romance” than in the previous five volumes. Aki Irie must really like age gap romances since a new male character, who’s 19, is introduced and it’s not so much “hinted” as it is “stated” that he’ll be the romantic interest of Ran’s classmate Nio (both are around 10) in the future. Ack. Ran’s love life picks up again as she and Hibi become a close couple rather quickly — honestly so quickly that I wondered if Aki Irie felt pressured into doing it. They get along well but at the same time Ran also seems to have matured by 10 years so their relationship didn’t feel at all like how it did in the previous six volumes and I liked that previous, authentic messiness in their budding relationship. Again, it’s a messy wrap-up in many ways and I don’t think that was intentional.
All in all, there were many things I liked about the world of magic that Aki Irie created but I wish she had either committed to having the story being fully episodic with many different focuses based around the magic and mundane towns (which would have let her show off the magic even more) or had committed to the entire story being more plot-driven (which would have helped the weird mish-mash of pacing that the series suffered from instead). Maybe someday she’ll be a skilled enough writer (or have another writer/editor to help) to balance both episodic tales and a grander story in one manga but so far she doesn’t seem to be up for it yet (and this was her first, full-length series so I’m not surprised it had major flaws in the craft). I am interested in checking out her other series for the art alone, that remained delightful for the entire series. However I would probably also spend the entire time bracing myself for another questionable age gap “romance.”