Did not like the ending, I could see they were going for a statement on love and sacrifice, but it played poorly with all the little things that made the manga great. A lot of what the story spent time on was getting used to the little quirks of your lover, so to just erase her devil side felt at odds with what came before. The dramatic action didn’t have the measured groundedness and consequent intimacy that animated the manga, and almost felt like it was saying that kind of thing wasn’t important enough for a finale. The subtle hints of angel heritage felt a lot better than an explicit confirmation with full on flashback backstory. Sometimes things just work better in your setting notes and don’t have to be said.
I think the subtlety of this manga is part of what made it great, and with such a dramatic event, so much dust is kicked up that it obscures that strength. i really think we could have gotten a legendary ending using the same delicate care to tie everything together, and it would have been great. Honestly even leaving the story with the two of them partially cohabitating and lily going off to work may have been a better ending.
It makes me reflect for my own writing whether a standard dramatic action finale is even appropriate. You can justify it to yourself as an author by casting choices in the heat of the moment as a crystallization of all your characters’ discussion of love, but I wonder if it isn’t better to finish with the same strengths in writing that carried the story thus far. Much to consider.
Focusing on this part specifically:
A lot of what the story spent time on was getting used to the little quirks of your lover, so to just erase her devil side felt at odds with what came before.
Yeah that's one of the aspects I dislike the most about this ending, and I think you worded it well. A lot of the interesting narrative aspects for both Lily and her falling in love with a human was the elements of her devil side, and everything she had to deal with there. Plus those parts made their relationship uniquely fun. Un-Deviling her feels cheap in my opinion.
Agreeing with all of this but it doesn't really surprise me sadly.
Unfortunately a lot of these types of stories in general are very human-centric and end in the character "becoming human" in some way because that's viewed as the height of being a person which like...sucks?
It also results in the unfortunate implication of non-humans being "lesser" in some way than humanity which has always rubbed me the wrong way, this is also probably why there's a lot of weirdness around transhumanism but that's a whole different debate unrelated to this, all it really comes down to is a lot of authors unfortunately falling into "being like the majority good, being different bad"
I think the part that rubs me wrong, and I think encompasses some of what you’re talking about, is that in a relationship your partner’s troublesome traits or the ones that require some adjustment around do not simply go away. Learning how to deal with your partner’s disability or how the two of you can manage your respective traumas does not mean these things will go away. You will have to keep dealing with them, but now you’ve had that conversation, you have a gameplan. It’s part of the way that choosing to be with someone for life changes your life permanently. It’s part of what’s terrifying about committed relationships: it’s a commitment, it’s not always going to be easy or fun, and you have to keep putting in the work and it is inevitable that eventually, possibly quite soon, this person you’ve chosen to shape your life around will leave you, or you will leave them, one way or another. If you treat the traits of your partner as something to be fixed, that time will and should probably come very soon.
But it’s also part of the beauty of that arrangement! You gain this constant developing intimacy with a person who is different from yourself, who thinks and lives differently than you, and you get to be part of the changes in the life of this person you love.
I think this ending is bad because it violates the premise of the manga in a way that ultimately contracts it instead of expanding it. It compromises the verisimilitude and the interest that one of the traits that shapes this relationship is that one of the girls is half-demon. It’s a perfect example of taking a fantastic condition and treating it in a grounded way such that you can see any condition, even an impossible one, can be fit into a relationship if two people are committed to learning and growing together. But the ending is not in harmony with that, and not enough interest or poignancy was added to the story by its removal to justify Lily losing her demon nature.
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