#raildex

So i did misaka too...

After 19 years, A Certain Scientific Railgun (Toaru Kagaku no Railgun) will be ending with its next chapter, Chapter 170, scheduled to publish on March 27. The announcement was revealed at the end of Chapter 169 (seen above), and Kentarou Ogino, the editor for Railgun, confirmed the news of the manga’s conclusion on Twitter.

This quite the end of an era. Despite me preferring the magic side stuff, finding Kuroko frequently written badly, heavily disliking the anime original halves of the first two seasons of the anime adaptation, and having had some beef with many Railgun-only fans dismissing the main series, the manga in itself I've loved, it's just really good, and I always heartily recommended people who watched the anime first to read it afterwards to see how much better it is tonally. So I have mixed to sad feelings about it ending.

It did seem, in hindsight, that the manga had lost a bit of steam. Level Upper, Sisters, and the Daihasei Festival arcs were so tightly interwoven and interconnected with each other in terms of plot and development that they felt like a whole really solid trilogy, about what espers are and what the city wants them to achieve at any costs, and how that plays into Mikoto's status as a Level 5. The arcs afterwards of Dream Ranker, Jailbreak, and First Year just did not feel as impactful to me. Which is a shame because they still have standout moments (Saten and Frenda especially was superb) and First Year felt like a return to form by connecting us with Mikoto's (and eventually Kuroko's) pasts and how that shaped the people they became by canon. But it just wasn't as strong as what came before to me, and I forgot a fair chunk of their plots as they felt not as memorable.

But it's still sad. Based on an old Ogino tweet from 2021, it is possible Fuyukawa Motoi may have been in burnout from writing the same story for more than a decade, so it may have been prepared since the start of the First Year arc to be the last arc, especially since they had wanted to do it for 12 years, so getting to do it may have been the final thing Fuyukawa wanted to do before leaving for good.

If I can be allowed some coping, it doesn't necessarily mean the end of Railgun's story. Nogi's Mental Out is still going strong and is, technically, a Railgun spinoff, it may be that Nogi becomes the Railgun side mangaka afterwards, even if what he writes isn't Railgun itself. Railgun also started with Kamachi wanting to make it Kuroko-centric, maybe there could be a Railgun spinoff focusing on Kuroko, who has more space to do stuff than Mikoto who becomes an Index regular following WW3. Kamachi still writes from time to time a Railgun novel. And, of course, the Railgun anime was announced to get a fourth season. It's not the end of the world, and there are things to look forward to to assuage the loss at least.