The Shrine

This is getting really pathetic. I never liked Naruto but Naruto at least has the minimal decency of making filler content meaningful. It does a good job of convincing you that you should at least care about these random guys who at least appear to be pretty cool, even if they have been fighting the same battle for the last 3 years or whenever this arc actually began. Compared to Bleach, One Piece, and even HXH now where I have no idea why I am even supposed to care who are currently involved in the story. It's really funny to talk about filler content since Naruto is filled with those, but Naruto at least makes an effort to convince you that you should really care about what's happening. Right now in the other 3 major manga of Shonen Jump, I can't even name an identifying trait of the characters that are involved in fighting let alone their names. I actually know most of the names of the characters getting involved in Naruto, and even if not I at least remember who has a cool nijitsu or who has a cool eye power. Most of the characters are at least uniquely identifiable too. Although people saw the plot twist coming about 1 and a half year ago (I'm told that was when the most recent arc started), I am genuinely interested in how it will resolve because it's at least interesting.

Last week's OP was like 'soandso's true identity revealed', and I don't even know who the guy is, or why we're even supposed to care he has a true identity. Maybe he has a 'D' in his middle initial, but I doubt that. Bleach is currently about a bunch of popular guys fighting a bunch of incomprehensibly weak guys. HXH is turning into some kind of mentally retarded version of Liar Game where Nao Kanzaki is actually smarter than Yokoya. Now OP and Bleach is just dragging on so I guess they can just keep on do that with minimal impact to the overall story, but HXH is presumably actually trying to tell a story, but this cannot end well. Right now Pariston needs to die immediately because he has to inexplicably lose assuming the point of this arc isn't that evil triumphs over all and the world is doomed. The longer this character sticks around the less believeable the story is. It is arguably less fathomable that Pariston could be defeated at all even compared to Meryem, since Meryem is only the perfection of evolution, and it's always known the only quality he lacks, treachery, could lead to his downfall. On the other hand Pariston is the perfection of treachery, which previously just defeated the equivalent of God in HXH. He, like Meryem, is one of the best villians in manga but just like Meryem's defeat seriously hurt HXH's legacy, when Pariston falls too people will look that as a complete failure of the story. It is barely plausible that evil can defeat perfection, even though Meryem is pretty muc like The Borg ("Death and loyalty are irrelevent"), but what is supposed to defeat evil? Good? Love? Friendship? None of that worked on Meryem, and now they're supposed to defeat the power of evil, which is the only thing that can beat Meryem? Is this supposed to be some kind of triangle inequality where perfection > good > evil > perfection?

I did notice Gambling Legend Zero started again, but nobody seems to be carrying that these days.