[Spoilers ahead.]

Ginka & Gluna was a brilliant fantasy manga, cut short for poor sales and a lack of popularity, and yet it will always stick around in my heart.

Watanabe Shinpei, as his first time being serialized in WSJ, paints a delightful picture of a youthful girl training with a master wizard to live life to the fullest. And yet, Gluna does not feel like a traditional shonen protagonist, nor does she have any of the conventional plot beats or power-ups. She may be an orphan, and she has the peppiness and love for life similar to other leads like Monkey D Luffy and Son Goku's origins in Dragon Ball, and yet, she derives her power from such a dark, viscerally traumatic place that it feels impossible to compare her to any other character written for this kind of joyous adventure. She is at times a selfless hero, and yet she is fallible, innocent, childishly stubborn to the point where her magic is fueled by mental and emotional self-mutilation rather than the physical limitations of her body. She is not a hero because of her great will, or for training 100 times a day, or for loving her friends so so much. Gluna is a hero because she is willing to throw away an essential part of what makes us human- not her emotions, and certainly not her friends, but her memory.

And, this is a story marked by memory and how a great history impacts the present. Ginka's backstory seems to form the foundations of the world, and it would have been delightful to watch it slowly unravel as the audience questions whether he was such a "great" wizard after all. But we never had that chance. Between horrifically bad first volume sales and miserable placement in the all-knowing WSJ Table of Contents, Ginka & Gluna got 15 chapters more than everyone thought it would, and this says nothing about its quality. The art was always good, the character designs memorable, and the action scenes- especially when they involve Gluna and her fantastic combat outfit- were creative and horrific in equal measure, starting upbeat and silly and moving into more serious spaces as the plot progressed. Some may say that the first few chapters are "rushed" or cut out potential hooks in a training arc, but I think moving right into their journey was a great decision, and showed that this was always the plan.

At its core, Ginka to Gluna is one of the most creative and exciting fantasy series I have read in many years, imbued with joy and the soul of battle fantasy that is willing to be kind, dark, loving, and tragic. What a shame, then, that we can never see what was initially planned, what may have happened if given years to flourish.