If you know me at all, you know I tend to put off watching “goodbye” OVAs of shows I love.  You know, the ones that figure to be the last we’ll ever see of a series.  That this applied was never in doubt with Majimoji Rurumo: Kanketsu-hen, but given events today I felt like watching something that would warm my heart a little (and Majimoji Rurumo is as sure a bet as any to do that), and my usual dithering seemed silly and pointless.  We’re here, right now.  We should do what we enjoy and treasure it, because the truth of the matter is the past and the future don’t exist – only the present.  And it’s forever gone before we have the chance to appreciate it like we should.

To say that I was surprised when Kanketsu-hen was announced would be an understatement.  Hell, I was surprised when the TV series was announced in the first place, as the manga was not exactly a huge hit (though it did sell well enough to get two spinoffs).  But the reason behind that adaptation, without a doubt, was Watanabe Wataru, the mangaka whose Yowamushi Pedal was at the zenith of its popularity (which remains considerable) at the time.  That’s surely not enough to get these OVAs greenlit, however, so I can only assume that was an act of appreciation by a producer who loves the material (and yes, that does happen in anime sometimes even now).

Five years is a long time to be away from a story and come back to it, and I’d be lying if I said I remembered all the details from the TV anime.  But I never forgot how it made me feel, and I was instantly transported back to those feelings as soon as Kota and Rurumo and Chiro started talking.  Everything written by Watanabe-sensei has this is common – an almost impossible amount of heart.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s schoolboy cycle racing or magical girls and romance, it’s all – as I said way back in 2014 – an expression of Watanabe as a “one-man wrecking ball taking aim at cynicism”.

Given all that, I never had any serious doubt that Majimoji Rurumo was going to give us a happy ending.  And this is an ending, as Watanabe has finished the manga, and the whole point of this two-episode OVA is to give the anime closure.  It’s obviously done in abbreviated form, but that’s fine – the essence of the series is unmistakably here, and the ending loses none of its effectiveness as a result of the pacing.  But that’s not to say things didn’t get pretty dark there for a while (and at the end, too).

In fact, the revelation that the series gives us – that the source of all witches’ magic is the purified human souls of the people they’ve made contracts with on Earth – is profoundly disturbing.  That could easily be the premise for a follow-up (and probably more serious) manga if Watanabe ever chose to write it (which I don’t expect, to be clear).  In point of fact it’s only through sheer good fortune – meeting the Witch Queen and doing the right thing by her when he has the chance – that Kota escapes this fate himself.  And that meeting pays other dividends as well, as the Witch Queen is the one person who has the ability to pay back Kota in kind for the act he committed on her behalf.

Still, in the end all that doesn’t matter too much, because Rurumo and Kota are just that impossible not to love.  From the beginning this was one of the sweetest anime romances of the decade, and that remains so right up until Kanketsu-hen’s final moments. I’m sad to say goodbye to this wonderful and criminally underappreciated little gem, but I’m happy it ended on such a high – and just as happy that it had the chance to do so at all in anime form.  That it did is so seemingly unlikely as to seem like a miracle, but even in 2019 those can still happen in anime once in a while.