i love my waifu and 800 guns

sorry but this was inevitable

When your soon to be wife gets Gurren Lagann’d.

>girl bound to the essence of the big villain

>learns about the outside world & develops her own identity with the help of the protagonist

>helps protagonist get out of a suicidal depression and become badass again in return

>possessed by the villain

>has to die at the end because she can’t exist without the villain

>DISAPPEARS DURING A WEDDING CEREMONY THAT’S EVEN VERY VISUALLY SIMILAR

lol god damn Genndy

^^^

I cannot express how disappointed I am in this ending. Jack’s entire time and experience in the future, his impact on all the people he met, their own personal internal journeys and growth (Ashi), might as well all have been a dream, because none of it even occurred in the first place it turns out.

It is not better to have loved and then to lost, because he never even loved in the first place! In this case, my sneaking suspicion is that even Jack’s memory of everyone he met will disappear as well. Why would he retain memory of them when they never existed?

Everything has been erased, Everyone has been erased, This was Genndy Tartakovsky’s own “genocide route”, except there were never any other options.

I don’t accept this ending. Not that it matters to anyone but me, but my own personal ending to this gorgeous series is this: Jack and Ashi are close companions, but they never get together. That pain between them, of the destruction both wrought on each other at season’s start, remains too painful to ever forget, and is always there beneath the closeness, the camaraderie, the love. Anyway, they both find love later on, after they defeat Aku with the help of everyone they have helped throughout their journey.

Aku nearly destroys Ashi whilst she is in Aku’sDaughter mode, but she experiences her own internal journey inwards, like Jack did in the episode where he sojourned to the spirit world for “balance”, and comes out of it of her own accord, not because Jack says the words “I love you” to her. He still says those words, and those words are important, but as anybody who lives in the real world and not in a juvenile mentality (as I thought this show did not live in until its final episodes), love is not nearly enough to save someone. That person must save themselves.

They defeat Aku together, and there is no deus ex machina to transport them to the past; Aku was the only one with that power, and Jack and Ashi must accept that there is no way back home. EXCEPT, they are home now, amongst the friends they’ve made, the people they’ve changed for the better. Nature can heal; the world can mend from Aku’s harm, slowly but surely. And in this future they can live in peace, at each other’s side.

My point was more that Ashi’s development & role in the story was taken from Gurren Lagann but without the thematic coherence behind her death (i.e. a message about the unavoidable yet extremely important, even sacred nature of mortality). But your points are very good.

That was my biggest concern with any kind of possible ending: that they would handle the time travel the worst way possible and make it so none of what Jack did in the future would even matter in the slightest. An ending I personally theorized before S5 even started was the time travel creating two alternate universes; one where Jack takes out Aku in his time and thus can reunite with his family, and one where all the people Jack saved somehow drive out Aku on their own. But with Ashi’s introduction a “Jack never goes back” ending would’ve made more sense.

This was always a problem with the show and I even noticed it as a kid. If going back in time would erase everything in the post-apocalyptic future, why did he even BOTHER saving so many people? I thought that, since S5 was taking a more serious approach, they would address this - and I was SURE they would when they brought everyone back and handled it all in such a meaningful, feel-good way that highlighted how Jack made the post-apocalyptic world a million times more hopeful than it was before. But no, it turns out Jack really does go back in time, kill Aku and alter the future completely, and all his friends just cease existing. This is bullshit because they worked so hard to give a lot of soul and beauty to the post-apocalyptic world. To show the natural life that can form and keep evolving, albeit in an alien way, even in such a dreary setting.

The more I think about this, the more I hate the ending.

a follower on Twitter pointed out that in fighting Aku, it’s likely most of Jack’s allies died

that… does not make it any better. so they gave their lives so that the entire world they lived in would be completely erased? throwing away THE EXISTENCE OF YOUR ENTIRE UNIVERSE, all for the sake of making one single guy happy, because he saved you 50 years ago? that’s really fucked up and depressing in a way that I’m not sure Genndy was aware.

5, every day

This image could kill Neil deGrasse Tyson

I hope so

thanks for this @biromanticmabel

bonus 

The best insult you can call someone is reading all these names at once