The Season That Never Comes
This winter anime season didn’t have much that grabbed my attention, but there was one unexpected treat, a new season of Blue Exorcist. The first season aired all the way back in 2010, the second season in 2017, and now, in 2024, we get a third.
If you’re still new to the world of anime, this kind of long break might seem really strange. Often western TV shows get a new season within a year or two of the first, or they won’t get another season at all. In the world of anime, having 5+ years between a season isn’t totally unheard off.
The honor of longest gap between seasons appears to go to an anime called Full Metal Panic!, clocking in at 13 years between seasons 2 and 3. I’m not familiar with this series, so my personal longest wait goes to the Devil is a Part-Timer. Sadly, I never got around to season 2, since after 9 years, I needed to watch the first season again to even have a chance at remembering the characters and setting.
I touched on this briefly in my anime 102 class, but many anime are produced to facilitate sales of the source manga. A 20 ish minute long episode of anime usually adapts 2 - 3 chapters of manga. Most seasons have 12 or 13 episodes, so anywhere from 24 - 39 chapters of manga can be adapted per season, give or take.
Unless an anime becomes wildly popular, it’s generally pretty uncommon for an anime series to completely adapt all of the source material. Sometimes this feels deliberate, since if you dangle an interesting story in front of viewers, but leave it unfinished, they might be more willing to read the rest of the story in manga form.
Other times, shows in production are canceled, production staff or interest may change, or even the manga series could be canceled. There are a myriad of reasons that things never resolve, so over time, I simply got used to it.
I try to enjoy stories as they are, and loosen my grip on the notion that everything needs to be nicely tied up in order for interesting stories to be told. I could probably get that satisfaction from reading the manga, but anime just seems to be the format I take to a little better. Also, every once in a while, you get a lovely surprise in the form of a second season.
I watched Blue Exorcist sometime before the second season had been announced, and I more or less thought it ended at a decent place. It was a solid show, but didn’t leave me with any huge lasting impressions, just a fun shonen romp. When the second season came out, I jumped right in, hoping the characters and world would come back to me. Instead, I was very confused.
Blue Exorcist had the classic problem of getting too far ahead of an ongoing manga, and so after episode 17, they had to make it up on the fly. As a viewer with no knowledge of the manga, I didn’t really notice anything weird. When season 2 came around, I was absolutely lost. Season 2 continued from episode 17, ignoring the anime original events that I had just assumed to be canon.
I’ll probably talk more in depth about “canon” in higher level anime classes, but it’s basically what events have transpired within that fictional universe. So, those episodes I had watched and enjoyed went out the window. We were going in a different direction now.
It worked out in the end, after an initial adjustment, I ended up enjoying season 2 a fair bit! Once again, I assumed that was where that story would end, still unfinished, but a good stopping place. And, yet again, I was proven wrong.
Since I didn’t have much else to watch this season, and I’ve already seen 2 seasons of this show, I might as well watch the 3rd. The only problem was, with this much space between seasons, I’d forgotten almost everything about the show. So I started over again.
Of course, because so much time had passed, I made the same mistake of watching the entire first season, then getting confused in the second season. Sometimes history is simply doomed to repeat itself I suppose.
As of writing this, I’m actually all caught up with the ongoing season, and I’m glad this show continues to get out of nowhere additional seasons. This 3rd season is easily my favorite, as it gives the characters a lot more depth than they showed in the past seasons.
It’s also pretty interesting to watch how the same characters and design are portrayed differently over the years. The characters haven’t undergone any drastic design changes, they still wear the same school uniforms, but you can see just how much the animation industry has developed.
I could see this trend of leaving stories unresolved being a big hurdle for people trying to break into anime. I’d probably recommend doing a little cursory research if you think these sorts of things would bother you. It can be hard to tell when an anime has broken off from its source material, or if it was canceled and leaves the story on a big cliffhanger that will likely never be resolved.
Comparing it to other media, like games, there are plenty of games I’ve never finished, but have no less love for as a result. I have a bad habit of getting almost to the end of very long games, sometimes even the final boss fight, then simply never seeing it through to the end.
Sometimes, the ending of a story isn’t what makes it interesting. Oftentimes it’s the journey, the struggle faced by characters as they grapple with conflict both internal, and external that endears me to the story. Anime that never gets fully resolved doesn’t mean I instantly like it less, it’s what they do with the time they do that matters far more.
We don’t need an ending to appreciate what we have. Though, with low expectations for another season or conclusion, it’s certainly a nice treat when we get more from a show we thought was lost to time. It gives us a chance to reflect and revisit who we were so many years ago when we first watched that season.
I was in high school when I watched the first season of Blue Exorcist. Now, in 2024, I’m working as an English teacher living in Japan, still watching the same show. It shows me all the ways I’ve grown, but also the ways I’m still the same. The best media can be like a mirror, and shows us ourselves in ways we didn’t consider. In a weird way, long gaps between anime seasons can actually tell us plenty of things about the kinds of people we were then, and the people we are now.
