Blather, rinse, repeat

You know, sadly, I never managed (read: afforded) to finish out the manga, and have only looked at the ending sitting in the bookstore. So maybe I'm not the one to comment. However, I would have liked it better than the direction the anime went, with that stupid god-guy.

The first is his inability to say no, and his sense of responsibility, and how that would eventually tangle up his happy ending; after all sooner or later something will come up that Kenshin feels he has to deal with, and off he goes, leaving Kaoru, and the others, behind. The second is a much darker and less personal tragedy, touched on only briefly in Reflections.

I guess that comes down to Kenshin being meta (the nation's man) or being Normal Hero. Here I think it comes down to how you interpret him: is he more of a hero working for humanity, or staying with his family? Me, I am partial to both ideas. So I really think they could have gone with meta-hero Kenshin ("There's still so much for me to do, I have to leave") and to even have him suffer to some extent. But not to suffer for the atonement that we'd already been told he'd achieved. That's just cheating.

That's why the jinchuu arc worked in a logical way for me. Kenshin had already defeated his own killer. But he still had a past, he could still have to get some payback. I can't comment on Enishi's henchmen since I'm not familiar with them, or with how compelling Enishi was, but for Kenshin, to me, that arc makes sense.

But as months turn to years, those enemies are not so much opportunists as victims of a nation that is more Shishio then Kenshin, and that Kenshin's wasting away was supposed to be a symbolic mirror of the wasting of his dream. I expected him to eventually return to Japan to die and leave the flame to the next generation.

I can see that, too. But I think that the manga (again, forgive me if I'm wrong on this) actually addressed that. Kenshin is wasting away, right? He loses his ability to fight because of his body type or something? Symbolically, he fades into, maybe not obscurity but to irrelevance in regards to the era. Returning to Japan, fading away, like I said, even suffering or whatever, sure, that works. It works on a symbolic level and prosaic for me. I just didn't feel the whole leprosy / amnesia thing was necessary. And Kenshin's reason for leaving Kaoru and Kenji was lame. By this time, he would have learned (as he did through Sanosuke and Yahiko) that the best way for him to change the future would be through raising a child to not make the same mistakes. Instead he buggers off, while Kenji goes to learn Hiten Mitsurugi. Seemed totally out of character for Kenshin.

I thought, for some of the first part of Reflections, that this had real potential to deal with what I always saw as the historical tragedy of Kenshin, that he overthrows the old order to create a new order that turns even more bloodthirsty and genocidal, that the warrior spirit he represents must die in order for the country to move on.

I absolutely agree with this. But the warrior spirit did die. You never see Hitokiri Battousai after the Kyoto arc.

Reflections just felt tacked on and redundant to me. Kenshin spent ten years wandering and atoning. He already found peace. If they wanted to animate his decline, physical and symbolic great, awesome. But to at least keep him in character and not address (and retcon) everything he'd already dealt with.

In short, yeah. :)