Well, claymore ended

And it was about damn time, too.

Sometimes, you fall in love with a series, grow to appreciate its rich setting, take an interest in its many complex characters and its plot, however simplistic, keeps you interested. And then you watch in helpless agony as the thing you once loved turned into a lovecraftian horror sprouting tentacles of bad writing, out of character moments, forced plot points, deus ex machinas, horribly illogical plot turns and setting revelations, and new arcs that make you wonder just how little respect the author has for his readership, storytelling, women and all around common sense.

Luckily, Claymore wasn't Naruto. Or Fairy Tail. Or Bleach. 

So what was Claymore? Claymore started out as a dark, gritty fantasy adventure that was pretty low on the fantasy and kept itself mostly reasonable within its own frame of supernatural ability. Its haunting artwork and grim themes and mood compensated for a fairly generic storyline and a rather dull main character, and it built itself up to be a really interesting fantasy story. And not unexpectedly, somewhere along the line, like so many stories before it, it fell over, broke its leg, and stood up and tried to walk again, hoping that if you just pretend hard enough, people won't notice the odd way your leg is jutting. 

Up till the point where the first part ends, Claymore was actually rather good. Simplistic and without an overly complex plot, but grim and captivating; you never knew who would live and who would die, and the villains were interesting- the morally grey tone especially appealed to me, as the people you work for are implied from early on to be as bad, or worse, than the monsters you hunt.

But then the timeskip came. Timeskips are funny that way- they can sort of reboot the spirit of a series, send your characters off on their merry way with new determination and a change of clothes, to tackle bigger, better challenges, and it saves we the readers the need to watch an eighties training montage. But the thing about timeskips is that they seem to so easily be a gateway into quality slippage. Something about the change in themes and how everything escalates seem to scale badly with the older concept. Claymore got more complicated, in ways both bad and good. It gave in depth insight to the organization, with several good twists, but it also included some ultimately pointless plot points, and quite a bit of filler, and some of the dumbest explanations for certain hyped up things- I still consider the explanation for the claymore scar an achievement in idiocy, and it's one that I wholly and utterly reject from every headcanon I have- and ultimately, the ball was dropped. Not in the quickest of fashions; slowly, as if getting successively more and more oiled up by some evil plot fairy, the ball slipped out of Yagi's grasp, and his writing- which had been consistently at least okay, if not always great- took a plunge. 

I think the turning point was the RafaLuci mess, where the two of them fused and awakened and nothing much really came of it. Lots of manga pages, not much accomplished except us realizing that Clare being off screen for a longer time was actually an improvement on the series. From there on, we had one bad idea follow another. The worst of them all, I think- scars aside- was Miria deciding to attack the organization on her own. It's a decision that requires paladin levels of stupid- seven years she has spent training with all her friends for this exact thing, all of them as comrades preparing to take it on together, and she decides to do it on her own on a whim. It's a decision completely divorced from every logical faculty- virtuous egomania aside, it makes no sense because she knows she would be overpowered, that attacking it on her own would be suicide. That it worked was an absurdly contrived, convenient lucky gambit- writing convenience at its finest. 
Of course, Yagi having the remarkable quality in a shonen writer of not being a complete hack has a way of taking a bad idea and making the best of it, and produced quite a few good scenes following it. It was unclear what point there was to the completely unforeshadowed, madly overpowered zombies that followed, but at least they gave us good characters.

And then there was the Clare and Raki thing. Have your two main characters separate to unite later? Not a bad idea in itself. Substitute character development between the two for everyone constantly talking about how great they would be together? Not so much. Raki ended up being pointless, as he always has been, an emotional rag who latched on to the first thing he saw- and the Who Wants To Live Forever aspect of things is completely ignored; that Raki will age and Clare won't.

And the ultimate resolution... Teresa showing up out of nowhere and fixing everything. Thanks to the above ability of not being a total hack, Yagi managed to make it look pretty cool- but that doesn't change it being an incredibly lazy Deus Ex Machina to counter an incredibly overpowered villain. It was fairly anticlimactic, too- Teresa was far too dominant, and our villain is done in without much fanfare.

The tragedy here is that it wouldn't have taken Shakespeare to write this to be much better. Give our hero some character, make us feel her struggle and sympathize with her (instead of making her impersonal and egotistical), make the plot points have an actual point, use some proper foreshadowing, and the villain- make her strong but not unbeatable, make the core of her power her skill, not Wolverine's healing turned up to eleven. Make the final battle a climax between hero and villain, give us some sense of proper accomplishment instead of throwing out a magical fix.

But sadly, none of this happened.

So what is claymore in the end? I dunno- it's a series I am greatly nostalgic toward, but even objectively speaking, it's okay. Despite a highly rocky part two, I'd still recommend it- if only because I know most people have lower standards than I. It's been an interesting journey, but bloody hell was it time it ended. There's the final part of Not Being A Total Hack- Yagi has the integrity to put a wounded animal down, where Kubo or Mashima would milk it for as much money as possible while running it in the ground far enough that it's reaching the planet core.

(I heard from somebody that there might be a spinoff with Irene- and I would be cautiously optimistic towards that. )