Ao no Hako manga ends:

Ao no Hako's manga ended on a fitting 250th chapter.  Hina not only won the high school national championship in rhythmic gymnastics, she's now a member of the Japanese national team.  She's following in her father's footsteps and well on her way to being an Olympian.  Taiki made it to nationals as a high school badminton player, but lost to Yusa there, so he rejected a girl who definitively is more accomplished than he was.  What an idiot.

In any case, everyone in the story lived happily ever after.  Except that, like in Kimi ni Todoke and Sakura Trick, Taiki and Chinatsu are in a long-distance relationship at the end.  Chinatsu is going to live in America or something for the next who knows how long, while Taiki stays in Japan.  This works well enough in fiction -- the power of their love transcends all difficulties -- but in the real world this never works.  Two people who live apart will find they have nothing to talk about, because they have nothing in common.  The people they're around are different, their circumstances are different, their activities are different, their time zones are different.  They can't even both be awake at the same time.  What would they have to talk about?  How can they empathize with one another?  How can they give their partner any useful advice, when they're completely unaware of the situation in a far off place full of people they don't know and have never met?  Furthermore, love is continuously fueled by physical intimacy, and a long distance relationship has no fuel.  Eventually both sides will want to be touched and find they can't get that from a phantom on a phone or an email.  Then what?  Obviously they start cheating on each other or dump their useless, nonexistent partner.  In fiction nobody has impure thoughts like these, but in the real world people have real needs.

Do a poll of men or women and ask them how important physical intimacy is to a relationship.  I guarantee you the answer for both sexes is 'vital.'  So that puts a fork in 'long-distance relationships' right there.

Chinatsu and Taiki are so far apart they can never visit each other.  They're permanently separated for years.  It's absurd.  It would never work.  Every romance story insists on this long distance ending -- Kimi ni Todoke and Sakura Trick are equally to blame -- but at least in those stories the long distance didn't cross entire oceans.  This is the worst ending of them all.

The problem is the same in all three manga.  All three manga are about high school romances.  In the real world high school romances are pointless, because everyone breaks up when they go to separate colleges or get jobs in separate cities.  But nobody wants the ending of a high school romance manga to be 'and then they broke up so that they could meet new nearby people in their college.'  But the authors also don't have the courage to buck modern sensibilities and say "and then the girl decided not to go to college and not to get a job, but to move wherever Taiki went and live with him as his young wife and the mother of his children."  That would be an actual high school romance gone right, with a bright future.  But I don't know if it's even legal for a manga-ka to write that these days.  Would a publisher even publish such a heretical ending?  Of course all girls must strive to reach their highest education level and highest possible income.  Love is great and all, but it doesn't trump cold hard cash.  Everybody knows that, right?

So we have a manga that caters to the emptiness in people's hearts, that craves romance, but when push comes to shove it can't say "romance is actually worth forgoing a job."  It can't say "romance is worth forgoing an education."  And it can't say, "their romance was actually weak so they broke up and pursued money instead."  So again and again, we get this fantasy compromise of long-distance relationships.  This is why all published works, with their constant oversight and censorship, are so hopelessly inferior to '100 Waifus.'  Only I'm allowed to say anything that bucks modern sensibilities, so I'm the only one saying anything at all.

Meanwhile, I finished Xenoblade X.  I played the game very thoroughly, completing almost every mission, getting all six spears to weaken the last boss with, surveying almost all of Mira, etc.  It took me over 170 hours.  Maybe 180 hours?  Anyway, too many hours.  The game takes way too long.  Sheesh.  I like the main cast and the beautiful setting.  The plot is okay.  It's a great game, I just wonder if they couldn't have sped things along a bit.  170 hours is a sizable portion of my entire life.  >.<.

Of course, I've played Heaven Burns Red far longer than that, but Heaven is divine so of course that's okay.

I still have a shelf full of unplayed video games I can now switch to, so finishing Xenoblade X means I'll now be more entertained than before, not less.  I can now start an all new exciting adventure and meet all new people, instead of flogging the same tired horse for endless additional hours.