Make the Exorcist Fall in Love has started its final arc. The news came on the wraparound jacket band of volume 16, which Shueisha shipped on Wednesday.
That is how a lot of manga endings get announced in Japan. No press release, no countdown on the publisher’s website, just a strip of paper around a new volume telling buyers the end is in sight. It means the authors and the editorial team have settled on a shape for the last stretch, not that the series is about to stop next week.
Who makes it
The manga is written by Aruma Arima with art by Masuku Fukayama. The pair launched it on Shueisha’s Shonen Jump+ app and website in 2021, which makes a final arc at volume 16 a respectable run for a digital-first Jump title. Shonen Jump+ series tend to live or die quickly, and reaching volume 16 is a good result for any of them.
Shueisha’s MANGA Plus service publishes the manga in English, so readers outside Japan can follow the ending as it goes rather than waiting for collected volumes.
What it is about
The premise sounds like standard battle manga until you get to the last clause. A boy was chosen by God to become the world’s strongest exorcist and to fight deadly demons. He carries the fate of humanity on his shoulders. What he actually wants to do is bake sweets in peace.
Then a girl walks into his life, and the story turns into something about love and hope growing in the middle of a holy war. Shueisha’s own description frames it that way, and it is a fair summary of what makes the series unusual: the fights are brutal, the tone is often gentle, and the central character would rather be in a kitchen.
That tension is the engine. A protagonist who has been handed a job he did not ask for, and who keeps finding small human things worth protecting anyway, gives the series somewhere to go beyond the next demon. It also means the final arc has an obvious question to answer: what does he choose when the fighting stops being optional?
Why the volume 16 announcement is the interesting part
Sixteen volumes is a specific number. It is long enough that the cast has filled out and the world has rules the reader knows by heart, and short enough that the ending can be built rather than improvised. A lot of Jump+ series that reach this length do it by adding complications. The ones that stick around in people’s memory do it by narrowing.
There is also a practical side for English readers. MANGA Plus runs the chapters close to the Japanese release, so the final arc will play out in translation week by week. Anyone who has been putting the series off now has a clear end point to read toward, which is usually the best time to start.
What we do not know yet
The jacket band announced the start of the final arc and nothing more. No chapter count, no end date, no confirmation of how many volumes are left. Those details tend to surface in the following weeks, either in the magazine’s next issue or on the series’ official accounts, and they can shift if the schedule changes.
Worth saying plainly: a final arc can run for a year or more. Nothing about this announcement suggests the manga is ending this month.
Where it sits
Shonen Jump+ has been the most interesting part of Shueisha’s lineup for a while, mostly because it lets creators work at a different pace and with a different tone than the print magazine allows. Make the Exorcist Fall in Love fits that pattern. It is a battle series that spends a lot of its page count on quiet character work, and it has been rewarded with a steady readership rather than a viral spike.
The final arc puts it in a small group of long-running Jump+ titles that will be judged on how they land, not on how they started. That is a harder test. Plenty of series with great openings have fumbled their last twenty chapters, and the ones that do not are the ones people keep recommending years later.
It is also worth comparing with the wider wave of endings Shueisha has announced this autumn. Seraph of the End: Vampire Reign wraps on December 4, and Kemono Jihen is closing with volume 26. A final arc is the slowest version of that process, and often the one that produces the better last act. If you are coming to the series cold, our coverage of the Nue’s Exorcist anime is a useful reminder that exorcist manga are having a moment across the board.
For now the only confirmed fact is the one printed on the band. Volume 16 is out, the final arc has begun, and the ending is being written.
Source: Anime News Network
Featured image: Volume 16 of Make the Exorcist Fall in Love, via Anime News Network.
