I finished my read-through of 20th Century Boys (and 21st Century Boys) yesterday and sat pondering about what I'd just read for a good while. The story itself was very compelling, and the characters kept me coming back to the comic any time I had a spare moment; it's a fantastic piece of manga storytelling and character design... until the third act where everything falls apart. Full-on spoilers ahead.
-The storyline was consistently excellent for the first good chunk of the series: Kenji and his friends making their secret fort, a cult rising in their adult lives as a mysterious person began executing their childhood "book of prophecies" with extreme accuracy. Kenji reunites what portion of his friend group he can and they try to take down "Friend" who plans to destroy the world.
They don't quite manage to stop things, the world is hit with a mysterious virus, and a giant robot attacks Tokyo on the turn of the 21st century. It's implied later that Friend and his party are seen as heros for providing a vaccine for the virus (which they created) and stopping the robot.
15 years later we primarily follow Kana, Kenji's niece and Friend's daughter as she gets herself embroiled in plots against "Friend". Things escalate and characters from the first act return, once again transformed and changed by the events over the last 15 years. Our group of once-store=clerks=and=office=workers (and Ocho) are now freedom fighters and political prisoners. As Friend begins to execute a new set of childhood prophecies not written by the original gang, they scramble to once again take him down.
Things start deteriorating once the Friend reveal happens (a very exciting plot point!). The story delves into Friend's interesting past that (more or less) wraps things up. We get some resolutions to old storylines from Kenji's childhood and everything kind of makes sense. We see a picture of Friend being obsessed with getting recognition, with being a petty and jealous individual that took advantage of others and became fixated on Kenji. There were some holes, but OK!
At this point the story had played the "Ah, but there was another friend we forgot about" a handful of times, but I think it was fair play. You forget the stuff that happened as a kid, that's a core recurring theme of the book. Forgetting the people and actions you took as a kid and the impact those actions may have had on others is central; this is seen in other characters such as Yambo and Mabo who forget how badly they bullied Kenji's group as children.
When Friend "comes back to life" and becomes "president of the world" and we see another 3 year jump, the storyline really becomes unhinged. The new Friend has no coherent mystery behind him, and ends up being yet another friend we all forgot existed who never even came up and dressed identically and wore the same mask as another character as children. Kenji comes back from 15 years of missing (assumed dead), which is brushed off as memory loss. Kana almost becomes a suicide bomber, and the whole world is apparently in some weird Friend worship state as he plans to kill everyone with yet another virus.
The new Friend hates Kenji for stealing a $1 badge from a candy store that he got blamed for and wants to end the world, he's had plastic surgery to look exactly like the old Friend, and then all of Japan unites behind Kenji singing a song and they all band together and defeat Friend again.
The story ends super abruptly, but gets continued in 21st Century Boys which has Kenji go into a VR game where Friend has simulated their childhood in order to look for clues about a world-ending weapon. The story leans hard into Kana's psychic abilities (which were only very loosely relied on in the past) for full-on deus ex machina several times as she communicates telepathically with VR childhood Kenji somehow and everything is saved.
Honestly it's a hot mess and kind of shits on all the excellent character building from the first 2/3 of the story. It didn't have any reason to go so far off the deep end, and felt like the author potentially didn't know where to take it. At the same time the whole thing feels intentional, so I don't even know whether this was the intended ending from the get-go or if there was some shift in planning at some point in the original plot.
Whatever happened, I can still honestly say I loved many of the characters in the story, and the way the author managed to portray and grow his characters from children to freedom fighters, still drawn together by a sense of friendship and justice, was fantastically done. Despite it's flaws this was a wonderful read.
Except Kenji and Friend should have both stayed dead. There would have been a better story in that -- Friend's party keeps the evil going out of faith a greed and must be stopped, Kanna searches for her mom, the friends find out why Friend was so dead-set on his strange plan and how he went off the rails when he actually killed Kenji who he saw as his rival. Lessons would be learned, the gang could come together and mourn over both Kenji and Friend (the one they shared class with, not the one he became), they get the VR versions of themselves to be friends with Friend as kids, The End. I would have loved to see that story, but alas.