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I originally posted this on reddit, but I thought I would post it here too. This is about you-know-who's death and why he couldn't have chosen whether or not to live. There seems to be confusion in the western fandom about his death, and why he didn't "go for help." This post does contain spoilers. If you want to read the full discussion on reddit, I will link it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/BananaFish/comments/k68mq4/about_spoilers_death_and_why_they_couldnt_choose/
idk if this will help any of you, and i know there are a bunch of interpretations to the ending of bf, but i found a reddit post that explains the japanese pov of the ending (which i will include at the end of the post). the writer basically says that ash didn't choose to die, taken from the context of the manga and the dialogue between ash and lao. yes, ash did say that lao missed his vital points, but in the manga, lao responds with "both of us cant be saved" or something along those lines. these two lines are inseparable bc it shows that ash couldn't have chosen his fate, that he couldn't have been saved and was going to die, along with lao. think about it, if ash also missed lao's vital points, why did lao also die? the author's intention was to make it seem like ash couldn't have chosen his fate. missing the vital points didnt mean that ash or lao had a chance to live, it just meant that they wouldn't die on the spot. ash wasnt given a choice whether or not to live or die, he was just given enough time to choose how he wanted to spend his last moments alive, and he chose to spend them reading eiji's letter in the library.
another important piece is in gol, they translated “長い長い時間“ to "long long hours" which is a misleading translation. sing is seeing this from ash's point of view - how it must've felt like a long time to ash, even though it was probably only a few minutes. the whole point of what sing was saying “What were you thinking? While blood kept flowing from your body slowly…for a long long time before death…you must have suffered, because the wound missed your vital points…And yet, you were smiling” was to point out that ash was still smiling despite having a deep stab wound, not about if ash chose to die or not.
perhaps the most important part is that ash would never do anything to hurt eiji. he must've known how badly it would hurt eiji if he chose to die, how much that would emotionally scar eiji. if ash could've lived, he would've done that.
also keep in mind this was originally set in the 80's, and is not as medically or logically "correct" in people's minds today as it was back then. people were much more tolerant of slips like this, and i think it may come down to "poor writing." after all, golzine managed to get up, mess with the system, and shoot foxx even after being shot in the chest twice.
in an interview w the author, she said that ash basically died in vain (“犬死にする”).taking that into context, it wouldn't really make sense if ash died for eiji. he died for no reason.
another good point the writer of this reddit post brought up was that if ash had died differently, perhaps collapsed in the street (like lao) and using the rest of his strength to read eiji's letter, maybe people wouldn't have misinterpreted the ending. but yoshida sacrificed logic to give ash the most beautiful end possible. in my mind, it's a good and beautiful ending, at least as beautiful as it can get, even though it is a bit of a plot hole.
oh and another thing (this is my opinion btw): the director of the anime said that she disliked the ending to the bf manga, but since she couldn't change it, she decided to leave the ending as open as possible, which also may have caused some fans to misinterpret the ending, since she didn't include all the dialogue between ash and lao. in the anime, we never get to hear lao say "both of us cant be saved" since the director wanted the viewer to interpret whether or not ash actually died.
edit: i forgot about this part but in gol, eiji says to sing something along the lines of "ash chose to live it out 100%, you and i know that better than anybody else" which also doesn't fit with the theory of ash choosing to die. honestly, i think many westerners came up with this theory bc of the misleading translations, the lines that weren't included in the anime, as well as the very obvious plot holes that yoshida wrote in order to give ash a beautiful ending/death. i think many people are struck by the ending not just bc ash died, but also bc of al he went through, all just to die not even from a major character like golzine, but from lao, who is a minor character. this is supported by the interview where yoshida says that ash "died like a dog/died in vain/died uselessly." but in the end, i still believe this is possibly the best ending ash could've gotten, as much as i wanted to see him alive. so thank you, yoshida, for this wonderful story with these beautiful characters; this story will always live in my heart.
edit 2 (lol): i think that this anime was made more for the original manga readers rather than just anime fans. the manga readers already knew all of the content that was supposed to happen, and knew the ending as well. it's no wonder why people who only watched the anime have these misconceptions about bf, with all the translation errors and cut out lines.
here's the link to the reddit post if you want to read it in full; the author of this post explained this in much more detail and brought up a bunch of other points, so i really recommend you read it :) https://www.reddit.com/r/BananaFish/comments/aij0vd/a_different_view_of_the_ending_long_post/
