As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
Fridge Logic
- Shadow Ushio is a piece of the dying god Hiruko, but unlike the source of her powers she somehow has the ability to slowly regenerate hacking damage done to her shadow and even grow stronger over time. One extra chapter even implies that her storage capacity levels up after each fight, almost like a video game character.
- Ryuunosuke is revealed to have an upbeat and outgoing personality in stark contrast to the levelheaded and reserved Hizuru, but whenever he takes control of her body you can barely tell the difference aside from a slightly more polite speech pattern. It seems odd unless you remember that he says that Hizuru only let him out to do interviews and meetings for her, scenarios that would require him to mimic Hizuru's personality as closely as possible.
- At no point in the story does Shinpei or Shadow Ushio bother trying to remove the shadow brand Haine stamped onto his arm despite the massive tactical advantages they would've gained by doing so. But what else was bestowed on him by a very powerful shadow, sticks with him throughout every single loop, and can't be taken away from him by force, not even by Haine herself? The shadow eye that grants him his time loop ability. The two of them likely concluded that the brand had the same kind of existential permanence as the eye and nothing could get rid of it.
- Haine is a deity that is over 300 years old, but her default human form is nothing more than that of a little girl. But the following points strongly imply that Haine was actually an adult for several decades before reverting back into a child during the World War II fire bombing of the island:
- Nezu mentions that there were more rumors of shadows lurking around before WW2, but after the war they all seemed to vanish. This can be seen as Haine and her powers taking massive, irreversible damage.
- In Tokoyo, Haine begs Shide to cease the memory of the island's firebombing because it's a dreaded and painful memory that she does not want to relive. Not long afterwards Haine appears in a brief flashback as an adult holding hands with Masahito.
- Shadow Ushio herself de-aged into a child after taking too much damage from Shide in the final battle.
- Regular shadows usually die when they take enough damage, but the fact that they take on baby-like forms after they age and degenerate into strays ties into the de-aging trend nicely.
- Are the Ushio and Shinpei on the beach embracing each other at the end of the story the same two protagonists we've been following all along? Or are they a completely different iteration of Ushio and Shinpei who just happen to have memories of their counterparts from the alternate timeline? Perhaps that the heroes you've been following for 99% of the story either ceased to exist not long after the whale was erased or are trapped in the endless Stable Time Loop that formed when Shadow Ushio gave Shinpei Haine's eye.
