As some have mentioned, recurring back pain ever since YYH.
Author comment for Chapter 75 (February 2000): "When I bowl for the first time in months, my muscle pain + score crumbles in 3 games. Kind of sad."
He eventually had to transition to longer breaks in 2006, and one could definitely tell before that with stuff in Greed Island and early Chimera. Volume comment for Vol. 21 (2005):
And then a string of painful author comments in 2016:
He said he was able to avoid having surgery, and was trying to walk/stretch more to get in shape.
I could disprove this in a second, but since spoilers aren't allowed here... well, let me know if you wanna talk in the HxH threads.
Not really because the only thing Togashi is doing so far in this arc is introducing hundreds of characters and complicated powers + guards talking for pages, if this will have real impact in the arc he has yet to show it.
I mean, I agree that the arc is too bloated with the number of characters and amount of text, but the notion that all he's doing is having random guard #5-500 ramble about their powers is not only disingenuous, but false.
Like i said, he has yet to show that all these infinite dialogues between random guards and powers will have any real meaning or impact in the arc, you're trying to make it sounds too literal and also being too defensive, when someone says "the only thing he's doing is blah blah blah" he isn't saying it in a literal way but that the overall feeling is that nothing really happens during many of the chapters.
The villains in MHA were kinda unpopular before they had their big arc. They never broke into the top 10.
Should probably be more clear, then. It's okay to point out things one doesn't like about an arc/series, but that can easily lead to solely focusing on those things and acting like there aren't things "happening". In those last 10 chapters, three pretty big events happened, with the most recent chapter clearly leading to things about to escalate. Rereading with the official translations really helps. And speaking of translations, it definitely doesn't help that many people are 1) reading the verbose fan translations and 2) not really even reading the text, so of course they're going to find things boring and confusing since they literally don't know what's going on and how things are connected (not saying this is the case for you, but I know it is for many others).
I think the concept is simply too ambitious to really cover in story form. Especially now, with the added speed of entertainment, mangaka just don't have the space to do a story of such scale.
Shogakukan Manga Award
Since it started in 1997, no WSJ series/creator has won at all except (though I might have missed someone besides the WSJ special prize in 2012):
Glad both ended up winning one.
Eh. I know people have been very patient with the series but I'd rather Togashi do this at his pace even if he doesn't finish it. It really isnt worth ruining his health over.
Closest thing we have is Jigokuraku, but that's Jump Plus.
I think the endgame of Kimetsu no yaiba is already near that's why it gets ridiculous sales.
And Jigokuraku isn't an "arc", it's the entire damn series. And it's more just a very big island than a continent.