The cover of this volume is an emotional attack

[i_wish_to_remain_nameless]

I got my hands on a copy of Noragami volume 25 today and read it and it was a great decision. I am quite sad that most western anime fans don't read manga so I can't talk about anything after season 2 because these last couple of arcs been really great.
I still hate the Crafter with a burning passion because he's an awful father and keeps getting loads of people killed and shinki excommunicated and/or turned into Ayakashi. However I do think that his backstory is pretty compelling and fleshes out his motivations in a satisfying manner which I like.
The Stray going back to the crafter despite knowing that he's just using her is a real oof moment. She's a very sad character in a lot of ways. Kind of reminds me of Bonesaw a little bit though that might just be because I've been reading Riley Alone lately.
Yukine -or should I call him Haru?- is really going through it right now. I'm concerned for him. It's not that I'm worried the mangakas will kill him off or anything but I've gotten emotionally wrapped up in the work enough to be worried about it despite that. His whole family situation was so messed up but in a depressingly realistic seeming way. At least he finally came back to Yato? I also think it's interesting how it's implied that Shinki are shielded to some degree from the knowledge that they are dead people who died and the full weight of that.
A lot of stuff is going on in this arc and I'm looking forward to seeing where things go from here.
Also I think it was very funny to go from the serious emotional moment at the end of the volume to the omakes. The mood whiplash isn't as severe as it was for the later Girl from the Other Side volumes but it was still there.

Comments

[scytale]

I am quite sad that most western anime fans don't read manga so I can't talk about anything after season 2 because these last couple of arcs been really great.

I'm not really active in this fandom any more, but there's actually a thriving manga scene on Twitter and Tumblr (though it does skew full of younger fans, if that's a concern)! If you post something meta-seeming and tag #noragami on Tumblr, you'll probably get bites. (There is also at least one fairly active Discord out there!)

[i_wish_to_remain_nameless]

That's good to hear. I guess my only concern with that is that I've only been reading the volumes as they come out and would prefer to avoid spoilers. I think that the Noragami manga has a really good official translation and for this series I prefer reading a bunch of new chapters all at once to one every month.
That said I'll keep Tumblr in mind as an option for a place to share any interesting Noragami thoughts I end up having and maybe check it out when I'm no longer concerned about spoilers for whatever reason.

[scytale]

Oh, yeah, that makes sense! I think a lot of places are very free about spoilers (the rule for the one I'm in is to only spoiler out the most recent chapter's...) and most people keep up with the scans.

(The official translation is very good at the translation notes are fascinating.)

[i_wish_to_remain_nameless]

I've learned a lot from the Noragami translation notes. I'm really glad Noragami is being translated by a publisher who includes such good translation notes because there's a lot of stuff that would make way less sense without them, like the shinki names for example.
I wish more English manga publishers had translation notes as thorough as Kodansha's.