I keep getting so confused in Hungry Marie when Beelzebub look a likes show up (especially male best friend and the priest). Either the writer cant make different character designs for beans or this has to be intentional
Newsflash: almost literally every mangaka/anime studio has sameface.
Food Wars
I can't tell if this series is getting the axe or if just this arc has been given the "too unpopular punt to the next story arc" because we've skipped pretty quickly from a multi stage test to confronting the council of 10 and central in the finals without any extended training scenes.
Neither of those things are likely happening. Training arcs in a cooking manga are dumb. In fact, training arcs in general are exceptionally common and expected in shonen, but are almost always dumb wastes of time. Usually a shonen training arc involves the protaganist trying to achieve some specific power, e.g. Gohan is going to learn Super Saiyan, Naruto is going to learn Sage Mode or Fox Mode, or Ichigo is going to learn Bankai, or Negi is going to learn Magia Erebea, etc. etc.
ad nauseum. That doesn't make any sense in Shokugeki; the only people with "powers" are people who are born with them (which off the top of my head are Erina's Divine Tongue, Hayama's Perfect Aroma, and Edgelord's perfect heating sense.")
Practically every example of a shonen training arc involves Character learns Power X and then uses Power X but then pushes Power X in the fight beyond what he demonstrated in the training ("I'm gonna extend the Kaio-ken to TEN TIMES", "I'm going to learn to gather Natural Energy without the frogs and throw the Rasenshuriken!" "I'm going to outlast my limit on the Visored mask!" "I'm going to use Magia Erebea too much!"). That doesn't make much sense in a cooking manga where you have no idea what the themes even are until they show up to the cooking battle. The only point of mentioning the training arc is to provide opportunities for flashbacks and let you handwave away rapid increases in skill (which are meaningless anyways since all of the dishes look pretty equivalently good and are simply explained to be superior or inferior by whoever judges it).
It's not necessarily a matter of punting to a new arc for external reasons; this has already been a very long arc and by the time they end the Regiment it will almost assuredly be longer than the Autumn Classic was. From a narrative perspective, the biggest reason I have no expectation this arc is going to end the series regardless of outcome is because its been readily apparent the purpose of the arc is providing character development for
Erina (and her father), not for Soma. This becomes even more obvious in this chapter where Soma explicitly names Erina as their "captain" for the Regiment, and Erina is the person who has a specific character arc with Azami (and Joichirou's arc is pretty clearly tied to Azami's, and if Azami is defeated here, you probably need Joichirou around to do it since Azami's character arc directly relates to Joichirou).
