The way I see it, a story being canceled before its time on account of circumstances surrounding its production—in other words, a story that readers will never be able to enjoy all the way to its conclusion—is a tragic thing indeed. Even then, however, there’s a yet more tragic way for a story to conclude: for readers to stop following the story by their own initiative. Sometimes, readers will simply drift away from a story before it reaches its conclusion. I suspect that, more so than anything else—more so than godawful endings and premature cancellations—that is the saddest and most unfulfilling way for a story to possibly conclude.
It’s inevitable that not everyone who starts buying a series will read it all the way to the end, of course. No matter how popular a series gets, its first volume will always have higher sales than every volume that follows it, meaning that there will always be a certain number of people who read a single volume and drop the series on the spot. Literally every series will lose some number of readers, without exception.
I’m by no means innocent myself—I’ve stopped reading plenty of stories over the years. Sometimes I’ll read a single volume and decide a story’s not my thing, and sometimes I’ll get really into a series while its anime’s airing, only to kinda just lose interest as soon as the anime’s over. These are stories that I liked—stories that I was super hooked on—that for some reason I stopped reading before I knew it, usually without even having a clear reason like “it got really boring” or “I couldn’t stand that one character” to justify my estrangement.
When readers drift away from a story they used to like, they usually don’t have a clear reason along those lines. It sort of just happens. It’s not an obvious, instant, binary thing, like the flick of a switch—the line between love and hate is fuzzy and ambiguous, and it’s within that realm of ambiguity that people fall off stories as a matter of course. I’m convinced that that’s the most common way for stories to end: by quietly, naturally passing on.
Now then. This speech has dragged on for an awfully long time at this point, but what I’m really trying to say is that most stories don’t end up wrapping up nicely. Authors will get bored, give up, and half-ass a lame conclusion. Publishers will abandon stories and cut them off without warning. Readers will take their leave of stories on their own terms before they have the chance to end. All things considered, stories that come to a natural conclusion—where the relationship between story and reader can end cleanly—are far rarer than stories where that just doesn’t happen.
If, over the course of your entire life, you find even a single work of fiction that you fall in love with, that keeps running for as long as you want it to, and that concludes with a final chapter you have no complaints about at exactly the moment you thought it should go ahead and wrap itself up, I think you should count yourself lucky. Most stories aren’t so fortunate, and so end in a manner that is, at least to some extent, difficult to accept.
Thus, I protest. Such stories are precisely why I raise my objection—in fact, I would deny the idea of “all’s well that ends well” altogether.
I mean, like...who even cares how stories end, right? I’m not saying it’s a bad thing for a story to end in a clean, satisfying manner, of course. That’s great, when it happens! There’s nothing better than stories getting endings that satisfy everyone! The thing is, though, that stories are not defined by their endings. Even if a story’s conclusion ends up being super lame—even if it loses popularity and gets canceled—if its readers found themselves enjoying that story from moment to moment before it came to an end, then I believe it’s those moments that define it.
I believe that’s true even if it’s the reader who ends up walking away from the story in the end. Even if a series runs for so long that you lose interest and stop reading, even if you lose the time to keep up with reading as a hobby after getting into a new school or starting a new job, even if you lose your passion for a story after its anime ends, even if the author just stops putting out volumes post-anime and you lose interest before the final volume comes out, even if you never see a story through to its conclusion, or even if you simply grow up and the stories you love become the stories you loved... In all those cases, I believe the moments that you spent reading and enjoying a series can never be invalidated. In my eyes, the single split second in which a story touches your heart can last an eternity.
In truth, nothing is defined merely by its ending—not even humans. How we live is far more important than how we die. In the same manner, how a story develops is far more important than how it ends. The process leading up to that ending—the individual moments that readers enjoy—is more important than anything else.
From here on out, my story—our story—will reach an ending of its own. This long, drawn-out tale will come to a clear and definite conclusion. Whether that conclusion will be a genuinely spectacular finale that will satisfy everyone or a miserable, half-assed disaster that will make everyone want to demand their time and money back, I can’t say. That’s something that will vary wildly from person to person, of course...but nevertheless, there’s one thing I want to say: No matter how this ending turns out, and no matter how this final volume concludes, the tale we’ve spun up to this point was by no means a fabrication. We were by no means just fiction. We lived out each and every moment, each and every volume, to the best of our ability. All the feelings that blossomed within us as we experienced all the events thrown our way were, without exception, genuine. Even if all of it was an intricate plot devised by a third party, even if we were nothing more than characters in a story woven by someone else entirely, and even if our story was a work of fiction with no relation to any real people, places, or organizations... Even still, I’ll stand up and shout it out as loudly as I can: We are real.
Now then, I think this prologue’s gone on long enough. It’s high time for us to get started. Time for us to wrap together everything that’s come before as we wrap up our final volume.
Now—let us begin the end of the beginning. The ending that will allow all else to begin...begins now.