You know the phenomenon of endings? A beginning must end. There is nothing you can do about that. Nothing can go on forever. It's a daunting, and frankly scary fact of the universe, but in your content, and life in general, endings can be used to great effect.

Ending something can be messy, especially in life. But knowing when to end something is incredibly important. If you're writing a book series that just keeps going, eventually you will mess up enough times to lose all your fans. If you're making a TV show that never ends, you'll run out of creative ideas to keep it going, and people will start to hate it. You can't avoid it. Discretion is the better part of wisdom, and being wise about your endeavors in life is incredibly important.

The inverse property of this is also important: Endings make people want more. This is less true in real-life applications, but in written content, it's incredibly important. I'm gonna take a quick little tangent here; I have an extreme love-hate relationship with endings. I love watching TV, and the finales are always hard to watch. I can name shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender and Psych, which both tie up their franchises perfectly, but both still hurt to finish.

But this is where this gets interesting. When Avatar ended in 2008, it left fans in a large lurch. But, through comic book releases, re-releases with bonus content, and a spin-off sequel series, it survived handily until 2014, at the end of The Legend of Korra. But, they still release comic books for it, exploring new storylines and what-have-you. Even though the show ended, the world lived on. In fact, one could argue that because the show ended, the world lived on.

The idea that endings can fuel additional fan fervor is nothing new. But at the same time, if you aren't careful with them, you can completely undermine their emotional impact by resurrecting it too soon, or too much. The ending to Harry Potter was tremendous. You saw the lives of the main characters in the future, and it tells you exactly what happens to them, where they end up, who they end up with, and it ends up being really emotionally satisfying. Then, J.K Rowling had to resurrect the thing in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Now, I haven't read it myself, so this is pure speculation that I've heard about it, but it sounds like it sucks (the book at least. I'm sure the actual play has a significant amount of whimsy attached to it). It sounds like it drug up a horse that should've stayed in the ground.

If you were to take anything out of this blog, take this: Because something is popular, does not mean it needs to keep going. There is the fact you will lose profits from it (in any form). There is the fact that people might hate you for awhile because of it. But the most important fact is, is that it cements fans. If you made something amazing, and gave it an solid, but open, ending, it opens the fan's imaginations. That is how you get a real following.

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So, this brings me to the end. My end. I know I've left for various periods of time before, but this time it's for real. There is nothing left for me here anymore. I've seen countless friends come and go. I've made amazing ones that I stayed in contact with, and I've made ones that fell to the wayside for whatever reason. I still feel bad about them. I feel like I failed in some regard.

Since I stopped posting content consistently (around 4-5 months ago), I felt as though I was losing touch with the site as a whole. For awhile, the only thing keeping me interested in the site beyond nostalgia was my job as a forum mod. Even then, though, I saw that I didn't have the same interest level in it, and when you combine that with a schedule that just kept filling itself up, I chose to let go one of the last ties to the site. I left for a couple weeks, but in the end I came back. I always came back.

I've felt forgotten by the site users for quite awhile now. To paraphrase the Ben Folds song Fred Jones Pt. 2; "I was forgotten, but not yet gone". I feel like I was probably stuck in time for awhile, and by the time I saw what was happening around me, it was too late to catch up. So that brings me to now. The site has moved on, and there's nothing left for me anymore.