And there you have it. I was hoping that ending this story would be more triumphant for me, but instead it felt like a very violent catharsis not too dissimilar to finishing a brutal school project. I legitimately cried when I finished because I had to deal with so much bullshit just so I could finish a story that I had mixed feelings about. I know that at some points the writing fell off because I was just doing the best I could with my mental state with the story, sorry, but that was the only way it was getting finished.
When I first imagined writing this, way back when I was still having a lot of fun with the story, I imagined the final Author's note being very heartfelt and talking about the ups and downs of the story and all that. But really, it would feel disingenuous to speak that nonsense now as the communities I've posted to have really destroyed any desire to write fanfiction.
And that is the truth. I know there's gonna be people telling me that I shouldn't let the vocal minority discourage me, but as it is, I cannot stomach the thought of writing any fanfiction any longer, even for the stories that I really enjoyed. The Drift, My Legacy, and Class 1-C: Enigma are all likely to go abandoned. That isn't to say that I'm done writing however. I'm moving on to write my own original novel, the working title of which is Synthesize, which I also spoke about in the Q&A. I've learned a lot from my experience writing Shadow Monarch, but I've also seen just how unabashedly toxic the communities can get and letting an audience read along as you write is a double-edged sword. As I wrote, I got lots of good feedback, which encouraged me to write, but as the fic went on and got more and more attention, it also attracted much more negative attention, discouraging me to write.
I do appreciate all the people who have stuck with the story and either gave good critiques or just nice comments, which is why I even finished this story at all. After seeing the blatant awfulness of these websites, people calling me trash, or pathetic, or even criminal (Yeah that's a funny one), I legitimately considered on multiple occasions simply deleting all my accounts and removing the stories on them forever. Because no story is worth any of this. No fanfiction that I write for free, and for fun, should ever become something that weighs so heavily on my mind. Even whilst I was on hiatus finishing the story there was a bunch of bullshit still being commented. And when the toxicity starts reaching out to even Discord servers like Epsi's Hoard, you know that fanfiction communities have really devolved. All you have to do is go to the reviews of this story on Fanfiction and look and how many times this story was called a copy to understand how annoying it was.
Shadow Monarch and my accounts will remain up indefinitely, but my love of fanfiction has truly been tarnished, so this is goodbye. I mentioned at one point that I may write extra chapters to fill in some of the blanks in the timeline, but I can't. I'm done, this story is done.
Thank you for reading and I hope you've enjoyed.