THE
FUCKING
END
I literally cannot—my brain can't quite fathom the fact that I'm done. Six hundred and twenty four chapters, over 460000 words, one month shy of five years.
Almost five years ago, I sat down, found the official Yu-Gi-Oh DM Shipping List, saw a few other people making the attempt at writing a oneshot for every single one on the list, and with only a few Yu-Gi-Oh oneshots under my belt at the time, having only seen DM and no other spinoffs yet, I decided hey, what's the worst that could happen?
Within a handful of chapters, I was one of the only people who had started the challenge around the same time as me to be still working on it. Stubbornness outweighed common sense—I was determined to be the first person to ever finish this challenge (to my knowledge, and outside of the people who did one-sentence per ship challenges).
Over the course of almost five years, I got into the other Yu-Gi-Oh series slowly, one by one, and I started to fall away from DM. Slogging through this project became more like pulling teeth, at least until I hit another burst of inspiration about a character dynamic I had never before thought of, and got the ball rolling again.
From this project, I met a lot of people. I'm not in contact with some of them anymore, and some of them, I'm more distant from than I was before. But because of this project, looking for inspiration for fics, I started to get into Tumblr. From Tumblr, I got enmired in the fandom, all of it, for all of the Yu-Gi-Oh series. From Tumblr, I met most, if not all of my friends. From my friends, I decided to go to my first ever anime con for all three days, and from there, I met even more friends.
I think you could honestly pinpoint this project as one of the reasons that I'm in a place that I am now. It may have become more trial than fun towards the end, but I got things out of it that I wouldn't trade for the world.
I got my friends, I got my space on Tumblr, I got better and better at writing. For real, you can see a marked difference between my style in the first chapters to the last, and I can't be more grateful to this project for making me write as much as I did and giving me as much practice and work as it did.
(of course, on the downside, I've come out of the project with a burning dislike for most side characters in DM, haha...so tired of writing about Haga and Ryota, and I probably won't be coming back to many side DM characters for a very, very long time :'D )
In the end, this project was every bit worth it. I won't miss working on it, but I'm glad that I finished. I feel actually pretty amazing for have coming this far, and I couldn't have done it without all of you.
So before I sign off on this project for good, let me tell y'all this: to every single one of you who left a comment, a review, sent a personal message, talked to me on Tumblr about this project or my headcanons or anything...thank you. You're a huge reason why I never gave up, and why I kept writing on a project of such ridiculous magnitude.
Thank you. I appreciate every single one of you, and I hope to still hear from some of you as I move on to other projects.
With this project under my belt, save for Gods of Many Faces and other ongoing projects here, I will be moving almost entirely to ArchiveOfOurOwn, and I hope that I'll see some of you there. But if not, one last thank you is in order: thank you for sticking with me, and with this project. I cannot thank you enough or express enough how important that was to me and to this project's success.
THANK YOU EVERYONE! And until next time ~ game on!
