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I feel that I have to say this now rather than later. If you haven’t been following my Team LUNA story, don’t worry: Aside from one part, you don’t need to for you to get the point.

I said long ago that me still continuing the story of The Moon Over Beacon and Blood Moon Rising was mere hardheadedness and that I was going to finish it because I had dug my own hole and I refused to jump out of it. That was two years ago, and now I’ve finally finished it.

Was it entirely as what I would have wanted? No it isn’t.

Am I satisfied with the way it ended? No, I wasn’t.

Was it exactly as I had planned out when I began the story? Definitely not, because 17-year-old me didn’t know where he wanted the story to end before he started it. I only figured out the finale in the middle of this December.

Am I glad it’s over? Yes, I am.

The reason for this is because I have run out of love for RWBY as a whole. Ironically enough, when I loved it before, when it still had potential, I based my whole presence on this website around it and many pieces of content I make is connected to RWBY in some way, shape, or form. That was in the 2013-2015 years. Around the time Volume 4 came along, the magic slowly died in my eyes. The passion was missing, the story fell flat, and the hype died. Eventually, I began drawing less and less fanart of RWBY proper, but I still worked on LUNA because I’m an imbecile who wanted to finish what I had started.

There were many more things I wanted to add in LUNA’s story. Most significantly, LUNA travelling to Vacuo to search for Ignia’s mother, or somehow implementing more unique Grimm into the story. I decided against it. It sounds good on paper but not in practice.

There were many more things I wanted to explore as well: getting into Team VSVS’ story, or fleshing out Guld, Sirena, and Viridia a little more, or Team MARS’ past, or maybe continued ascension through the ranks of the Black Fang. There were also some things that I kind of started but never fleshed out, like the plotline that Lucian was aware of the Black Fang because her sister had means of communication with them in her room, and that’s how Maruna contacted them again and spread their influence. Some parts of this remain, in the form of the chapter “Twilight Trigger”, and I’m relieved no one called out this glaring question.

There was once a time in 2016 where I was thinking of incorporating some macguffins from the World of Remnant – The Crystal King story I wrote, but I threw that out. The one remaining vestige of that is Maruna’s mood cloak, that just changes color based on pulse rate and blood temperature.

Maruna was always intended to die as a sacrifice to save her son and break the cycle of vengeance that was started in her past with Ranslate and the Bianc dictatorship. In the same way, Krysten was always meant to eventually lose her leg and then face a life without running onward ahead of everyone in battle. Krysten and Lucian both lost something close to them in the course of the story, that’s both of their minor themes. Meanwhile, Natalia and Ignia had learned how to break their ties with their past and be their own selves rather than what the people in their lives (in the end, the same person, basically) wanted to turn them into. I wish I could have fleshed out Natalia’s a little more.

The final three chapters of LUNA Volume 5 was really a clusterfuck, because I had to rewrite massive chunks of them. There was a point where Caraway stabbed herself with Fire Dust like Hazel and fought Lucian, who goes into full “Aesir Valkyriea”, a mode where they can form weapons out of pure Dust energy and they act like lightsabers that leave elemental effects, and that fight would end up being the thing that destroys the facility but he spares her and Azzurin. In that timeline, Azzurin would have been the one to shoot Maruna, which kicks it all off, but I felt that it would be too much jumping the shark. Like, how would Lucian have learned that ability if he was under surveillance? If he obtains that, that makes his resolution to never use them again a bit weak if he knows he can learn to control it. So I instead made him go out of control to put the fear of his abilities in him and make him never use them again. Even where they go in the final chapter was a lot to think about. I was considering having them all travel back to Ranslate, or even go down to Menagerie. This volume of RWBY gave me the option of Argus. There was even one iteration of the finale where Lucian ended up dying because he stays in a burning Aesir facility building to carry people out, Bull Allen style.

There are some things I wish I could have done better, but there’s no point in going back and rebuilding everything from the ground up. If I go back and try to fix a fanfiction when I’ve lost all love and respect for its source material, I might as well just export the entire story into an entirely different universe with different rules.

The reason I picked this ending in particular, the Inn for Huntsmen and Huntresses ending, is because of my favorite scene from what I deem is the best Volume of RWBY, Volume 2. It’s when Oobleck says to Ruby that “As a Huntsman, it is my job to protect the people, and although I am capable of doing it with traditional weaponry, I believe I can make a much larger impact if I do it with my mind. As a teacher, I'm able to take knowledge, the most powerful weapon of them all, and place it in the hands of every student that passes through my classroom.”

So this is where LUNA is going to end. In its fifth volume, the same volume in RWBY that began my loss of love for it. As the characters I’ve focused on the most for the past two and a half years, they walk away, like I do. They, like me, are unable to stick through to the end. They turn around and leave it all behind, in search of something better.

This is absolutely not the ending I wanted, honestly. A rushed finale, a timeskip and a cheesy cop-out happy ending absolutely do not feel natural to me, because it opens up a whole entire can of worms regarding identification and registration. But this stupid cop-out the best I could possibly do because I refuse to make any more content for RWBY, including my OCs. It wasn’t worth it. I’m incredibly disappointed in what RWBY, something I once loved, has become, and I’m almost certain that if I didn’t end LUNA at this point, I would grow to start hating it too. If I could turn back time, I’d tell myself to stop, not get involved, tell myself how it’s all going to turn out, to not continue to be invested in any part of RWBY that comes out after February 1, 2015. Take my stories and put them in their own world, because the exposure it would get just for the sake of being an offshoot of RWBY would never be worth it in the end.

So, the bottom line is: I’m done and over with RWBY, and by extension, that includes my OCs. If people want RWBY content from me, you are literally going to have to PAY me to draw RWBY related content. I don’t want to make art for it anymore.

I’m sorry, Monty. I’m sorry I couldn’t see your vision through to the end.