Orphaned Series

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I may come back to write a funny caption for this, but Candle Jack says that he'll kidna

When the author of a series abandons the storyline entirely, either from lack of interest, time, money, inspiration, or pulse, the series is said to be orphaned.

This is a distressingly common problem with Web Comics, as many are written part-time by authors who have significantly underestimated the amount of time and effort of scripting and drawing three strips a week; a series may begin to suffer more and more frequent (or longer) schedule slips, until the author either takes an extended hiatus which then becomes permanent, or else simply stops updating the series without warning to the readers. Free comic hosting sites such as Comic Genesis and Drunk Duck are littered with the wreckage of hundreds of such series, some of which have only a single introductory strip to indicate that they ever were even conceived.

On rare occasions, a seemingly Orphaned Series may be resurrected, either by the original artist or by another taking it over. Fans may wait for years in vain for this to happen, but it almost never does.

An even worse case is when the webcomic literally vanishes from the Internet, because the account it was hosted on was deleted due to the bill not being paid in a long time.

The more extreme Schedule Slips blur the line. See also Dead Fic. Compare Vaporware, which is something the creator claims not to have given up on—but almost all the fans have.

Here's an article in The Other Wiki about it.

Examples of Orphaned Series are listed on these subpages:

• Anime and Manga
• Comic Books
• Fan Works
• Film
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Music
• Tabletop Games
• Video Games
• Web Comics
• Web Original
• Western Animation

Examples of Orphaned Series include:

Fan Works

• Very common: depressingly common among The Other Ten Percent.
  • See Dead Fic for more examples.
  • Given that dead fics are often of the other ten percent, and that the ten percent often Needs More Love, it can be incredibly depressing or frustrating to an author to see that the ninety percent of crap gets more attention than their decently written fic ever will.
• The Zelda fic Feel Good Hit of the Summer has died...after posting a very well-done Mood Whiplash Nightmare Fuel scene revealing some serious Break the Cutie in a flashback. (In fairness, it's a sequel to a decent-length complete fic, but still.)
• The The Legend of Dragoon fic Rebirth of a Legend was four chapters from the end according to the author. He never came back to finish it.
• The Avatar: The Last Airbender Azulaang fic "Lanterns" has also gone over two and a half years without an update.
• The New Students. An incredibly good crossover between Yu-Gi-Oh! and Harry Potter. No, really.
• Final Fighting Fantasy, in the most frustrating way. It's been 4 years since the last installment came out, and the prognosis for the final installment doesn't look good.
• Harry Potter and the Breeding Darkness might have run solely on Plot Bunny fuel, but it is very well-written, possibly even brilliant (although as always, Your Mileage May Vary). Unfortunately, the fic seems to have been discontinued due to lack of interest and time to continue writing for it, and has now been put it up for adoption.
• With Strings Attached was this for a long time. The author, who started it in 1980 and began posting it online in 1997, gave it up in 2002 after her personal life imploded (mother had Alzheimer's, laid off from her job, etc.). The two-thirds of the book she'd finished remained on her website to drive readers nuts. She never thought she would finish it, but in early 2009 she was hit by literary lightning, wrote 300 pages in 3 weeks, and finished the thing. (The final product in book form is over 650 pages long.) She is now working on the long-promised sequel, The Keys Stand Alone.
• The Nunu Bot Show is in one, with creator Angry Goran not even logging onto YouTube for two months.^[when?]
• The Shoebox Project is one of the most highly-rated Harry Potter fanfics ever, but it hasn't been updated since 2008 and never got a proper ending.
• Colonization: First Contact is a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic with the typical "human in Equestria" premise, except with a twist: instead of the typical self-insert, it features a space expedition of scientists and soldiers who stumble upon the planet Equestria. Unfortunately, it petered out just as things had started getting interesting; all we got are five chapters, and a piece of the sixth on the author's profile. The author later announced he will not be finishing the fic (and offers it to any enterprising author who would like to finish it.)
• The Ranma ½ fanfic Hearts of Ice by Krista Perry Fisk. An epic in both size and subject matter, Hearts of Ice first appeared in 1997, and over the next two years, Fisk (then unmarried and writing under her maiden name of Perry) turned out some 25 chapters of exceptionally high-quality story, with the 25th -- the penultimate chapter -- ending on a heartbreaking Cliff Hanger. And then stopped writing for ten years. Ultimately averted when she finally completed it in 2009, but not before it gained the nickname "The Great Unfinished Symphony of Ranma Fanfic".
• The extraordinarily well-done Harry Potter fic Realizations by "Wishweaver" reached thirty-six chapters between 2003 to 2010, at which point its author abruptly disappeared. It lay fallow for a decade, until in 2020 when Wishweaver reappeared and began posting a rewritten version on Archive of Our Own. Unfortunately, as of early 2021 Wishweaver has once again reached thirty-six chapters and stalled out; at the time of this writing it is too early to say whether it is again Orphaned, but it's not looking good.
• Girl Days, perhaps the best Original Flavour Ranma ½ fanfic in existence. Seventeen and a half chapters written between 1999 and 2002, after which its author vanished from the Net.
• Tales of Ranma and Ranko by Jack Staik and Lady Tesser. An absolutely epic work of Ranma ½ fan fiction, it is composed of three massive (and complete) novel-sized stories (Ranma's Secret, Ranma's Fiancees, and A Matter of Romantic Chemistry) and one short story ("Nabiki's Plan"). A fourth novel-sized installment, Our Wedding Day, promised to wrap up the entire cycle -- but was left barely started when its husband-wife writing team suddenly disappeared from the Net in the early 2000s.

Film

• The first two installments of Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey series, 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: Odyssey Two have film adaptations, but not 2061: Odyssey Three or 3001: The Final Odyssey. Tom Hanks expressed interest in doing film adaptations of the last two, but this was ages ago.^[when?]

Literature

• Older Than Print: At the beginning of The Canterbury Tales, the characters are all heading to Canterbury for various reasons, and it's stated that each one will (for a story contest) tell two stories on the way there, and two on the way back. However, it breaks off before they make it to Canterbury or even have one character tell more than one story (in some cases, such as "The Cook's Tale", the story is incomplete). Whether or not Geoffrey Chaucer simply abandoned it or meant to finish it but died first is unknown. (An alternative explanation is that the work was completed, but no complete version of the manuscript has been retained or recorded.)
• Some scholars consider The Tale of Genji an example. It cuts off abruptly with the potential for plenty more story.
• Puffin has apparently announced that the Hagwood Triology, about a shapeshifting, hobbit-like race, has been abandoned by Robin Jarvis. Same fate for Intrigues of the Reflected Realm series?
• Quest Of The Gypsy by Ron Goulart was supposed to be 6 books long, but stopped after the second book in 1977.
• Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy was planned to be a decalogy, but was cut short by his sudden death.
• Kim Newman writing as Jack Yeovil's Demon Download series for Games Workshop's Dark Future universe has been awaiting the fourth and final installment since 1991. Despite GW republishing the earlier works, there's no sign of the final volume ever appearing in print.
• Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, which he spent twenty-plus laborious years making until he abruptly died in the middle of writing the twelfth and final book. (Subverted in that he left behind enough notes that another author could, and did, finish it for him.)
• Tales of the Nine Charms by Erica Farber and J.R. Sansevere had two books published in 2000 and 2001 respectively and claims to be a trilogy. As of 2012, the third book has yet to materialize.

Live-Action TV

• Firefly was a dead-then-resurrected-then-dead series which wasn't able to put out a full season before its final-and-actual cancellation. Some semblance of closure was attempted with the movie Serenity. According to Joss Whedon on the DVD extras, one of the characters was glibly killed to focus the audience on the seriousness of the final scenes.
  • Serenity was in fact made because Joss had become convinced that the show could not be revived. Instead, it was intended to finish the story of River and the Academy. Main characters only died because Joss was sure the series would not be renewed.
• Chappelle's Show: When Dave couldn't handle the fame and pressure after the success of the first two seasons, he literally walked out on the production of the third, even when Comedy Central offered a bigger paycheck.

Music

• The Vocaloid series "Synchronicity" was thought by fans to have been abandoned, since the third and final video in the trilogy has yet to be released. This notion was perpetuated when an incomplete version of the final video was allegedly posted on Japanese video sharing site Nico Nico Douga before quickly being removed. However, the creator of the series, Hitoshizuku, claimed that no such video was ever uploaded, and she has confirmed on her blog that the conclusion to the series is in progress, though she stated that fans might have to way awhile for it to be released.
• The 1995 David Bowie album 1. Outside was intended to be the first part of a trilogy of concept albums. Bowie apparently lost interest in the project.

Tabletop Games

• In a sort of Show Within a Show style example, this phenomenon got a reference in the RPG sourcebook GURPS Fantasy II, where the greatest poet of a certain ancient civilization has been suffering a writer's block for thousands of years, his magnum opus left one volume short of completion. Rather than an isolated case, this is another symptom of said civilization's stagnated nature.
• While the game itself has continued without a hitch, Konami is notorious for creating and then dropping various deck archetypes for the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game. While the anime-based ones are forgivable, the original ones are not, especially when some of those archetypes are left orphaned with only an opening hand's worth of cards to their name. Fortunately, Konami seems to be realizing that they have those archetypes orphaned, and are starting to readopt them with new support in the game's more recent sets.
• Mage: The Ascension's revised Convention books, covering the groups of the game's primary antagonist group, the Technocracy. The first book in the series, Iteration X, was released in 2002, proving to be a considerable improvement over the original... then White Wolf went and ended the Old World of Darkness. Fans thought that was it for the Convention books. However, at Gencon 2011, WW announced they'd be doing the remaining four Convention books. Here's hoping.
  • On the subject of the oWoD, both Changeling: The Dreaming and Wraith: The Oblivion were ended before the other lines, and both were left incomplete. In Changeling's case, Book of Glamour was announced, but never saw light of day, and the Kithbook series was cut short, with the Boggans and Sidhe not done (though Nobles: the Shining Host is considered an unofficial Sidhe Kithbook). Wraith's Guildbook series was also left unfinished, with five of the thirteen Great Guilds not covered.

Web Original

• The first incarnation and reboot Darwin's Soldiers on Furtopia were never finished and will probably remain that way.
• In general, this is very common fate for online roleplays.
• Similar to the web comics examples, this is an incredibly common result for blogs. Due to lack of time or interest in maintaining regular blog posts, the internet is littered with thousands upon thousands of blogs that are orphaned permanently. Bloggers also often bring their blog Back from the Dead after long periods of orphandom, but frequently this results only in "I've been meaning to get back to this..." and "I'm sorry I haven't posted in so long..." posts showing up at increasing intervals.
• Played straight with Strong Sad's blog, which is otherwise a parody of LiveJournal. And then lampshaded when Strong Sad mentioned it in the Strong Bad Email "email thunder". Sadly, it seems that this has happened to Homestarrunner.com as well.
• Xiao Xiao ended with a demo of a beat-em-up game back in 2002. There have been no signs of that demo or the series ever continuing since then. In fact, the author's whereabouts are unknown as well.
• Sapphire Spindle Paw is either this or Stillborn Serial. Mystic (TheSpiritWolf) created a prologue video and then a first episode, then posted about their intentions to make a third video before disappearing site. Searching "Sapphire Spindle Paw", with quotes, gives around four or five results, and there is no sign of an episode 2.
• Rock Tumbler's Let's Play of Grand Theft Auto IV was discontinued due to his drug use. His former partners have started it up again and finished it.
• Spoony's Let's Play of Deadly Premonition is looking like it won't ever be continued (at least not any time soon), having only Part 1 up on the site. This doesn't stop fans on the forums starting a new thread every few weeks or so asking when he's going to finish it...
• Atlas of Medieval America was a very intriguing concept that never got more than a couple months of updates. Alternate History buffs have tried to carry on.
• Super Mario Bros Z, due to how time consuming it took to the animate the fights. What was meant to be a twenty-six episodes ended at eight after the creator Mark Haynes called it quits. He has since made an attempt to reboot the series, which has been progressing slowly - but progressing nonetheless.
• The SCP Foundation story "Metafiction" (one of the most popular tales on the site) ends with to be continued on a very interesting cliffhanger. The discussion page is filled with requests, pleads and threats to the author to just finish the damn thing already.

Western Animation

• Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated version of Lord Of The Rings covered the first two-thirds of Tolkien's trilogy. Those who desire to see the ending, however, will be forced to pick up the books. (Which is probably for the better . . .)
• Perfect Hair Forever was scheduled to have 17 episodes made for the internet but the creators only made 1 due to lack of interest.
• The Pirates of Dark Water eventually simply stopped, after about eight of the thirteen treasures of rule were collected. A lack of budget and Channel Hops were the responsible issues, here.
  • The Genesis game does contain a proper ending to the series however.
• G3.5 of My Little Pony should have lasted at least three years, but ended prematurely at only one year. It had one special and a few toys - however, it was made around the same time as My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (which ended up being the series to revive the brand).
• Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles ended abruptly before finishing the final story arc.

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Waldorf: These shows aren't getting finished! Statler: Who cares? They never should have been started! Both: Do-ho-hoh!