Well, this was long, long overdue.

For that, I apologise, but I feel like people deserve some closure. In the last few weeks, I've gotten more than my fair share of messages asking me what happened with Weiss Reacts, or why I haven't touched it in a while, and I want to set the record straight before I proceed with anything else. This should be pretty obvious to anyone, but I want to make sure that this is very clear.

Weiss Reacts, and anything of the Reactsverse, as far as my capacity as its creator and writer is concerned, is done.

I haven't touched anything RWBY-related in almost four years. As is immediately apparent, I haven't touched Weiss Reacts in longer, although the signs were obviously there to begin with; my updates became sparser and sparser and I got less and less interested in writing RWBY fanfiction. Part of this was because I had other stories going; for those of you in the know, I also write Fire Emblem fanfiction set in the same multiverse, with Lucina Reacts and Corrin Reacts over there, and I had more projects planned; one set in the world of Pokémon Sun and Moon, one set in Puella Magi Madoka Magica and one set in Star vs. The Forces of Evil. I had a few more up my sleeve planned that I didn't post up here; one in Danganronpa, revolving around Nanami's return from the dead, and one set in Shadows of Valentia with Alm and Celica as the protagonists.

Five particular factors got in my way and ultimately doomed this project.

Firstly, balancing out all these fics. As you are probably well-aware by now, I work on my own to write all and every single chapter; I do all the brainstorming, the writing, and then take several hours to edit, and I do not have a beta or anyone else to share my ideas with. When I started out, I didn't take too much care, but as my stories got popular and I saw how much you guys loved this, I began taking more and more care (not that it's that easy to tell). This was okay to do when I only had Weiss Reacts to write. When I decided, foolishly, to add Lucina Reacts and all of these other stories to my growing universe of stories to write, the editing time took a lot longer than I'd anticipated. Some chapters were obviously rushed, in an attempt to keep time. As a result, my ability to write and edit and put out updates when I promised fell massively behind. Eventually, it got to the point where it was too exhausting to keep up all these stories.

Secondly, growing older. When I was a teenager writing Weiss Reacts' very first chapter, I was a very different person, and it was actually written as a way to vent my anger issues by making fun of things. This was a very solitary hobby as well; as I did not have many friends (don't worry, I've got a few now), so it was something to entertain me when I got bored of playing whatever video game caught my interest. Now, I was also very much the kind who was relatively new to fanfiction at that time, so I did a lot of things that nowadays, I'd take great care in doing if not refraining from doing at all; chucking in random characters from whatever I liked at the time, using really overused running gags, butchering canonical characterization and all sorts of other things I would absolutely pillory someone for doing as I am now.

This was okay, so long as people liked the story and so long as I had much the same mindset. However, as I was introduced to better and better writers in the fandom and generally grew older and wiser, I realized how cringeworthy some of the decisions I'd taken earlier, when I was younger, was. Being the type of person I am, I couldn't stop thinking about how weird it was. I did initially have an answer to that, as you'll see later, but eventually, I couldn't keep it going without thinking just how foolish and weird some of my decisions were. A lot of these decisions, I would not repeat now, if I'd had the writing knowledge and the experience I have now when I began writing.

Thirdly, real life responsibilities. As I mentioned earlier, I began these fics when I was in the early stages of high school, and the only things I had to concentrate on were very easy pieces of homework. However, exams got tougher, and I eventually had to concentrate on those. As university got closer, I had to study to get into the best possible sixth form (for those of you unaware, I do live in England, and the years shortly before university work very differently from most other places in the world, and sixth form comprises the last two years of your secondary education before university) because the school I had gone to up to that point was notorious for a poor standard of teaching.

Now, of course, I did all that, I got into a good sixth form school, and then currently now go to one of the best universities in the country. However, that did mean that I had to sacrifice some hobbies, and fanfiction was one of the first to go. I had intended to come back, from time to time, but other responsibilities, such as preparing to head into the world of work, actually having a social life, and family issues. It got to the point where by the time I had had the space and the liberty to work on these stories, the ideas had been snuffed out and the passion I had for them completely gone.

Fourth, disillusionment with RWBY. As all of you know, my opinion on Pyrrha's death was something akin to one's opinion on rotten Vegemite; completely unnecessary, salty and something that ought to never exist. Of course, I cared about RWBY still, and still enjoyed Volume 3, that even with my anger about it- something that could occupy a whole, different essay- I still wanted to follow the show. As it turned out, her death was something that was just the first gut punch in a series of genuinely poor plot decisions; Volume 4 was, in my opinion, something that failed to live up to the momentum that Volume 3 had begun, with boring villains outside of Hazel and most of the eponymous cast split up and useless for the vast majority of the volume, and Volume 5 falling even further into a deep hole and quite possibly being a contender for the worst volume of the show.

Put simply, one plot decision I massively disagreed with turned out to be the first blow in a series of increasingly terrible writing decisions that soured me on the story as a whole. Losing interest in RWBY, of course, inevitably meant I lost interest in Weiss Reacts, and so it was a victim of my total disillusionment with the show. Volume 6, I'm told, is a return to form, but in my personal opinion, being made to wait for almost two years for quality material is not good enough.

Finally, burnout. A lot of my stories had been placed on almost daily update schedules for the better part of almost three years. This was manageable only because as mentioned before, I worked alone on most of these chapters. The only presence of other people was for the authors I asked for permission to react to their stories and a few people I revealed key plot points to who helped me work a few things out. However, all the above combined factors meant that, eventually, writing these stories had become a chore, something to just be done rather than done for my entertainment. Part of that was because I felt, as mediocre an entertainer as I am, I had a responsibility to my readers to deliver them the material that they enjoyed, and as long as that was the case, I would be fine. That worked for a while, but not completely, and eventually, it just got too tiring to keep these up, and I had to make a decision as to either keep going with increasingly mediocre and terrible stories, and stop, take a break, and reassess my situation.

Weiss Reacts and all the stories in the Reactsverse have a very special place in my life, and that will never go away. However, it is a part of my life that I have passed; the mindset that began writing these stories is long gone, I've matured too much to really view some of my jokes as funny anymore, and the show that inspired me to write these stories is a show I no longer really actively enjoy. That does mean that I will no longer be writing anything set in the Reactsverse, with its brand of humour and its characters.

To answer one more question that I've gotten since I left, "Will you do reaction to X?", I have a longer answer.

Obviously, Weiss Reacts Volume 3 was intended to be the Grand Finale of the series, the end of Weiss Reacts as far as I was concerned. As such, there were quite a few plot elements that I had intended to place into the story. The reactions planned were at least three more stories that I'd confirmed with the authors already and had lined up, one to Jojo's Bizarre Adventure which would have covered up to Part 3, which was the latest part at the time, one to Katawa Shoujo to cover Hanako's route and one to Kamen Rider Drive. As my burnout with this story intensified, however, I cut out a lot of the ideas I had planned for reactions and had intended to finish it at chapter 75, which itself did not pan out.

As for plot points…hoo boy. Take some popcorn, sit somewhere comfortable. This is going to be a long one.

- The very first words Yang ever said in this volume are indeed a shout-out to Lovecraft and also were a Chekhov's gun for the second half of this volume.

- There was originally going to be a resolution between Jaune, Pyrrha and Winter, and Winter was originally going to be far more snippy and irritable with Jaune after having her heart broken.

- Winter herself was eventually going to find happiness with Rook Leblanc, the cowboy-themed student who'd joined up, and Jaune would have been careful with Rook to tell him to keep her safe and happy or he'd go after him.

- Pyrrha would have eventually had second thoughts about being a Huntress after seeing what happened to her in the canon and almost dying during the camping trip, and Jaune would have had to help her decide if she wanted to remain a Huntress or not.

- Jaune was eventually going to decide to become some sort of combat medic (and this plan was actually plotted long before the Volume 5 finale).

- Demeter Rose did indeed kill the poachers who almost killed Pyrrha. This was intended to be foreshadowing that Demeter was the Big Bad of the volume….

- ….because she was trying to resurrect her daughter Summer. She was a foil to Siegmund in that, while Siegmund didn't care at all what happened to his family and was fully intending to be an abusive bastard for the sake of it, Demeter just wanted her family back together and was willing to pursue this by any means possible. As for how, continue reading.

- Cassandra, the mysterious teaching assistant who had given Pyrrha a new set of armor, was actually Pyrrha and Jaune's daughter Xanthe, from a different future than the one in the Reactsverse. Her Semblance was the ability to stop time for several seconds; I figured that the only way to top how broken Pyrrha's Semblance was was to give her daughter the ability to control time. Weiss would have been the first one to realize that Xanthe was related to Pyrrha and then kicked off the final revelation about the nature of the Reactsverse. In earlier drafts of my plan, Cassandra was actually female Corrin from an alternate Corrin Reacts, but I decided against that.

- Eventually, Weiss would have gone up to Ozpin after figuring out that Cassandra was actually Pyrrha's daughter. Ozpin would have eventually revealed how, exactly, Xanthe came to be…

- ….which was that Xanthe originally came from a version of the canon timeline, with the sole difference that, rather than dying during the Battle of Beacon, Pyrrha survived that day. Ruby had gotten to her, but assumed Pyrrha had already been killed, thus triggering her silver eyes, but Pyrrha had simply been crippled and rendered comatose by the stress. Eventually, through whatever means, Cinder and Salem were defeated, victory to our protagonists, Pyrrha woke up from her coma, was caught up to speed and ended up marrying Jaune and having Xanthe.

- However, Cinder had actually survived her death and set about pulling one last card out of her sleeve; she time-traveled back to that night and killed Pyrrha faster, in the hopes of mentally breaking Ruby enough that she couldn't stop Cinder from killing her. Of course, that doesn't work and all Cinder gets is the canonical timeline happening exactly as it did originally. Meanwhile, a side-effect of Xanthe's Semblance was that she was unaffected by changes in time, meaning that when Pyrrha was retroactively killed, Xanthe continued existing as a paradox, but now she was in a future where she can't logically exist and her father doesn't even recognize her as his daughter.

- When she found out that Pyrrha had been killed over twenty years ago, Xanthe set about trying to fix what had been set wrong, time-travelling back to stop Cinder from killing her mom. Ozpin and Faust, however, tried to stop her from traveling back in time, realizing that Xanthe, already being a paradox herself, would cause more paradoxes and potentially destroy all of reality.

- She did not heed the advice and essentially broke the world so hard that it tore parts of other worlds away to fix what Xanthe had done; this was the explanation for all the crossover characters and why the world was so weird, because it was literally a patchwork caused by Xanthe breaking reality to get her mom back and the world had practically been reset to zero. Xanthe, Ozpin, Faust and Cinder were the only survivors of the old reality, although Cinder lost her memory and initially was much nicer than she canonically is; this is the Cinder you see in Diary of Glynda Goodwitch by Half-Blind Otaku, which is a prequel to Weiss Reacts.

- The entire multiverse had actually been adversely affected by Xanthe's actions because Xanthe's actions forced the world to draw in things from other universes to patch itself up, something which she felt massively guilty about; this is where the differences in all the other Reactsverse fics came in.

- Eventually, Cinder regained her memories and was horrified; having had a good upbringing and made friends with a lot of people, including Pyrrha's parents, and was understandably distraught to realize that she killed her friends' children in another world. Cinder herself would have had a redemption arc of trying to become a better person and never becoming like her past self again….

- ….only to fall in love with Summer Rose in the new reality. However, the Grimmfather (the massive Grimm in Weiss Reacts Volume 2) was busted into reality as a result of Siegmund Schnee's schemes, causing Summer to be deployed along with a team of Siegfried, Raven and Qrow (this was before Taiyang was properly revealed) to get rid of said Grimm. She died fighting the Grimmfather despite her silver eyes, and Demeter and Cinder were distraught. For Cinder's part, she almost went insane with grief and vengeance, but managed to pull herself back; the reason she has a bow is because this was Summer's weapon and the only thing that they could recover of Summer. As for Demeter, however, she wanted her daughter back, and she wanted Siegmund Schnee dead.

- However, Professor Faust had inadvertently created a machine that supposedly resurrected the dead (it actually drew the dead from another timeline with the only difference being that the person in question was not dead). This machine was tested on the Fall Maiden Amber and worked successfully; Amber was then hidden in the maid café Yang worked at and given a cover as Yang's coworker, because nobody looking for the Fall Maiden would ever look at a maid café for her. However, the machine strained all of reality trying to bring people back from the dead; Faust realized that if it tried to bring back anyone who had been dead longer than a few months, the damage to reality would be catastrophic.

- Demeter finds out about the machine and attempts to take it, but Faust tells her off. Demeter retreats, and plans; she helps with the Amity Arena's construction, she makes herself head of security of the Arena, all in service of her plan. The plan would eventually have been to, during the Vytal Tournament, for Demeter to break into Beacon, take the machine, smuggle it onto the Arena and hook it up to the Arena's engines to power the machine, because she believed the machine just needed more power to work without understanding why using it to bring Summer back was so risky. However, Weiss and the rest of team RWBY would have been savvy to what Demeter was planning and warned everyone; however, Demeter being the badass she was, all it basically does is get everyone badly hurt by Demeter, with only a combination of Professor Goodwitch, Amber and Cinder managing to ward her off. Reactsverse!Cinder, for those concerned, was as powerful as her Maiden-powered counterpart before even having Maiden powers, so Demeter being able to beat one of the best Huntresses in Beacon, a Maiden and someone equal in strength to a Maiden was intended to showcase Demeter's sheer power and experience.

- Rook was actually a mole for Demeter, who she pawned off on Qrow to get him into Beacon and tell her where Faust was hiding the machine, partially because he'd felt abandoned all his life and Demeter was the first one to show him real respect. However, falling in love with Winter and making friends with the protagonists, he decides to help them stop Demeter before her plan completes. Demeter eventually realizes that Faust's machine is stored beneath her office, with the password being the very first thing Yang said in the volume ("With strange aeons, even death may die"), which she'd overheard while passing by Faust's office.

- Demeter manages to take the machine while the protagonists are off investigating a different lead about what Demeter actually wants (revenge on Siegmund Schnee), with nobody left to guard the school outside of Ozpin, who Demeter evades and refuses to fight. The action would have been taken onto the Amity Arena, where team RWBY and JNPR (plus Velvet, Rook and Winter) would have had to take on Demeter's goons to stop Demeter's plans. The party would have been eventually split, dwindling slowly. Pyrrha was supposed to actually die at one point, only to refuse to abandon Jaune and her friends because she had something outside of being a Huntress to live for, resurrect through sheer will to live and defeat her attacker, but have to be evacuated with Jaune for obvious medical reasons, and Rook would have eventually had to leave with Winter due to taking a bullet for her and being too wounded to continue.

- Eventually, only team RWBY would have been left on the Arena to confront Demeter, and Demeter would have then tried to stop Ruby through convincing her that this is what Summer would have wanted. The team and Demeter would have fought and Demeter effortlessly defeated them, but seeing Ruby crying would have shocked Demeter back to her senses as she realized that Summer would not have wanted Demeter to hurt her daughter. She turns off the machine and turns herself in.

- The epilogue would have had the kids of the protagonists attending Beacon, with Xanthe acting as a cool aunt to Jaune and Pyrrha's actual children; the two of them would have retired from Hunting, becoming a doctor and a teacher at Beacon respectively. Weiss and Ruby's adopted kids would have attended Beacon, with Weiss taking care of stuff at the Schnee Dust Company and reforming it and Ruby taking the kids to school and telling them the story of what happened there, starting with the very first chapter of Weiss Reacts Volume 1. Winter and Rook were going to be travelling around the world, Velvet would have found someone who looked exactly like Weiss to hook up with, Ren and Nora owned a waffle restaurant in Vale, Yang and Blake were on their honeymoon and Cinder would have finally moved on from what happened in the first world, realizing she'd been a good teacher to the kids now and maybe, even if everyone she'd hurt the first time around wouldn't forgive her, at least she'd started anew.

And that, in a nutshell, or as small as I could put it, is the final plan for Weiss Reacts Volume 3. As far as I can remember, anyway; there are probably elements that I have forgotten.

Now, to answer a few more questions, since the site's PM function is broken and therefore incapable of allowing me to give more personal responses:

- Yes, you may use and reference the Reactsverse in your fanfics or your D&D campaigns or whatever, as long as you PM me first. Crediting me with the idea is not necessary (especially because I'm not the first one who's ever done stuff like this), but I would be very flattered if you did. However, if you use any original characters like Vivi or Norn, do please credit me; unlike the concept or the universes these stories are set in, those are actually still my characters, rather than the property of Rooster Teeth, Intelligent Systems or whoever else.

- Yes, I will be continuing to write stories, at a slower pace, and indeed, I've already begun planning and writing a story set in Doki Doki Literature Club that will come out sometime in the next few months, for anyone interested in that.

- No, I will not be reacting to any more stories; a lot of the requests I've received failed to even read the rules on my profile, and those that did decided to send stuff in that broke the rules anyway and forgot that I still have the right to veto anything I don't like.

- No, I will not be continuing to write in the Reactsverse, if you somehow missed that, and if you want to continue it on your own, see the first response.

- Yes, you may translate this into whatever language you feel like.

In summary, Weiss Reacts is always going to be something important to me, as something I found to be a comfort in hard times, something that entertained other people and something that taught me a lot of valuable lessons about writing and working on projects. It will remain up, as long as I remain on the site and as long as the site remains up and keeps it up, along with the rest of my stories. I may never write a story of its type, sheer scale, or genre ever again, but it was a great experience.

My thanks go out to everyone involved in making this story one of the best experiences I'd ever worked on; all the people who helped me plan the story, all the authors who gave their permission for me to react to their stories, all the fans who gave reviews and support, and all the silent readers who've followed this faithfully from start to finish, thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

To finish, I feel like we should end with the very last sign-off in the Reactsverse.

I hope you enjoyed the Reactsverse, leave your thoughts, and I hope you have a great day.

Until next time, folks!