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Author Existence Failure: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|''"After all, as some of you like to point out in your emails, I am sixty years old and fat, and you don't want me to [[Person as Verb|'pull a]] [[The Wheel of Time|Robert Jordan]]' on you and deny you your book."''<ref>Someone created a cartoon pretending that he's deliberately planning to do '''exactly''' that. "They think they hate me now... wait til they see who I kill off next!"</ref>
|'''George R.R. Martin''' on ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire|A Dance with Dragons]]'' in 2009}}
A [[Fandom]]'s worst nightmare.
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Please note that this trope applies when a creator (writer, director, etc.) ceases work on a project, not a participant (actor, well... mostly actors) unless they had significant input.
Not to be confused with the criticism trope known as "[[Death of the Author]]". Or [[Apocalyptic Log]]. See also [[The Character Died with Him]], where the show goes on without the character a dead actor portrayed, and [[Fake Shemp]], where there is an attempt to disguise the absent actor. Contrast [[Outlived Its Creator]].
{{examples}}
== Anime and Manga ==
* When [[Osamu Tezuka]] died, he left his life's work ''[[Phoenix]]'' unfinished. Which is an absolute shame, as he quite clearly had great plans for it. Had he stayed alive to finish it, the separate stories of each time period in each volume would eventually converge at a central point, the "present", and tying all the loose ends of the Phoenix's story together. Now we can only wonder...
*
* Noboru Yamaguchi tried to avert this trope by attempting to finish ''[[The Familiar of Zero]]'' as fast as possible while also undergoing treatment for cancer. He died in April 4, 2013. [[Posthumous Collaboration|That said, the series
* Ken Ishikawa, the creator of ''[[Getter Robo]]''. Though he did leave some notes behind, they were apparently only for Getter Robo Hien - a prequel. The cliffhanger ending of ''Getter Robo Āḥ'', the latest series chronologically, has yet to be resolved.
* The director of ''[[Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team]]'', Takeyuki Kanda, died while the OVA was still being produced. One effect of that was that it took over three years to finish it, making it the longest-running single [[Gundam]] production until [[Gundam Unicorn]], except the long running period for that has been planned from the start.
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== Film ==
* It's more of an actor existence failure, but [[George Clooney]] has said there cannot and will not be another ''[[Ocean's Eleven|Ocean's]]'' movie without Bernie Mac.
* [[Akira Kurosawa]] died just before the shooting of ''[[After the Rain]]'' was scheduled to begin, so the movie was directed by his assistant Takashi Koizumi. ''The Sea is Watching'', another screenplay Kurosawa had written and intended to direct, was also filmed by another director in 2002.
* Parodied in ''[[Monty Python and the Holy Grail]]''; the knights were saved from a cartoon monster by the death of the animator. (Not really, mind you, just in the movie. [[Terry Gilliam]] is still alive in [[Real Life]] as of April 2012.)
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* Frank Herbert died in 1985, leaving his ''[[Dune]]'' series unfinished, though Herbert had been tacking books onto the series for some time. After his death, his son Brian Herbert, along with Kevin J. Anderson, wrote a handful of sequel and prequel books to the series.
* Arthur Ransome had an unfinished ''[[Swallows and Amazons]]'' book when he died. Nicknamed "Coots in the North,'' it had the Blacketts meeting the Death-and-Glories, and makes one weep for [[What Could Have Been]].
* Robert Jordan died before he could complete the "definitely, probably final" 12th book of ''[[The Wheel of Time]]'' series, but he left behind extensive notes. Before his illness was discovered, he used to joke that if he died before the series was over, [[Funny Aneurysm Moment|his will was going to dictate that his notes be destroyed]]. Fortunately, he relented, and Brandon Sanderson was been picked to finish the series. Sanderson
* A lot of [[Franz Kafka]]'s stuff was unfinished, including the novel ''The Trial'' and a bunch of short stories. He still had fragments. What's more, he never intended to publish any of it; his papers were to be burned unread upon his death, and we only have them today because no one followed instructions. Many people have speculated that Kafka left his papers to Max Brod because he knew Brod would under no circumstances obey his request to have the papers burned.
* Stieg Larsson died of a massive heart attack in 2004 after having completed the third book of his supposed-to-be-decalogy ''[[The Millennium Trilogy|Millennium]]'' (''The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'', ''The Girl who Played with Fire'' and ''The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest''). All of the completed novels were only published after his death.
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** As of late 2010, what is probably the last Stone/Randall novel, a crossover, is out, and while as noted the works were all ongoing series, as a final book, {{spoiler|it ends things well, with the two main characters, who had been struggling with personal issues, making a good effort to find happiness with each other much the way Spenser and Susan had in the Spenser novels.}}
* Jack Chalker set up a huge cliffhanger with Horrors of the Dancing Gods, leaving {{spoiler|his main hero (originally a Barbarian Warrior) now in the form of an immortal (even by immortal standards) wood nymph (oh, and she's pregnant by the Big Bad with who knows what), his son in love with a young girl with male genitalia, the second main character having switched to the evil side of thing...}}
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20131010193523/http://www.thedailypage.com/isthmus/article.php?article=30610 Nothing else] is coming out after [[Harlan Ellison]] dies:
{{quote|"My wife has instructions that the instant I die, she has to burn all the unfinished stories. And there may be a hundred unfinished stories in this house, maybe more than that. There's three quarters of a novel. No, these things are not to be finished by other writers, no matter how good they are."}}
* [[Gordon R. Dickson]] died after completing the 9th of an unknown number of books in his [[Dragon Knight]] series, leaving Jim Eckert's journey from 20th Century grad student to Master Magickian incomplete. The 11th book in his more famous [[Childe Cycle]] series, ''Antagonist'', was completed by his assistant and friend David W. Wixon and published in 2007.
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== [[Web Original]] ==
* Spoofed in ''[[PRIMARCHS]]'', where the {{
* SuperPie suffered a (fortunately non-lethal) version of this in Game 11 of [[Comic Fury Werewolf]].
* ''[[The Gungan Council]]'' has had two confirmed deaths of writers: Skelosh Delaroch and Raven Darkness.
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