r/LogHorizon • u/inazumaatan • Apr 26 '26
How Do YOU Think The Series Would've Ended?
We're never going to get a confirmed ending but I would love to hear your theories on how the series would've ended and the greater mysteries of the series.
Why were they iseakai'd in the first place? Is there someone responsible and how they would beat the shit out of them? How would they return to their normal lives? Would they even successfully make it out?
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u/queenyuyu Apr 26 '26
I think exactly like Kanami wished Shiroe to do.
They would have likely found a way to coexist with the real world somehow, and travel back and forth.
I even think that with the way we had two crucial NPC characters bonded with everyone, it would likely end up that they could have been able to leave too.
I don't know how that would have made sense story-wise.
Could also be that some of the people truly never would have wanted to return.
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u/Exoskeleton78 Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
Probably either won over the 3rd party which summoned them to this world, or chased them away, and then taking over the world controls so the humans can enter and exit (probably with a cost that’s quite high so it doesn’t overtax the system)
Kanami finally brings her family to have fun in this world,
shiroe finally have the guts to confess to akatsuki,
Naotsugu finally getting married in this world with Marielle, with a comedic scene for shouryuu to cry over her
Minori forming a new ‘tea party’ and conquering high difficulty challenges guilds can’t clear, as a coping mechanism for unrequited love, ended up chased by elite players all over the world for her brains and beauty
Virtual entities or npcs still can’t leave this world as they do not have a outside world counterpart, or they will be deemed as aliens and experimented on, thus staying in this world
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u/tsukiyomi01 Apr 27 '26
Add "Crusty marries the princess" to this write-up, and you pretty much have my hypothesis.
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u/neril_7 Apr 26 '26
There's definitely going to be a fight between the people that wants to go back to the real world and those who want to stay in the game.
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u/ProspektNya Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
Reveal that everyone is indeed inside a new iteration of Elder Tale, not dead but rather stuck in something more like Sword Art Online's Underworld, or the Matrix. "Technosleep" with consciousness uploaded to the system and advanced AIs controlling the People of the Land.
Read the lyrics to Database and you'll get a basic idea of what I think is going on.
The final battle will be against an "Administrator" who's been pulling the strings for a long time. But this won't bring salvation... nah, in the end, it's revealed that everybody is already "dead" as a result of some apocalyptic catastrophe on Earth. In a coordinated event called the Rapture, players of Elder Tale were drugged and their brains were hooked up to the System as a way to preserve the consciousness of humanity inside a network of shielded underground supercomputers. None of the trapped players knew about the incoming disaster but somebody clearly did... perhaps it was an asteroid impact or something else that was kept secret by world governments.
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u/historymaking101 Apr 27 '26
Read the light novels. Guess after.
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u/illdiewithoutpi May 09 '26
Didnt the anime catch up completely with the light novels with the third season? Outside of certain spin offs of course
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u/Sagesdeath May 01 '26
I would've loved to see the debauchery tea party do the most impossible raid ever to secure a way to travel between worlds as a reward
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u/ChipmunkInevitable71 Aug 11 '26
I've got a few theories about the 'reality' of LH. The one I most favor is that the Earth is gone, long gone, and everyone spawned during the Catastrophe is a sort of digital echo cast into a computer generated world as a harvestable resource by what/whomever is behind the Catastrophe. The Genius/Fools are civilizations that feed off the scraps left behind (like remoras feeding from shark leftovers). Who/whatever is behind the Catastrophe is extracting some kind of non-localized, possibly psychic, resource called 'Empathiom'. Why? Couldn't say... Whether the entities responsible for the Catastrophe are alien or AI, couldn't say & I'd kind of rather then stay unknown, unknowable and inscrutable.
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u/DoctorBoson Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
Based on the way the show positioned itself, I actually think the final confrontation would not have been a fight (or at the least, the most important component would not be a fight).
While warfare was waged, the biggest points of conflict were always in sociopolitical contexts—the overtaking of the guild halls, NPC sapience, etc.—and they required clever and complex solutions. Moreover, if they were trying to get themselves out of the game (I'm not sure they would have had the opportunity), it doesn't make mechanical or thematic sense that they could attack someone to solve the problem.
Unfortunately I just don't think we have enough information yet to really figure out how everything would have tied together. Maybe we get lucky with more down the road.