[Espy]

As an ex-writer back from the not-shopkeeper storyline, I'm going to put it out there that the shopkeeper-verse extremely fragmented and hastily put together. Sure, it may have been cheery and lackadaisical, and maybe that drew more readers, but I also felt it was really haphazard and didn't go anywhere in particular.

On the other hand, the storyline with Dyten/Ryuko/everyone else was, in my own opinion, intact and planned out for months in advance. Sure, it was going down a rather morbid path, and I think that's why people started not reading it. Perhaps the chapters were too long, but all the writers at the time (who often amount to just two or three of us) spent hours hammering out a third, fourth, fifth draft.

Do I want to keep the darker storyline? Sure. But I don't see it helping Trisphee much at all, so I'm not fully opposed to somehow writing around it. But the "waking up from a dream" thing is one of the most cliche deus ex machina that writers use to reroute a plot, and it also has the appearance of tossing everything we've done for the past few years under the bus.