Original Anime With No Source Material

It is no secret that anime is often created to help sell manga, light novels, or just merch in general. It is like a 12-episode promotional commercial to help get you hooked on characters and invested in the plot. It is why you see so many anime series that only adapt fractions of the source material, never to be heard of again. Either it wasn’t received well or it didn’t boost sales enough.

But not always!

Creativity is dying, but never dead. Sometimes anime studios dare to make an original creation that has no light novel or manga to dictate its story. However, these original anime series always end up in a very Schrodinger’s Box place when it comes to their conclusion.

As they are original stories with no source material, they are both finished and unfinished. A series could end with a cliffhanger and never be picked up again, and that is how the story was meant to end because there is no source material saying otherwise.

Then you have series like, for example, Psycho-Pass. The series could have and perhaps should have ended with its very strong first season that told an interesting story to a satisfying conclusion. Yet, they made two more seasons and a series of movies in that world, because it is technically an open-ended detective story – there is always another case and another cop to solve it.

If you are looking for “complete” original anime with no source material, I’ve gathered a list. I went through 4,500+ entries in the MyAnimeList database (I saw Ex-Arm and where the ratings end o_o), clicking on everything reasonably well-known enough and that I didn’t already know had source material.

I can say that, from what have seen on this list – which is a decent portion, but not all – ends pretty conclusively, but again, original anime stories with no source material can end in an open-ended way just in case the studio thinks they might be able to pick it up later.

As a note, any series that do have manga or light novels – AKA Gundam – had those written based on the anime, not the other way around.

Complete Original Anime With No Source Material

Did I miss one? Leave a comment! I did my best, but these lists will never be perfect.