Warning: This
page contains SPOILERS for the TV series through TRY.
Also contains opinions, which may or not be
offensive.
First off, let's get one thing straight. The chances
of the anime studio getting the team together to make a
new season far after the third season has ended are very
low. Down to impossible range. Of course, I can't say
with complete certainty that it will never happen, that
five or ten years from now they may decide to put out
more sequels, but I'd bet you ten bucks that it's not
going to happen. I'm tight with my money and don't
gamble. This should say something about the degree of
certainty involved.
But were there to be a fourth season, what would they
do? Here's some speculation/wishlist.
1) Let's see some more dark lords and mazoku. Slayers
has been a series blessed with good antagonists, which
give the plot some cohesiveness and provide credible
threats to our insanely overpowered main
characters.
2) Backstory. You know, there is actually quite a bit
that we don't know about the Slayers characters. What was
Lina's childhood like? Don't her parents worry about her?
And Gourry, what about him? What was Zelgaldis doing
before the chimera incident? Tell the story of Amelia's
past.
3) More background to the Slayersverse. How about
seeing the Dragon gods for a change? Perhaps they could
do one resolving the battle between the Mazoku and the
Gods. And that would decisively end the series once and
for all.
Of course, the other position was that TRY had a good
ending, because isn't that they way that all Slayers
things end? With everyone just walking off? And as such
is a perfectly fine ending to the entire television
series. This can be so because the plot in Slayers is
driven mostly by external conflict, rather than internal.
Typically, Lina is forced into doing things by
circumstances, or by manipulative others. So at the end,
(as Lina always wins) she usually walks off mostly
unchanged. The need to return to the status quo is most
clear in NEXT, when they erase Lina's memory at the end,
so she doesn't remember much of the events of episode
twenty-six. She doesn't really appear to have many plans
beyond learning more magic and getting more money and
food. There appears to be no great quest or obvious thing
that Lina must resolve internally in the story. Usually
once a character resolves their quest(s), their story is
over, or at least so greatly altered as to be a different
story. Kind of like Zelgaldis's cure. If Zel really were
cured, he'd lose his purpose, and have to develop greatly
and change as a character.
So one could argue that very slow character
development, or lack of focus upon it really is
characteristic of Slayers. But still, I'd personally like
to see what seems like the hardest thing for an anime
series, an ambitious ending pulled off successfully. I'd
like to see them be creative and change one of the
characters drastically. I'd like something which fuflills
the promise of TRY, which I feel was somewhat flawed as a
serious series. In TRY, the animators made the storyline
darker, and diverged from the novels. They altered
Slayers canon by introducing Valgaav and the aliens, and
by introducing Filia. The ending attempted to make the
series more challenging, with mixed results. After which,
they would have had no choice but to continue with the
anime canon reestablished in TRY (NEXT diverged from
novel canon too, but generally followed it). In TRY, it
seemed as if they were going in an interesting direction
with the characters and the plotline, and developing
Slayers. We can only imagine what that direction could
have been.