Tucking this away on a side blog because I'm not really vaguing anyone, but I am a little annoyed - I just don't get how someone can look at a fic that is 300k on AO3, 43/45 chapters, and go, nah, if it's not complete I'm not going to read it
It's just?? 300k is an IMMENSE amount of words, and it's evidently a beloved and well written story - I totally get wanting to check that where the story is left off isn't a terrible cliff hanger, but discarding it just because it's not finished is just like, then go read a book then, and pay those authors for their effort instead, and also, screw you. It really goes against the essence of fanfic - that these are labours of love, you are being let in to the workings of writing, the work in progress, and it means you get a variety and diversity of voices and stories you'd normally never see because not every story gets finished - many many stories do not get finished, but that doesn't mean they're not worth reading. You have people at all stages in their writing process, learning and experimenting and venting or just having fun; I love reading works in progress, because it's more time in a world I love, the writing is so wonderfully good, and many of my favourite stories aren't finished, and will never be finished. But that's alright. Because I loved what was there. God, I don't always finish stories/books that ARE finished (I do this with some of the ones I really enjoy sometimes because I don't want them to end - so I leave the end for myself to finish one day, so it's not truly over until then. Whoops. Looking at you, final raven cycle book)
But it's especially ridiculous because 300 THOUSAND WORDS. The average book is 80,000 words. You have nearly FOUR BOOKS worth of content, and you won't read it because it's not finished? What, you won't pick up a book series because the last book isn't out? That's a sad life to live but go off I guess