Okay, I have a little rant, and because I don’t like to leave negative comments on people’s works, I am putting it here. So ao3 has an amazing filtering system, it is truly beautiful and remarkable, but some people try to work around it and that bothers me. There are many things I could say about this, but the one I want to talk about right now, is the complete works filter, and how people circumvent it by saying “It’s a series”. No, it’s not, if it is under 5000 words, and just abruptly ends, with zero resolution, that is a chapter, not a complete work, and you mislead me. You abuse that label, you got me hooked and this is fanfiction, so I have no guarantee that you will ever finish it. When you read an incomplete work, you know that going in, you make that choice and accept that it may never be finished. But when someone games the system, and posts an incomplete work, but labels it complete, they disrespect me and the entire, beautiful tagging/filtering system ao3 has. Just be honest, it’s a wip, 1359 words with zero plot resolution does not a complete story make. Please and thank you, thanks for listening to my Ted Talk.
Please share if this annoys you too. I’m posting this here because I refuse to shame people directly on their works. As a fellow fanfiction writer, negative comments, no matter the context, can be devastating. At the end of the day the only reason I’m mad is because they started something amazing, and the last thing I want to do is discourage people from writing more, negative comments have been holding me back on some of my fics (well one of them) so as frustrated as I am, I won’t put that on them, besides, it’s not just one author I’m annoyed at, so many people do this. Either finish it, or be honest.