the fact that fandom is a space where unfinished works proliferate is something to be celebrated. where else can you start a novel and never finish it and still people read and engage with what you’ve done and share your interest in it. where else can we get to read the work of people who do not have the time or capacity or resources for commitment to long projects over long time. i don’t know if there’s a way to measure the total volume and proportion of unfinished and abandoned works on ao3, but i’d bet good money it’s a large majority of multichapter works, and do you know what would happen if fandom required all works to be finished? none of that great volume of work would exist! what a tremendous loss would that be! fandom’s permissiveness of unfinished work is one of its greatest strengths as a creative environment, productive for readers and liberating for writers, and if we better recognized that, if we stopped allowing the dominant discourse of unfinished WIPs to be about failure or betrayal or whatever, we would get more stories, not fewer, more story, not less.
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