Not Tropeworthy (new crowner 8/2/13): Completed Fic

I don't see the point of this for reasons already established.

Even as a fan term. Do people really need the word "Completed" defined?

I do agree with Amy Gdala that if we do keep this... for some reason, it shouldn't need to be in the trivia tab or anything. That a work is completed is sort of the default assumption.

edited 2nd Jul '13 4:00:08 PM by Ghilz

Dead Fic has 108 wicks with the namespace Fan Fic. That means there are at least 108 fics on TV Tropes that are not complete. While indeed there are many fanfics are not complete, the majority of them are not notable enough to have a page. In theory, every fic in this wiki other than those 108 (and any others not wicked) should wick to Completed Fic, but they don't because it just isn't notable unless a work is a Dead Fic. Considering that Completed Fic has only 8 wicks, and I don't think any of us are willing to add Completed Fic to every single example, I think we should just ax this completely. The only time a completed fic is notable if it was declared dead and came back, but then that would just be a subversion of Dead Fic.

So, as said, it's just assumed unless stated otherwise.

In short, unless we are willing to add examples to other pages, this page doesn't need to exist. It should go back into the pit from whence it came.

edited 2nd Jul '13 4:52:35 PM by Rethkir

Re-reading the thread

...you realize none of that is unique to Fanfic right? Like the same can be said for every media ever.

There's no page with an example list to tell you if a TV Series is still being produced, on hiatus, or completed. You have to live with Cut Short and cancellation (Well there's Grand Finale, but Grand Finale is a specific type of ending). The same for book series, Film Series, Comic Book Series, etc...

edited 2nd Jul '13 5:03:27 PM by Ghilz

I think there's a difference. Fanfiction is closer to an episodically-published novel than to any of the other ongoing media. You don't get novels that are cut short in the middle of a chapter; they're simply not published.

A fic being completed isn't default for anything that isn't a one-shot. If you assume it is default, I think this page is actually needed.

I don't think "there are too many examples" is a valid reason to cut the page entirely. It may be an argument for cutting examples, but not the page.

edited 2nd Jul '13 5:50:46 PM by AnotherDuck

Sure you do. That happens to light novels and manga, but in that case we'd just say it was Cut Short or whatever. For example, Kaze No Stigma was never completed after the author got into an accident and later died. Manga are canceled or abandoned frequently, such as... X1999, was it? It's by CLAMP and they dropped it to work on other stuff. There are even rather famous ones with a sort of reputation of 'Eh, maybe it'll finish eventually if the authors get around to it' like Berserk, Black Lagoon or Hunter x Hunter.

I don't understand what makes a fanfic any different than these things.

That's called Schedule Slip. Never heard of X1999, but if we don't have a page on it that probably says something relevant to this discussion. As for the manga and visual novels, those still end between books, not in the middle of one.

This is sounding more and more like an argument that Dead Fic is superfluous, rather than this page.

edited 2nd Jul '13 7:08:49 PM by Noaqiyeum

Most fanfics I know off are published in deliberate chunks. So a fanfic who gets cancelled doesn't exactly get cut mid-sentence as the author just stops typing. Most of the time, yeah, it's actually at the end of a chapter (Since most fics I know off tend to be released in chapters). Yeah, books don't get cancelled the same way, but that's simply because the format doesn't allow for it. Besides, how is this an argument to cut the article? "Fan Fic sometimes can be abandonned in at a more granular point that most medias. Ergo Completed Fic should stay?" A Fanfic missing chapters is as imcomplete as a book series missing books.

Comic Books however will regularly get cancelled in the middle of a story arc, sometimes with less than 3 or 4 issues out (Which translate to less than 40 pages out, and lemme tell you that 40 pages of comic ain't a lot of story. And no, an issue is not a single "story" the way a book or tv show episode is, Comic haven't worked like that for 30+ years). Even stand alone series (ie: Visual novels) will sometimes never be finished, which is pretty much tantamount to stopping at some arbitrary chapter like a fanfic. Ditto for TV Shows who can be cancelled mid seasons. (And in a few, very rare instances, mid episodes, but those are beyond rare).

So I still fail to see how Fanfics have a need to advertise they are "complete" more so than any other works.

If people want to keep the page so badly, fine, expand it to "Completed Work" and we will define what "Complete" means since apparently there's a lot of people who seem to think we need a definition page for that.

edited 2nd Jul '13 8:20:44 PM by Ghilz

Just for some background, the example section is only a recent addition. The page previously was just a definition page. The discussion in Ask The Tropers that Septimus alluded to earlier talked about possibly turning it into an index but we never actually reached a decision on it. I was in favor, by the way.

I could agree with that, or with an argument for turning Dead Fic examples into aversions only.

Actually, as I understand it the "real" distinguishing factor that makes fanfiction much less likely to be completed isn't anything to do with the format. It's the amateurish nature.

Yes, but that angle is already covered by Dead Fic.

Noaq: Well, it's not just schedule slip when the series never gets picked back up again, is it? And I had the name right: X1999. They just stopped writing it. Kaze no Stigma also stopped in the middle of the story. Books, manga, comics, video games, tv shows etc all get cut off before the story finished because the author was unable to complete it, wouldn't make enough money off the completed series or just lost interest. This may happen more with fanfiction, or it could just be that it's more noticeable. So I fail to see a meaningful distinction between the premature end of a fanfic and the premature end of a book series.

I have no opinion on Dead Fic at the moment.

Also, light novels, not visual novels. One's a book, one's basically a game.

Completed Fic started with no examples. From history, the "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" folder appeared 5 May 2013. The "Mass Effect" and "Pokemon" folders appeared 24 June 2013.

I will not add any examples, and I will not put Completed Fic in any trope lists. A list of Completed Fics is about as boringly useless as a list of hardcover books, or color films, or black-and-white webcomics. In fact, the idea of a Completed Fic is so trivial that I almost never mention it; I prefer to mention when stories are not complete. For the pages about A Far Green Country and Home with the Fairies, I wrote, "The story was not complete," intending to delete the sentence when the story becomes complete. For The Games of the Gods, I wrote, "This is a Completed Fic," only because Book One is complete but Book Two is dead.

Yes, add the Trivia banner.

Most FanFic/ pages have no Trivia/ sections. It would be silly to create new Trivia/ pages to list Completed Fic. However, the Trivia banner can help keep Completed Fic out of trope lists.

If we decide to cut, then please redirect Completed Fic to Dead Fic.

I think this page would be as interesting as a page about finished TV series.

edited 27th Jul '13 9:15:33 PM by MikuruFan

Looking back at the thread, I think that we have consensus for turning this into Trivia at least, if not even cutting the examples.

I think that Completed Fic could be useful, but not as an independent trope.

Has anyone checked the Google results? I see a lot of mentions that treat it almost like a genre, never mentioning anything more.

It's an important classification in the fanfic community. I've never seen that kind of importance been placed on it outside fanfiction. On a cynical level, there are three kinds of fics: completed, abandoned, and will likely become abandoned (a.k.a. ongoing).

I suppose this could be an index. I don't see how it's a trope though.

Index of works would work in my opinion.

I think we came to a general agreement in AST(I was the one that brought it up) to just use the page as a index of completed fics that have work pages here.

Making it an index of such fics is fine with me.

What does "completed fic" mean anyway? What constitutes completed anyway? One chapter fanfiction or a long fanfiction that abruptly ends and is marked as "Completed", among other things like poor usage counts, still make me convinced the best way to deal with the page is to cut it.

Anything that has a clear ending. Were not using completed in a subjective way here. It's a self contained story with a beginning and end. We also limited to fics that have work pages here to stem the tide a little.

edited 28th Jul '13 7:44:33 PM by shoboni