Let's face it, you've seen at least a few fanfics that are amazing, but are dead or have updates that become more and more infrequent as time passes. The reason for this is pretty simple: Fanfiction writers have no incentive to work beyond their own personal enjoyment. There is no reason for them to keep writing if they lose that enjoyment or no longer have the inspiration or free time to work on it. Donations or patronages like Patreon, Ko-Fi or similar services have allowed some measure of reprieve but if a fanfic author goes legit they have less reason to update those works they have no requirement to, with an exception being an incredibly popular fanfic kickstarting a career being finished so as to show gratitude.
- The fanfic Tails of the Old Republic, a crossover/ Fusion Fic between Sonic the Hedgehog and the videogame Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic never really had a regular schedule (it started out weekly then rapidly degraded from there), the author went from February 2011 to April 2013 without an update because of real-life woes.
- Subverted with You Got HaruhiRolled!. In its first year there were 81 chapters written (that's one update every four days or so, for the curious) and since only three chapters have been released in its second year one could be forgiven for thinking that a major Schedule Slip has occurred. But in fact, the creator hasn't stopped writing; he has simply updated all of his short and mid-length chapters in a Spin-Off fic
while reserving HaruhiRolled itself for his longest work. Taken together, he still averages one chapter per week.- Unfortunately, since March of 2012 this has been Double Subverted, due to the author's college schedule getting in the way of updates of any sort. There has only been a single update since then.
- This happened to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Around Christmas 2011, nearly four months after Chapter 77 was published, Chapter 78 was finally done, but to spare the readers the nerve-wracking wait between its cliffhanger and Chapter 79, the author decided to finish Chapter 79 first. When that one was finished three days later he then decided to finish the whole arc first because his speed had improved so much.
- But three weeks later, he was already finishing chapter 81 and explaining that he was still making backwards edits to all the unposted chapters. So most of the complainers have stopped complaining and asked him to just post more often on his progress.
- Calvin & Hobbes: The Series had a year-long gap between seasons 3 and 4 - oddly mirroring a similar break in SpongeBob SquarePants.
- Season 5 (retroactively named Part 1) was very slow with uploaded "Nocturnals", sometimes getting a bi-yearly schedule, but garfieldodie saved it by uploaded the rest of the stories as Part 2, explaining that the delay was because of real-life issues.
- While John the Crossover Master hasn't actually given up on any story per se (he's working on Port-Ed 2 with another author), and the stories that he has genuinely given up on have been removed from FanFiction.Net, he knows full well he's rarely giving out updates to his remaining stories on the site, even comparing his update schedule to ProtonJon's upload schedule (it helps that the two of them share the same name), to the point of Self-Deprecation in the Author's Notes of chapter 6 of Eddward Wright: Ace Attorney in much the same way Chuggaaconroy made fun of Proton Jon's upload schedule in the intro to The Runaway Guys' Let's Play of Mario Party 2.
- The Naruto fanfic Team 8 was updated on January 20, 2011, after which it went for about two years without being updated, until it was updated on September 6, 2013. After this it wasn't updated until March 6, 2015. Another update did follow a month later, on April 23, 2015, but since then there was no update for almost five years, due to the author being in long treatment for health problems. As of October 22, 2018, the author still has plans to continue.
- In Opening Dangerous Gates, around April/May 2014, the author's stored notes and outlines were deleted by a computer failure. She assured that she is not giving up on the story and must simply write them over again, but warned the readers that updates will not happen as frequently as a result. She later explained that she has to focus on college. She announced that she graduated and got her medical license in 2015. She further explained that she focuses on being a nurse and writing is only a part-time hobby, but she will finish the story.
- The highly popular /r9k/Elsa Is Suffering (a modern retelling of Frozen (2013)) stopped at 41 chapters for five months. Many fans became convinced that the story had been scrapped, only for the author to publish the final three chapters together on July 22, 2014.
- The Frozen fanfic The Sting of Summer's Winter has not seen an update since September 7, 2014. Now, at the time of this writing, the author has stated that she would like to finish the story by New Year's Day, but it remains to be seen if she can follow through with this statement. If she does finish by her target date her story will not have been updated in over three-and-a-half months. This is an oddity because Sting updated on a fairly consistent basis of every two to three weeks before its current schedule slip.
- Given that the author of Sting has missed her target date by nearly a week now, it is safe to say that she did not update on time (obviously), and her schedule slip has continued.
- Hivefled has gone from a once a week update schedule to once every 5 or so months, due to the authors' real life responsibilities meaning they don't have time to write.
- Tangled Adventures in Arendelle once had an update schedule of weekly due to the ease of creating a "from another perspective" fic at the time. However, once chapter 10 was reached, updates tended to come slower, whether every 3 months, or every month due to real world responsibilities and needing to work on more original material to the fic.
- Young Justice Titans use to have an update schedule of once per week. Due to the author's escalating training schedule, he dropped this in favor of doing 5 chapters at a time every so often. Overall, this has slowed down the update schedule slightly, but due to the 5 chapter drop, this does at least make things more bearable.
- The team behind The Bridge announced they would release an animated Q&A video to celebrate the fic's 2nd anniversary. Unfortunately, the video was released a month late due to technical difficulties.
- Hail to the King (Qwapdo) didn't get updated from December 2013 to December 2014. After that, it became inactive again.
- Shadows of Giants didn't get updated from January 2015 to April 2016, as the author wanted to focus on college.
- The Pokémon: The Series fanfic The Dark Side of Innocence began in 2000 and didn't finish until 2013, 13 years later. The fanfic originally began as an Original Series (Kanto-Johto) fanfic however it became an Alternate Universe Fic over time, as Ash is shown still traveling with Misty despite having gone through Hoenn, Sinnoh, and possibly Unova.
- Intercom when first released was a pretty regular one new chapter per week/month/3 months. Even when things slowed down, Potterphantomkitten was still consistent in her slowdowns. And then she started taking writing and acting classes, and the fic now sits untouched after over 6 months of inactivity.
- As it has progressed Pokémon Reset Bloodlines has fallen a couple of times into this. Chapter 22 was posted in August of 2016, and Chapter 23 didn't follow until Christmas Day that same year. The author explained that there were a lot of reasons for this, and the chapter's length may have also been a factor, as previous long chapters like chapters 17 and 20 suffered similarly long writing times. Chapter 27 also took several months to release, and notably like the above two was immensely long. Though more recently it has been lessened, as the author has begun splitting some long chapters to post on a more regular basis, and has gotten help from other writers.
- The Danganronpa fanfic Never Say Never used to get updated on a biweekly basis until October of 2016, since then the updates have been every month or two, sometimes even three months. hunterofcomedy have explained that this is a result due to the death of two family members, him having a full-time job and the story becoming increasingly more complex.
- The six story Powerpuff Girls series Ladder started in 2007 and ended 10 years later in 2017. There were gaps between several of the fanfics.
- The Pokémon Squad has a fairly erratic schedule. The first season took approximately 9 months to air (January to October 2010), which is fairly normal. The rest of the Sailor Pikachu era (91 episodes over seven seasons) took until Summer 2013 to finish. Then, Seasons 8 to 16 enjoyed regular updates from August 2013 to December 2016. But... Season 17 came into play, which plays this trope straight. That season started in January 2016, and took until May 2019 to finish. In fact, there was a ten month gap between Episodes 216 ("RM Goes to Hell", from March 2018) and 217 ("Ash Con", from January 2019), but updates became more frequent after this point, and Season 18 averts this trope so far. The official reasoning is unknown, but there were a large amount of scrapped episodes during that period; there were originally over 80 episodes waiting for a release, but only about 20 of them survived.
- The series dipped back into this by Episode 228. The intro was released in June 2020, then it took over a month for Chapter 1 of the episode to release. The episode began updating pretty quickly until Chapter 4, when hiatuses lasting up to four months became common. There hasn't been a new chapter since the release of Chapter 11 in January 2022. The episode's absurd length and complicated plot compared to the others might have something to do with it.
- Here by Accident, Staying on Purpose had a several month slip due to the artist getting injured. Chapter 3 ended August 20, 2019 but Chapter 4 didn't begin until January 21, 2020.
- The Masks we Wear (JiggleWigs) had a several year gap between chapters that lasted from October 2016 to January 2020.
- All in the Family: After the first three chapters were published in February 2013, it ended up with a slip that lasted three months due to real-life things getting in the way. After Chapter 4 finally saw the light of day in May 2013, it went back to having regular updates for the most part. Chapter 7, however, ended up with a slight delay due to the May 19th and 20th tornadoes hitting the author's home state of Oklahoma.
- The MLP Loops: In-universe. Twilight and Dash are horrified when their favorite author, AK Yearling, announces that her next book will be delayed by a month. Except since they're trapped in a "Groundhog Day" Loop that only expands rather rarely, that means that they have to wait thousands upon thousands of years from their perspective.
- The Loud House: Revamped: Despite this being updated daily, there are points where the author takes breaks, usually ranging between a few days to a week.
- More Than Human is notorious for this, due to a combination of chapter sizes (over 26,000 words on average) and the author and beta readers being exhaustive in their editorial processes. Just editing a chapter takes a minimum of a month. The most extreme instance came with chapter ten, which published in 2018, five years from the previous update. During that time, the author shifted their blogging efforts from LiveJournalnote to Dreamwidthnote . The author also has yet to cross-post new chapters to FanFiction.Net since porting the story to Archive of Our Own in March 2020; as a result, the FFN version is three chapters behind the AO3 version, which last updated in October 2022.
- True Potential went through almost all of 2017 without a single update, until a new chapter was posted in February 2018. Reasons for the lack of updates include the author's own personal problems, as well as being unable to write a mystery driven arc a la Phoenix Wright or Danganronpa before giving up, and settling for something else.
