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I’m sure we’ve all read a fic so engaging that you can’t wait to get to the ending and see how your favorite characters live their happily ever after. Or maybe it’s an angst fic where the characters are in danger, you have no idea who will die or be seriously injured next, and you can’t wait to see how they solve the mystery before they all end up dead.
Except you don’t get to see an ending, because the author left it open to interpretation.
I hate ambiguous endings. I avoid fics tagged with “ambiguous ending” all the time.
I read a fic to get invested in the story. This is an escape from the real world, and depending on how good the writing is, I’m invested in the characters. But no matter how much I may dislike characterization or not, if I read your story, I’m reading your story to find out what the ending is and how the characters get their.
I don’t read fics only to decide what I would do at the end of the story. Sure, I think about other options the characters could have taken and wonder about different choices the author could have taken to reach an ending. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t consider alternate paths their characters could have taken.
But as a reader only, it’s not my job to decide how this fic ends and where the characters end up. Frankly, if the author of my favorite fic gave me their story and told me I’m free to write whatever ending I want, not only would the ending be bad, it would ignore almost everything that happened in the story up to that point to give everyone a happy ending. I like happy endings, and no matter what the fic is, I want the characters to have those happy endings.
The author is the one who led us to where the characters are now, and they should be the one who decides where the characters end up. I would seriously rather a bad ending where everyone is dead over an ambiguous endings because at least that’s final. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. That’s it, and there’s nothing more.
With ambiguous endings, you’re left with the eternal question of “what really happens?” (Unless the author makes a sequel, but that kind of ruins the point of an ambiguous ending.)
You read this entire story, and maybe it’s the best thing you’ve read in years. You’re invested in the characters, the plot is amazing, and everything is realistic. You’re invested in where everything ends up. And you never get a true, concrete endings because it’s ambiguous.
I feel like ambiguous endings may as well just be incomplete and abandoned because you as the reader have to decide the ending, but they’re more disappointing. At least with abandoned fics, you almost always go into it knowing it’s abandoned and you won’t have a true ending. With ambiguous, you’re expecting a complete fic with a concrete ending that you’re not given.
Please authors, even if you don’t tell us everything that happens (either because you yourself don’t even know or to leave room for a sequel) at least give us a proper ending. Don’t lead us on for the entire fic with us expecting most things to be resolved at the end just to say, “well, my part’s done! Whatever you want to happen can happen now!”
I’m just a tired fic reader who wants an ending. At this point it doesn’t even need to be a good ending. You could just write a sentence saying “and everyone died for reasons unknown” and while I would low key be sad because it’s not a happy endings, it’s better than being left in confusion forever about what could happen to them.