I've been around fanfiction since I was extremely young, long enough to feel sort of just viscerally uncomfortable with the "commission model" more and more authors seem to be trying to employ lately. There was a time the rest of fandom would have shut you down instantly, terrified that the copyright holders were going to come down mercilessly on everyone writing and reading fanfic purely as a hobby as soon as they noticed anybody openly trying to profit off their intellectual property.

Still, while I reserve major doubts that it's a Good Idea for any of these authors in the long run (especially here, where they'd potentially be dealing with DISNEY--ie, the guys who are largely responsible for keeping the US public domain stagnant from the 1920's on for the sake of Mickey Mouse), within fandom I do feel like there's a real ethical difference between saying, "Hey guys, if there's a fic you really really just want to exist and nobody's writing it, you can always commission it from me if you like my other stuff," and taking something that'd been posted for free and, it having taken off in popularity, requiring money to keep going.

Technically, the ASIS author didn't do the latter, because the focus of her post was commissioning drabbles and that's the only thing she's explicitly guaranteeing quid pro quo, but I'd say she certainly insinuated it when she said "any charity I do get will only speed along the process of ASIS." And of course, since it is an insinuation, and since she's framing those payments as "charity," if anyone did put up hoping to get another chapter asap and has yet to see anything, well, nothing was explicitly and concretely promised, was it? Even that "first half of May" projection can ultimately be written off as the sort of genuinely sincere well-meaning wishful thinking that just happens with plenty of other fanfic writers doing their thing on their own time before life and/or lost motivation gets in the way. Hmm. ***

***For the record, I'm not accusing her of any pre-meditated dishonesty, because I have no way of knowing what her motives are. However I do think this is--at best--irresponsible behavior evincing a lack of reasonable foresight.