If characters A, B, and C are in the tagset, and I request "Any", there's a good chance I will match on someone who only wants to write C and is expecting a C-focused prompt. (Sometimes a very good chance, if there's an offerer who are only wants to write C and nobody ever requests C, they match the Any requester every time.) And there's an expectation that an Any requester will prompt for every nommed character, or only include requests which work equally well for them all, which gets super exhausting if there's 20 nommed characters, even if you do truly love them all. Sure it's not required, but if you get tired and don't prompt for W and you match the W stan, you're going to have an unhappy writer and a crappy gift.
Meanwhile if you offer Any, you have to be willing and able to write literally any possible combo of nommed characters, and that can be really hard to be confident of in some fandoms, especially if there are super obscure characters or chars from very different parts of canon. And again if you're the Any person you'll be the only match with the impossible combo request.
Either way if you're not a person who engages with the canon via specific characters, the lack of reciprocity for Any makes nominating and offering a lot more complicated and stressful, and a lot of the time you'll just give up and pick a couple characters just to get through it.
If there was an option so you could know you were matching two people who weren't expecting any particular characters in the requests, or who are both happy to treat characters as ODAO, it would open a lot of options.
Not to mention the fandoms that don't really have characters in the conventional sense at all, where the current nom guidelines are just a bunch of messy workarounds.
no subject
Meanwhile if you offer Any, you have to be willing and able to write literally any possible combo of nommed characters, and that can be really hard to be confident of in some fandoms, especially if there are super obscure characters or chars from very different parts of canon. And again if you're the Any person you'll be the only match with the impossible combo request.
Either way if you're not a person who engages with the canon via specific characters, the lack of reciprocity for Any makes nominating and offering a lot more complicated and stressful, and a lot of the time you'll just give up and pick a couple characters just to get through it.
If there was an option so you could know you were matching two people who weren't expecting any particular characters in the requests, or who are both happy to treat characters as ODAO, it would open a lot of options.
Not to mention the fandoms that don't really have characters in the conventional sense at all, where the current nom guidelines are just a bunch of messy workarounds.