Note: This interview contains adult language, as well as discussions of mature content and sexual harassment.

Sean
Could you introduce yourself?

Seanan
I am Seanan McGuire. I also write as Mira Grant. As myself I am primarily known for my urban fantasy works, such as the October Daye and InCryptid series, and modern portal fantasy, such as Wayward Children and Middlegame.

As Mira Grant, I mostly write biomedical science fiction thrillers, including the Newsflesh trilogy, the Parasitology trilogy, and assorted other works.

I am currently the writer of Ghost-Spider for Marvel comics and have done various other comics work.

I’ve been a member of fandom actively since I was 14.

Sean
Your first published novel was the urban fantasy work, Rosemary and Rue, which was in 2009. Could you discuss your work prior to that, both in fandom and other places?

Seanan
Well, my work prior to that was primarily fanfiction. I wrote a huge quantity of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer fic, in the day. I was also an active member of a print Elfquest zine for several years and I did a lot of Veronica Mars fanfic, some fandom of just two people Disney Channel Original Movies fanfic. I was very well known for ‘Why did you do that’ crossovers—I wrote the Veronica Mars/Josie and the Pussycats crossover that was going around a little while ago, and quite a bit of Doctor Who fanfic.

Sean
You mentioned in an earlier essay you started writing fanfiction when you were six. How did you first discover fanfiction?

Seanan
Well, I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. What I knew was that, like any other six-year-old, I wanted to have adventures with my toys. It’s very standard for kids to imagine themselves in their media: you’re playing G.I. Joe and you’re with the G.I. Joe, or you’re playing My Little Pony and you’re with the ponies.

My first fanfic was me writing stories where I got to go on adventures with the Doctor, or where I got to go play in Ponyland instead of Megan.

It wasn’t until much later that I found out this was called fanfic and people did it all the time, and that writing a story about yourself having the adventures is called self-insert, or ‘Mary Sue.’ I also found out it was dirty, bad and wrong, but actually, there is nothing wrong with a self-insert, and ‘Mary Sue’ is a sexist term that should never be used. But that is how I got started.

Sean
The author Celia Tam made one of my favorite comments about fanfiction:

Painters are encouraged to go to the art museum and sketch and copy the masters. Musicians are urged to perform the songs of other composers before they ever write their own. Writers, though, are expected to lock ourselves in a room alone and strain until somehow genius pops out.

There’s this taboo about fanfiction, where if you write something in someone else’s sandbox, you’re doing something wrong. Why do you think, at a high level, fanfiction is stigmatized?

Seanan
I honestly think that fanfiction is stigmatized on a high level because, for a long time, fanfiction was the creative part of fandom that was most dominated by women and queer people.

When all the lead characters in everything you’re reading or watching are straight white men—when they’re somehow the chosen one, the one who gets to pull the sword from the stone, the one the dragon loves… It’s always a dude, and on the very rare occasions that it’s a woman, she is only the chosen one until a dude comes along and can do it better than her. A huge amount of fanfiction was people putting themselves into the story going, “What if the chosen one was a woman? What if the chosen one was a gay man? What if the chosen man was a gay woman?” And it’s bringing all of these marginalized parts of the story into the forefront.

This was very threatening to some of the straight white guys who thought that the natural order of things was, “All stories focused on us,” and you can see this in fanzine and APA writings from the earlier days of fanfiction. So, if I wanted to write my chosen one story, but it was about a lady who didn’t need a man, that’s filthy, that’s wrong. That’s perverse. If I wanted to write my Star Trek story, but let Spock and Kirk actually be in love with each other, the way that they were very much written and played on the screen, that’s filthy, that’s disgusting, that’s perverse.

The closest thing we’ve had to that woman-dominated area in traditionally published fiction has been urban fantasy, which a whole lot of men will not read because they have dismissed the entire genre as vampire porn. There’s nothing wrong with vampire porn—I enjoy a good piece of vampire porn from time to time—but the entire genre is not sexy sex times. Most of the sexy sex times are actually off in paranormal romance, which is a completely different genre.

Sean
Since fanfiction is often associated with porn or erotic stories, do you think a lot of people write off all fanfiction as just porn?

Seanan
That is very much a stigma around fanfic, that it’s all about pornography. We have the Organization for Transformative Works, which is the fanfiction legal support organization, and they run Archive of Our Own, or AO3, which is the world’s largest fanfiction repository.

There’ve been various studies done—I was just trying to find one really quickly about how much of the fanfiction on Archive of Our Own is actually NC-17, meaning it actually includes graphic sex—and what they’ve found is that on the whole, fanfiction is not pornographic. There is no more graphic sex in fanfiction than there is in any other set of works. Nobody says Game of Thrones is trash because George R. R. Martin likes writing dicks going into things. So why is fanfiction trash? Because SuperWhoLockLover#12 likes writing dicks going into things. As long as the dicks are plot appropriate and doing something useful, I don’t think that’s a reason to dismiss an entire work.

Sean
I would agree, and to your point about fanfic being from marginalized people, I’m a gay man and the reason why I started reading fanfiction was that was the only place I could see stories of characters like me. Growing up, fanfiction was all that was available to me.

Seanan
And that is the thing. Traditional publishing has to look at what the market will bear. I think if some of the wonderful queer science-fiction being published today had come out 20 years ago, the publishers would have suffered for it because we were socially in a very different place. But if those authors had been the age they are now 20 years ago, they could have been telling those stories in fanfic and still getting them out there for people who have the time and the resources to look for them, and that’s very, very important.

Sean
You mentioned the stigma primarily affecting female authors. Do you think male fanfic authors do get the same negative responses or do you think the Internet’s anonymity changes things?

Seanan
I think a lot of authors that people assume must be women are really men in fandom. There are more men writing fanfic, and a lot more non-binary people who’re writing fanfic, than we know.

When I talk about fanfic it tends to be in a very gender binary sense because I did grow up reading fic in a time before our understanding of gender was as nuanced as it is right now, and it’s still not very nuanced compared to what it will be in a decade or so. I can’t speak to the non-binary experience in fandom. I can say that male fanfic authors, when they reveal themselves as men, have historically gotten a much more positive reaction than female fanfiction authors.

They’re less likely to get harassed than a woman, and they also get benefits within fandom. I was part of a couple writers’ groups where the default assumption is, fanfic writers are female. Whether right or wrong, whether that’s appropriate or not, that is the default and so we’re chugging along, middle of the pack, getting the same number of kudos and comments as everyone and then it comes out that one of the writers is a dude, and suddenly overnight their kudos triple, and they’ll start getting comments about how incredibly literate they are. And nothing has changed other than, we now know.

For the closest equivalent of that effect in traditional publishing, look at the responses to James Tiptree Jr.’s stories before and after she was known to be a woman. Before we knew she was a woman, she would get praised for the intellectual masculinity of her work and would get talked about constantly as one of the best in our genre. After we found out she was a lady, that dropped off precipitously. It didn’t stop, but you don’t have nearly the frequency of praise.

Sean
You’ve mentioned writing fanfiction has had a really positive influence on your own career. You’ve been fairly open that you met your agent via your Buffy: The Vampire Slayer fanfiction. Can you talk about how fanfiction has had an impact on your writing as a craft?

Seanan
With fanfiction you get a level of immediate feedback that you can’t get with traditionally published fiction. With traditionally published fiction, even when you’re talking about something like serials—where a story was coming out every two weeks like clockwork, bam, bam, bam—in order to make that publishing schedule work, I had to have written the first six of 12 issues before #1 ran. There was no time to shape the story based on reader responses. With a multi-chapter fanfic piece, you can actually start shaping the story based on reader responses. If people go, “I really love how you write this character, I want to see more of them,” you can play it up. That’s a faster timetable.

You also have to feed the beast. If you’re doing fanfic, you need to be posting consistently. You need to be ready for people going “more, more, more.” You need to spend a week writing a chapter and have someone devour it in 15 minutes and then yell at you because the next one is not ready. The worst I’ve ever seen is a fanfic author out in Scotland who had somebody leave a comment going, “I asked you to send me the rest of the story so I could read it to my daughter. Well, you said no, and now she’s dead.” That particular author is one who does not write ahead. So, if he posts chapter one of a story, that’s all he has done, and the commenter was literally asking for the impossible. But there is the attitude in some fanfic readers that, “I should be able to have whole story right now since I want it.”

You will learn to take critique and not take it personally. I feel like fanfic is a great school of hard knocks. I had one person read a story of mine—and this was 15 years ago now and I still remember it—and comment, ”Your writing is not shit. Your writing is what happens when someone eats shit and shits it out again.” And I was just like, “Damn. Okay, cool.”

Sean
That’s a response.

Seanan
Yeah. But it helps. Comments like that on fanfiction made me a lot more equipped to be magnanimous and not punch people when I got responses to my books like, “Why is Georgia a woman? There’s no way a woman would survive in the zombie apocalypse because menstruation would attract the undead.” They say that like that was a reasonable thing to say to an author. Birth control still exists. Also, zombies are not bloodhounds. Also, not all women menstruate. I don’t tend to document the periods of my characters in the books. That would be the best material ever. Buffy cycle day one: Ovulation. No.

Or, “Why is everyone gay?” There were three gay people in this whole book. We run in packs. Okay. I was like, “What the fuck is wrong with you? Have you ever asked an author, ‘Why is everyone straight?’ There are 17 straight people in this book, but there are three gay ones. So why is everyone gay?” Or, “Why is Mahir Indian?” I don’t know. His parents were from fucking India. Shit like that, I was much more prepared for it because I had already dealt with the unfettered id of fandom responding to characters they already cared about.

Sean
Do you think fans in fandom are more toxic than they are for mainstream works?

Seanan
Oh God, no. Fans in fanfic and in fandom can be very toxic because they have very strong ideas in their heads of who the characters are, how they behave, what they want, and it can be difficult to break someone away from that. But if you’re reading fanfic, it is almost certainly because you have a genuine love of those characters in that setting. You’re bringing some affection to the table with you.

Now there has been a recent purity movement in fanfic readers who call themselves “antis,” and I think that they are more toxic than most readers of traditionally published work because they feel their toxicity can have the outcome they want, whereas readers of traditionally published works don’t necessarily think that. That being said, readers of traditionally published works can be just as toxic as any fandom.

My fans are generally pretty great, but we also work really, really hard as a community to engender a culture of kindness and doing your best, and I think that’s a thing that has to be modeled by the initial creator to a certain degree. If you’re just going to say, “Fuck you, I’m the author, I can do whatever I want,” then your fans are going to feel like they can be a little more aggressive. If you’re going to say, “Hey, we’re all here, we all have to share the same space. Let’s not be assholes to each other,” it’s more likely that your readers are going to take a deep breath and go, “Okay, we’re not being assholes today.”

Sean
Are you all right with fans writing fanfiction of your work?

Seanan
Oh, absolutely. I just can’t read it ever.

There was a very well publicized and partially false accounting of Marion Zimmer Bradley having to trunk a novel because it had been influenced by fan works. Now I know that when we speak about Marion Zimmer Bradley in these days, it’s mostly in the context of the accusations of pedophilia levied against her by her daughter. But this is outside that context. This happened long before that.

The story is, she read a fan story that was very, very similar to a book she was already working on. She contacted the fan, which is how the fan could know for a fact that she had read the story, and said, “Hey, this touches very strongly on some stuff I was working on and you’ve got so much I didn’t think of, can I have it?” And the fan said, “Sure.” And Marion was going to credit her in the acknowledgements.

Then supposedly the fan’s big bad husband came down and said, “No, she gets to be a coauthor and get half of the rights and royalties.” And Marion said, “No, not appropriate,” and trunked the whole book and could never tell that story.

The actual story, which was researched in detail by Jim C Hines a couple of years ago, is much more complicated and much less, “Oh, the author did everything right and the fan did everything wrong.” But the end result, because that story in its false form was circulating for so long, is that writers are a little gun shy about anything that could provably connect their work to a fan’s work. A good fanfic writer is generally extrapolating from the material that is already there. They’re looking at the clues that they’ve been given and they’re projecting forward to try and figure out where those clues are going to take us.

I have a friend who was working on a very elaborate Buffy: The Vampire Slayer story, where Oz—who was Willow’s boyfriend in the early seasons—was not a werewolf, but instead was the son of Lucifer, and when she laid out the reasons that she had this theory based on stuff that had actually happened in the show up to that point, it was a solid theory. It made sense. But she was extrapolating from what the show had given her. Now, if that was what Joss Wheaton had actually been intending to do, she would have looked like a genius, instead of someone who had a crackpot theory. But a good fanfic writer is going to be looking for those things in the properties they’re writing about. The fear is that if you read the Toby books and said, “I think this is Seanan’s endgame,” and you actually managed to hit upon my endgame and then wrote it, and you could prove I had read your fanfic, you could sue me for stealing your intellectual property.

I genuinely believe that you would lose. I feel that copyright is on my side. We know that you can’t copyright ideas. It’s not plagiarism to steal an idea from someone. It’s only plagiarism to steal an expression. Just like you can’t copyright names; you could go out tomorrow and write the Harry Potter and Harry Dresden adventures series about two wizards rampaging through the world and as long as it was not exactly those two wizards, you could not be hit with a copyright infringement case. So I do think that whoever makes that first lawsuit is going to lose their shirt, but it’s going to take time and it’s going to take money and it’s going to take effort on the part of the author who has to defend against it.

And I’m tired. I’m really tired. I put out four books a year. I write a monthly comic book. I have three cats that I have to keep entertained. I do still have to do my own laundry and dishes and I’m fucking exhausted. I don’t sleep enough. I do a lot of conventions when we’re not all under quarantine. I do not have the time for your bullshit lawsuit because you wrote a fanfic in which Toby ate bananas with her oatmeal and then I had Toby eating bananas with her oatmeal and, “Oh my God, I stole your idea and you need to sue me now.”

Plus, I am very big on the idea that creators should try to be good neighbors. Our readers are the reason that we have a job. If I didn’t have readers, I would have to get a job at Starbucks because I’ve been out of the workforce for five years now as a full time author and that is the gap in my resume that anything at a higher level than Starbucks does not forgive. And if you made me work at Starbucks, I’d beat somebody with a chair within a week. I don’t like people enough to work retail anymore. So I don’t want to create a situation where you can credibly say, “That author who is above me in the hierarchy of our fandom, because she is the original creator, stole my shit,” and have it sound like you’re really telling the truth and not like you’ve gone Rooney Tunes off to Cabo for the weekend.

So, I am thrilled when people write in my universes. The first time one of my fandoms was listed as an option for Yuletide, I literally cried. I’m not exaggerating. I literally sat down and cried because I had changed the world in a way that I was never sure I was going to be able to. But I can’t read it and if you try to tell me about it I will shut you down like a blockbuster video.

Sean
Do you think that authors should be able to say that you can’t create fanfic of their works? I believe Archive of Our Own has taken the position that fanfiction is a transformative work and permissible under copyright law.

Seanan
No, I don’t think authors should be able to block fanfiction. Some sites historically banned fanfic for series were the author had directly requested fanfic not be written, but I think that is an unreasonable and alienating request to make of a readership given that telling stories and retelling stories and putting yourself in stories is a human impulse that goes back as far as we can trace the existence of fairytales, folktales, oral accounts, things like the fucking Bible. They all proved that what humans want to do with story is throw it on the counter like a bread dough and squish it around and see what will happen.

And if I say to my readers, “No, this story is for consumption only, and if you try to touch it, I will slap you,” then why are they going to want to consume it? Because the brain is inherently going to want to do that remixing. You can’t stop it. You can’t turn it off. That is a natural human response. It’s like saying you’re going to eat these cornflakes and you’re never going to masturbate again. You’re going to read this book and then you’re never going to write fanfic again. It just doesn’t work. I think authors can say anything they want. I don’t think that they have any rights to enforce it and I don’t think that it’s reasonable, fair or—from a purely capitalistic standpoint—smart.

The closest I’ve ever come to “don’t write for fanfic” is when Every Heart a Doorway came out and I was reasonably sure Wayward Children was going to be an option for that year’s Yuletide. I asked fans to please be considerate of how little asexual representation there is and not write a story recasting Nancy, who is asexual, as anything other than she is. Because that seemed cruel in a way that I didn’t want to sanction, but I had no way of enforcing it. It’s not like I’m going to go and break my own rule and read those stories and find out that you’re the one that put Nancy in the middle of the gang bang.

Sean
Since you’ve been such an active member of fandom for such a long time, you’ve probably seen shifts from the LiveJournal days.

Seanan
I miss LiveJournal so much.

I was actually just on LiveJournal. I have a permanent LiveJournal from that year where they said “if you give us $100 we will give you a paid account with maximum features forever,” and even though at the time it was a lot of money for me, I thought, “No, no, no. This is great. This is a long-term investment.” I bought my LiveJournal and I went back there the other day to try and look something up and thought, “Oh God, I miss it so much.”

Sean
As do I. I have written on the development of fandom, from LiveJournal to Tumblr and how that changed the landscape of fandom harassment, because as long as there’s no “recommended for you” to break you out of your bubble, the fanfics you see and the communities you see were only the ones you opted into. This is unlike Tumblr, where someone makes a post someone doesn’t like and tags it with the fandom name, and the waves of hate occur.

You’ve seen this shift, so I wanted to ask, what are some of the biggest changes you’ve observed in how fandom has changed from the earlier days of online fandom to the more modern times on AO3.

Seanan
Well, the earliest fandom activity that I was involved with was actually a paper Elfquest zine, which was edited and published in a Kinkos. You would subscribe for a year, and once a quarter you would get a book. I still have all of those in a bag in my closet; it was actually great. I credit learning how to be edited with that zine. Arlene Harris was our editor. I was in high school at the time, and like many of us in fandom, I was the smartest kid in my high school. The reason fans fight so much is that if you put 30 of us in a room, all 30 of us think we’re the smartest person in that room because we were the smartest person in our high school. We just don’t consider how many high schools are pumping out a couple smartest people every year.

My English teachers never really had time for me. If it was me, and then 28 people not performing at my level. The English teacher knew I was going to be basically okay, so they would just give me an A and send me on my merry way, but they would not edit me and they would not improve me, because they didn’t have the time or resources to do it. Some of them genuinely regretted that and told me so at the time like, “I wish I could give you more help. I think you have the potential to do more than you are, but I just don’t have the resources.”

So the first time I turned in a story for the zine, Arlene sent it back to me dripping with red ink. It was a massacre. It was Anne Boleyn at the headman’s axe and it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, because for the first time someone was actually telling me how to improve. Even though I will never show those zines to anyone, part of why I still keep them is I can see me improve from the first issue. In that first issue, everything is a cliché, everything is just this very straightforward, “What the fuck is going on.” But, by the end of it, I’m doing eight-part, elaborately-plotted, multi-threaded stories and this was just a three-year period. So, I learned to be edited.

Then we moved to Yahoo groups, and it was much like LiveJournal today. What you got was what you had opted into because you didn’t just have the option to scroll through an archive. What you had was, “I’m on the Buffy L mailing list and all the fanfic I get is the Buffy L mailing list.” That for me was a step up in quantity but down in quality, because now that it’s electronic, you don’t have to edit it all; everything just comes and comes and comes. That was a little bit startling, but I read a lot. Prior to today, I would’ve said I still had a lot of that stuff saved, but I just tried to log into that email account and found that my Pine, which is where all my email has been saved since high school, had been deleted. I’m a little broken up about that.

We went from there to the LiveJournal days where it still was opt-in; you had fanfic rec groups going on LiveJournal and there was a very heavy community of commenting. It was considered standard, polite and normal that if you read the story you would say what you thought of it. Now, you wouldn’t necessarily say, “This is amazing,” but you also probably wouldn’t really shit on it unless you were trying to be an asshole. You’d just be like, “Hey, this was an interesting look at something I had not considered, moving the fuck on now.” That was pretty cool, because LiveJournal was the opt-in model, much more like AO3 is today, where you do have to scroll and decide from descriptions. We also had a very strong culture of “don’t like, don’t read and the backspace button is yours.”

Then LiveJournal got bought by the Russians, and we got all these crazy pants content restrictions put in place, which was awful and so everyone scattered to the winds and most of fandom eventually settled on Tumblr.

Tumblr is very much a firehose, and we’ve seen the rise of things like the fannish purity groups—like the “antis” I mentioned before—who are weaponizing language in a way that reminds me very much of the Christian purges that got parts of LiveJournal shutdown a couple of times. This is because they have decided that if you have written anything—not even explicitly sexual, just anything with underage characters or characters who were underage at one time, which technically is all characters—in a sexual or romantic situation, it’s because you, personally, are a pedophile.

They throw the word pedophile around like it’s candy out of a piñata, and it is hurtful. I’m a child sexual abuse survivor, and I’ve had people accuse me of being a pedophile because, in InCryptid, two of my characters met when one of them was 16 and they’re like, “Oh my God, you wouldn’t have a 16 year-old girl having sexual feelings unless you were a pedophile.” Well, when I was a 16 year-old girl, I was having sex with my boyfriend under the stage in the drama department. So, I’m pretty sure 16 year-old girls do have sexual feelings sometimes. I do think it would be inappropriate for me to write them having graphic sex, but I don’t write anyone having graphic sex because that’s not what I do. So the censorship brigade has found Tumblr.

It’s interesting, because as someone who was a teenager in the early days of the internet, we were all lying about our age to get into adult spaces and now they’re trying to shut down adult spaces because they don’t want to lie about their age, but they do want to be in those spaces.

Sean
I remember discovering adultfanfiction.net; I certainly was on there before I was 18.

Seanan
I think we all were. I mean, I was 15 and on some of these mailing lists and I’d be like, “Everything is fine. Everything is fine. Oh my God, it’s all seven doctors having sex with each other and all their companions. Do penises really bend that way?” They do on Gallifrey.

Tumblr fandom can get really, really shouty really quickly because so many people are swinging wildly and yelling, and as a result people wind up very bruised. There was a show called The Librarians for a little while, which I really loved. I love people who do magic with math and Cassandra, who was one of the main characters, did magic with math, which made her perfect for me. I re-blogged a gifset for her at one point where, in my tags, I had called her “perfect little math girl” because she refers to herself in the show as a “little math girl.” Somebody came at me screaming about how she was a strong female character, and she was not a little girl at all, and blah, blah blah. And I’m like, “Well, I didn’t call her a little girl. I said, ‘perfect little math girl,’ not ‘perfect little girl,’ which would be a different statement and I was quoting the show, why are you screaming at me? Go scream at the show writers or better yet, don’t scream at anyone.”

Sean
I’ve always thought what AO3 has done has been such a great thing for fandom, because they’ve provided us with a home with lawyers and an actual abuse team, which is nice.

Seanan
And AO3 is a place where you can’t just directly message creators. Every time I get a message on Tumblr, I wince a little bit because, what’s it going to be? Is it going to be, “I liked the pictures of your cat”? Or is it going to be, “You’re a fucking pedophile”? Or is it going to be, “You have not gone whole wholeheartedly in on support of my preferred presidential candidate, you clearly want poor people to die in the streets because they can’t afford their insulin”? I’ll get all four of those in the same day. It’s magical.

Sean
Do you still write fanfiction?

Seanan
I do. Most recently Sailor Moon, weirdly enough.

Sean
While I know many people know you from your novels, you’ve also been involved in the filk scene, or fantasy/science-fiction folk music, for quite some time.

Seanan
Yes. I have won multiple Pegasus awards.

Sean
And you were nominated for a Hugo award, if I’m not mistaken, for Wicked Girls?

Seanan
Yes. It is the only time a single-artist filk album has made the ballot. I believe a couple of multi-artist albums have made it in other categories. Wicked Girls was a best related work nominee, rather than a best dramatic presentation nominee, which I honestly feel is where filk albums belong. Something that is telling a single coherent story, like the Hadestown soundtrack, is the best related work. Something that is written to be a cycle or an opera is a best dramatic presentation. Something that’s just individual pieces is a best related work.

Sean
For people first discovering that medium, what are some of your go-to recommendations for people just discovering filk?

Seanan
I would recommend Archetype Cafe by Talis Kimberley, Thirteen by Vixy and Tony, Standing Stones by Marian Call, and Who Let Him in Here? By Tom Smith.

Sean
Carmen Miranda’s Ghost is the filk album that gets the most play in my house.

Seanan
There was actually an anthology called Carmen Miranda’s Ghost inspired by that song.

Sean
That exhausts my questions. Do you have anything you’d like to add about fandom or your experiences in fandom?

Seanan
I love fandom. It’s overall positive, but you do have to manage your own experience. You have to set your own boundaries and you do have to be certain that there’re boundaries you can stick with. Like I am still writing fanfic, but I don’t release it under my own name because people were starting to review my fanfic as if it were published work. They were getting really aggressive about typos, about this sentence, about things that it’s common to point out, but it’s not common to be like, “Fuck you, I paid for this.” Well, you didn’t pay for this. That is the whole point of fanfic. It is free. I wrote it for fun, say nice things or go the fuck away. I didn’t ask for your concrit. I wound up having to put my fanfic under a pseudonym.

A lot of it is, “Just be nice, be friendly. We’re all here because we love this shit.”

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