So last August I was at GenCon, and part of that time I was at the Writers Symposium. And miracle of miracles, my overly shy self actually managed to network a little bit, which is one of the things you’re supposed to do at the Writers Symposium. Said networking even went relatively well. So, yay me.

And there I was making small talk with a fellow author who was friendly and a very accomplished person in multiple areas, quite interesting to talk to. And after we’d been talking for a while, and discovered that we both write horror sometimes, I asked if they liked zombies and then if they ever read fanfiction. The wall immediately went up. “I try not to.” And I plugged One Day in Surrey anyway, because it’s a damn good story and I’m proud of it. We continued to talk for a bit longer, then went on to our separate seminars and I didn’t see them again while I was there.

But it was bugging me, that wall. Part of my brain was saying, you made a mistake, you shouldn’t have mentioned it. Some of you are thinking that too, as you read this. But my brain and you are both wrong, and I’m going to tell you why.

I was at GenCon for four days, and I spent hours trekking back and forth across the Event Hall where all the stuff you can buy is at. I had a list of things I wanted to find, but I was getting to the booths on my list by just roaming up and down the long, crowded aisles to see everything else. Games, books, tea, more games, t-shirts, pins, art…and there we find our issue. Because some of the awesome artists in Artist Alley are fan artists.

Fan artists. Proud of their work, showing it off, people telling them how great they are for creating it. Less than ten minutes’ walk away from the Symposium where I can’t tell people I write fanfiction as well as original fiction without having them pull away from me like I’m carrying a disease, because it’s shameful to admit to fic. A dirty little secret you’re not supposed to share, whether you’re a fic writer or a fic reader. And apparently no one at the Symposium gives a shit about this weird double standard, because that’s different, those are artists.

An opinion endorsed by large swaths of the fanfic community, by the way, both online and offline. Hence the post title. We did this. We fucking did this to ourselves, and we’re the ones keeping it going. Me. You. Everyone in the community who’s carrying around internalized shame for writing or reading fic, everyone who titters behind their hands and gleefully wallows in how naughty they’re being. Everyone who decries the fact that fanfiction started trickling into the mainstream back in 2020, and who says that’s different and vomits out a sanctimonious lecture when newbie fic writers complain about the fan artists being accepted and celebrated (and yes, getting away with selling their fanworks) when we’re not.

I’m not talking about the selling part. I still don’t know why conventions let them do it without proof of a licensing agreement, even just for CYOA purposes. I don’t know how t-shirt companies can make and sell cartoonized depictions of popular characters without having Disney send a pack of flying lawyers after them. I’m also not talking about the difference in the medium making a difference legally—fan art is usually seen as celebrating the original work, fanfiction as competing with it, even though that seems a little backward when you’re talking about a TV show or movie that has official merch. Anyway, I’m not a copyright attorney and this is not what I’m complaining about.

I’m complaining about us as a community failing to act like a community. Us not standing up for ourselves. Us not standing up for each other. A fanfic writer who’s doing good work—or hell, even bad work, because crappy fiction is not confined to fic writing!—should be able to proudly add their work to their writing portfolio if they want to, talk about it in a writers group, claim it as the creative fucking achievement it is. The artists do this without even thinking about it, it’s normalized in their community. And it ought to be in ours, too.