Sometimes I feel there’s a very artificial sort of divide in fandom, between Us Fans and The Creators of the Source Material

Some of it, of course, is the very real economic divide– many of the owners of canon properties are huge corporations or millionaires, very much unlike us in a real-world way

But not all of them. Being the owner/creator of canon material– even a popular canon– isn’t what makes them so different from the rest of us.

And it certainly isn’t grounds for the extreme double standard I sometimes see, between expectations for Us and Them.

Sometimes I feel an urge to ask some younger fans some questions that feel to me like they’d be horribly condescending– and yet I think some people may really need to be asked them.

Like

Suppose you made an OC, an original character of your own creation. Suppose you made a bunch of OCs, and you wrote stories and drew art about them, in an original setting you made up.

Suppose you even got some support for this on Patreon and made some money from it.

How would you react if someone else started using your OCs and your original setting in their own art and writing, without asking for your permission?

Would the answer be different depending on whether they gave you explicit credit for the ideas in a disclaimer?

Would the answer be different depending on what they portrayed your OCs doing?

Would the answer be different depending on whether they made money from it?

And… if you answer these questions for yourself differently from how you expect the creators of a popular canon to answer them… please try to spend some time thinking about why.

At the very least, it may help you understand some of what happened in fandom history…. and how certain traditions of fandom work now…. and why some policies of AO3 are set up the way they are.

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