How would you feel if one day you came across fanfiction for The Harvester?
That’s a very complicated question.
If you want total honesty, I’d feel very strange about it if it wasn’t from someone I knew/trusted. Now, if they were incredibly respectful and faithful to the characters and who they are, I’d give it a chance.
However, if it was a usual fanfiction fare, CZ and I would be very uncomfortable and prefer not to see it. Normally, we as fanfiction writers wouldn’t have that much to say on it, because we’re borrowing characters. But that isn’t the case here.
TH is different. It’s 99% OC’s that mean a lot to us, on very sensitive, personal levels. So generally speaking, we’d prefer not to see fanfiction. Not at this stage in our lives. TH is too near and dear to our lives right now, and maybe it sounds selfish, but we don’t trust most people to be respectful to the characters and their complexities.
On that note, we’d also prefer if we didn’t ‘come across’ it. We want people to ask us first before posting things. We’ve already had people be very disrespectful and even distasteful towards the characters. This has actually almost killed VT’s ability to write Hema.If someone wanted to write actual /fanfiction/ of TH’s canon, that’s one thing. But most people just want to ‘borrow’ the characters to put them in other stuff like their stories. Look, it’s flattering, but people have to understand where we’re coming from. If we were writing the crystal gems and this was around them, then we’d be like ‘yeah sure go for it!’ but these are our characters. These characters are /pieces/ of us on a deeply emotional level that we don’t want other people fucking around with.
This may seem insensitive or restrictive, but it’s the honest answer.
So, no, we wouldn’t like to come across fanfiction of The Harvester. Especially until people know the whole story. Theories and such are fine! Those we’re okay with, because they’re just theories! But seeing people take your characters and use them, especially without permission... doesn’t feel nice.
