Posting Fic Is Like Graffitiing Your House
Okay stay with me here - but posting fics publicly for others to read is a lot like taking the art you might make inside your bedroom and graffitiing it on the outside of your house - it’s public, maybe you even post a few pictures on social media, but you don’t physically drag anyone except perhaps friends or family to look at it, and you get nothing from people other than, at best, kind words or a few social media likes for doing so. Maybe you live in an artsy neighbourhood, or you’ve done this before, and people choose of their own accord to come and have a look around.
Nobody has to look at it, and they certainly don’t have to say anything to you about it. They can just glance at it, and either not care or decide your particular art style/concept/content isn’t for them, and keep on walking.
Or they can knock on your door, or comment on a post you might have made, and say “wow this looks so cool!” or “finding your art really brightened my day”. That’s lovely of them - unnecessary, but very much lovely.
People have no right, no right at all, to knock on your door and say “this is disgusting” or “why on earth did you draw this” or “you should’ve used red not yellow”.
After all, this is your house, and your art. Just because you made it publicly able to be seen, that doesn’t mean you gave over a single iota of ownership. You didn’t blackmail everyone walking down the street to look at it, and you didn’t ask for tickets from three doors down either way. It’s still yours, and you made it at no cost to those people walking past, so they have no right to criticise you for it. (And that includes, in my opinion, writing cruel or harsh things on a letter and posting it to you, which for this analogy is my equivalent to writing it on a public bookmark on AO3 - because it is attached to you, that letterbox/bookmark space, and maybe you don’t check your letterbox, or at least not regularly, but it’s still yours, just like your house and art are.)
I’ve seen people saying that once you post a fic online it isn’t entirely yours anymore. And to a degree I understand their sentiment, but I don’t agree with what they’re ultimately saying - you as an author still have complete ownership over that fic, and can do whatever you want with it, including deleting, editing, or rewriting it. You don’t have ownership over other people’s memories, impressions, or interpretations of it, but that still doesn’t magically give them ownership of your fic.
Publicly available/viewable does not mean publicly owned.
You don’t own everything you see - if you go to a friend’s house and sleep in their guest bed, you don’t suddenly own the bedframe or the sheets or the pillow, no matter how much you might have had the best night’s sleep of your life.
You can repaint your house. You can add more to the art on your house. You can maybe accept a kind request from an admirer of making art for them too. You can demolish your entire house, art included, with a hired crane and a cackling laugh or tears in your eyes.
Your house, and the art you have painted on it, are yours. Your fics, and the worlds you have created with them, are yours. Never let readers, well-intentioned or not, guilt trip you into thinking otherwise. It’s absolutely okay to consider the feelings of others in how you paint your house, but never do so at your own detriment. That isn’t what art, or even life, should be about.
