My family knows and they don't care but it's such a niche subject that it's never come up with friends/acquaintances. I wouldn't go out of my way to hide it, though. Where I come from there isn't much of a social stigma against fanfiction since barely anyone even knows what it is. Anyone who knows me would probably just write it off as just another nerdy thing that I'm into.

 

Some of my close friends. Like someone else said, I don't hide it or anything, it just never comes up because no one around me is into it.

 

Literally nobody except a best friend of mine that's an avid fic reader, and also once in early high school, back when I first started writing fic, I sent the first few chapters of my Naruto time travel to my aunt. She had never seen a single episode of anime in her life, if she could've even told you what it was, but she's an avid reader and I wanted as close to a beta as I could get, plus she knew I wrote a lot (nonfiction, fiction, and fic), so she'd offered before to read some of my stuff. Next time I went to her house, she was like, "Oh wow, this is 50,000 words. I didn't know you were halfway through a novel draft" and was generally cool when I explained what it was. Then she blew it by telling my dad about it as soon as he came to pick me up, and I never sent her anything I wrote again lmao. My dad demanded to know what I was writing, got about two sentences in and saw a Japanese name, and just handed my phone back and never brought it up again. My mom hated the fact that I wrote anything at all, so I didn't even bother. The rest of my friends either barely read or only exclusively read original works.

 

This seems like a very healthy way to think about it. And as I've gotten older, I've definitely drifted closer to that mindset. I still feel a person out first, of course, to make sure they're enough of a nerd that it wouldn't be a totally off-the-wall subject to bring up, but I'm nowhere near as anxious and secretive about it as I was ten years ago.

Part of that is just feeling like I have less and less to prove as I age, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that the sheer size and overwhelming activity of archives like FFN and AO3 implies that reading/writing fanfic is actually quite common as a passtime.

 

Fanfiction is Catholicism during the reformation for me. Everywhere I’ve lived, I’ve prepared a priest bolt-hole, in case those nearby should learn my deepest darkest secret, and I have to go into hiding.

I keep my ear to the ground and look for those who might also have my leanings but as yet, when I believe I’ve picked up subtle hints, no one has returned the secret handshake.

There are one or two people I’m suspicious of, but there’s never been a situation where I could bring it up. There was one doctor in a previous job who admitted it at a Christmas meal. To my shame, I joined in with the others with some lukewarm eyebrow raising and tittering — ‘fanfiction? Oh my’ — but a few days later I took him aside, to a blind spot for the cameras, and we exchanged reccs.

Once, one of my dearest school friends, whose child I am godfather to, text me before I visited, saying something like. ‘Hey Blorcyn, what time are you arriving tomorrow’. My heart froze. I erupted in a cold sweat, my pupils pinpoint. What she knows, I can’t say. She’s only mentioned the name once more since then. Is she one of us? Has she found my writings? Or does she have my balls in a vice, biding her time to sow my ruin?

All I know is that my bolt hole needs more canned goods. One must be prepared, when One lives with a secret of this magnitude.