Applies to all fan writers, or writers come to I'll start it here.
Reckoning
They come from many places, for the product of a thousand sentient worlds pass before this court, but the look is always the same. Species, race, gender, age or philosophy matter little, and we see them all, the pattern of expression rarely varies. First the disbelief at finding themselves here and then anger at discovering themselves in the dock, then comes the rejection of the court, of the claims and charges, and finally as the proofs unfold, eventually, the creeping understanding of where they are and how they came to be there. Why they come to be here.
Then comes the slow growing horror as the testimony and the reality of it unfolds, the desperation for it not to be so, for the crimes not to be of their making. None who stand in our dock consider themselves callous or cruel, and in their past lives many will have been judged kind and virtuous, yet they are the author of all the cruelty of which a thousand realities are capable. By word and picture they create it, with laugh and bow they accept the trohpys of their imagining never wondering of the consequences, not thinking or caring that universe might make their shadows real.
No trivial crimes these either, murder, betrayal, rape and torture, the lowest things that sentient life can descend to, all of these indictments and more are heard in this court of all realities. Worlds of terror and pain created on the whim, lives and hopes destroyed by careless words, bodies and minds broken for a momentary indulgence.
Yet in their minds they are innocents, 'But it is not real' they plead, 'they are not real. It's just imagination, a story, a game.' Then, as the witness stand before them, their testimony whispered or shouted or cried as the offence demands, comes the hand wringing the pleas for understanding, the final desperate justifications made to judge and plaintiff alike,
'I never meant it to be real'.
But real it becomes if someone, somewhere, believes in it. For those they spawn in that momentary belief are from that point as real as they, their wounds bleed, their bones break, their agony is screamed to the universe. So as death claims them they come to stand before this cour, for this is the only route to justice for the sins they spawn, only here can the two worlds, that of the author and victim of the cruelty, come together. This they learn, but too late.
Dream as you will but be warned, and take care in what you make someone believe in.