A question about My Little Pony fan fiction - An Otherworldly Adventure.

[Dawnshine Wonder 1,446]

Before I press on with the rest of chapter #1 titled World of Jinn - Before Harmony, which is a long part of the story mind you before I even begin to work on the other chapters, I'd like to ask thoughtful members of community here about this situation, perhaps people with way more knowledge than myself about how this works pertaining to how copyright and trademark is typically handled in the case of MLP fan fiction.

It does seem like for the moment, Hasbro are not heavy handed when it comes to people putting out not for profit fan fiction, when I say not for profit I mean no sales, no ad revenue and no donations, only people sharing their take on the franchise. All I know about this so far is this appears to be handled on a case by case basis, but typically Hasbro has been known to be friendly around fanfics, or at the very least, they seem to think it's a waste of time to file DMCA's against everyone who does this, they may even be cautious about community backlash if they become too nit-picky about this.

But how safe would my fan fiction be, if I were to put mine out on fimfiction when it finished which I am sorry to say, will probably take years at this point as this is a one person project? keep in mind this too, will be non profit in every sense of the word. I will do my utmost to stay within fair use territory by not making money off of IP's I do not own, and not copying and pasting too much from the original show My Little Pony Friendship is Magic, pushing the story in the direction of transformative works. Yes, it will have characters from the original show, and some concepts and places within it. But again I do intend to put a disclaimer on this, the story begins with a disclaimer making it clear to everybody this is not an official project and I do not own the intellectual properties the story is about, this is not intended to replace or compete against official Hasbro branded products either.

Right now I am considering simply keeping this fan fiction private and within a limited circle of community members or friends. I would only be comfortable making this public if I had some kind of a guarantee that I'd be left alone about it, I don't want this project I would be spending a long time doing, going to waste. I will be keeping personal backups at home, with photos of my pencil and notepad version stored on a couple of CD R's. But what good does that do? if the story is good enough to share with other fans, why not?