Reading articles for Composition II

[shamanicshaymin]

I found this little gem from The Problem(s) With Fan Fiction:

If you’ve got crazy cool ideas for characters and relationships, don’t waste them in someone else’s world. Do you think Suzanne Collins would have been successful if she reworked her Hunger Game stories into works of Rugrats fan fiction?

Congratulations, author. You just shot yourself in the foot, 'cause now Hunger Games AUs in Rugrats fanfiction probably exists. Or will exist. I don't even like Rugrats, and the first thing I thought was, "Dude, now I wanna see Collins do dark Rugrats fic set in her own universe."

Is it me, or does a few of the anti-fanfic arguments seem misogynistic? "Ugh, women and their slash and talentless hacks masturbating over porn of someone else's characters! Stupid anime fangirls who crush over hot bishounen disrespect the author by writing fanfiction."

Comments

[redwoodalchan]

It also disregards the fact that there's a pretty significant leap between coming up with something new to do with an already-existing character and writing a completely original work. I've actually gotten ideas for original works but I haven't committed any to paper for a really long time (let alone tried getting them out into the world) simply because I can create a character, but not a world. Or I have a world, but not a plot. And so on. Whereas with fanfiction you have a world already established, and characters, and your biggest challenge is writing the story you want to write while still keeping the characters in-character.