Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Because the fan fiction writer is a leech, a parasite, a blood-sucker, feeding from the creativity of someone else. If somebody wants to be an author, let them create their own worlds, not steal somebody else's.
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Wow.
All I can say is that I'm damn glad my favourite authors don't seem to regard their most passionate fans like that and are, instead, happy to let fans write and read as much fanfic as they can.
And yeah, I do check before writing fic (non-profit, needless to say) if the author of the original has made a statement about his or her attitude towards creative fan efforts. I would never write fic when the creator of the original doesn't like it; unfortunately this means that when I know in advance the author's famously anti-fanfic, I also don't
read anything by them, because, god forbid, what if any of it inspires me to think and wonder? What if any of it makes me wonder what happens next? What might have happened between some of the scenes we didn't see? What might have happened if something had gone the other way? What could have driven this or that character to act the way they did?
Can't have that, of course, blood-sucking leeches as we are, daring to wonder about, talk about and ask questions about worlds created by someone else - sometimes in the form of discussions, sometimes essays, and yes, sometimes in the form of fiction.
I wonder if people feel the same way about fan art. Especially as fan artists make money off it a lot more often than fan writers do.
Also, writing fanfic and writing original fic are two different things, driven by completely different motivations. Plenty of people (and that includes published authors) write both, for different reasons.