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I think everyone is missing the real point.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s I read the first 150 Star Trek tie-in novels. And when they started publishing the Buffy tie-in novels I read the first 30-40.
But after awhile they all started to seem too predictable and stale.
Then I discovered fan fiction and realized what the problem was with the 'published' tie-in books. They were all forced to stay within canon. Meaning the main central characters had to be exactly the same at the end of the story as they were at the beginning of the story and weren't allowed any growth. So the better writers started to focus on the 'guest of the week' character because they could grow and change or even die over the course of the book. However that regulated the central characters to a secondary role and they were the whole reason you bought the book. So the 'published' writers were trapped in a catch-22 position.
However in fan fiction, there are no restrictions. If the writer wanted to kill off one of the main characters to explore the impact on the other characters, they could. It meant that the 'verses you loved were suddenly unpredictable, which made every story potentially completely new and exciting.
So, anyway, my point is that I hope the fan fiction stories are allowed to be 'alternate universe' or these new writers are going to be trapped in the same mode as the 'published' writers of these types of tie-in books, which to me means the works are probably going to be predictable and therefore boring.
Duane
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