[ SECRET POST #3038 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3038 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 036 secrets from Secret Submission Post #434.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

For me it isn't the materials at all. It is copyright and courtesy. If someone is writing a book or writing screenplays for television, this is their world. Unless there is official tie-in art, making art of the characters is not taking away from that world, it is supplementing it. On the other hand, writing stories set in that world is taking away from that world. It is the same storytelling that we are paying for from the creators, rather than something different and supplementary. Thus it is competing with the original work. There are reasons why authors are generally not allowed to read any fanfic but are allowed to (and often endorse) fanart. They are completely different things.

I like reading fanfic, but if you want to be paid for writing, create your own world, your own characters. Don't base your work off of the work of someone else; do your own.

[(Anonymous)]

THIS. I do both fanfic and fanart and I'm honestly amazed by the number of people who can't understand what the difference is.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, because nobody in the history of ever has based their fictional, published work on someone else's work. EVER.

This is bullshit. Fanfic does NOT take anything away from the original story nor is it competing with it, even if people charged for it--it supplements it and is sometimes better than the source. It brings people to the show/movie as well. I've discovered new fandoms because of fanfic. Strangely enough, a piece of fan art has never inspired me to watch a show or movie.

[(Anonymous)]

Pretty sure most of those people either had permission from the authors or were basing their works on things that were in the public domain.

[(Anonymous)]

Da. Not necessarily. In terms of history copyright law is fairly new.

Plus there's the added fact that copyright law is by no means perfect and tends to protect big companies over small time artists. Just look up how many times Disney has tried to bend copyright law to their will and did so successfully because they have the money for lawyers.

Copyright law is not the same as morality, and changes all the time.

[(Anonymous)]

Dante's Inferno. It literally uses a guy he had a massive boner for AND a girl he had a crush on.

[(Anonymous)]

Not a fanfic, but try again!

[(Anonymous)]

Pretty sure Virgil had no permission from Homer to write about Aeneas and his OCs.

[(Anonymous)]

lmao you are no historian are you? We have no idea what is Homer's original work and what isn't, since it was already a legend long before.

[(Anonymous)]

Jane Smiley's novel A Thousand Acres, a modernized AU retelling of King Lear and winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. King Lear is itself a hybrid of multiple folk and fairy tales.

Rodgers & Hammerstein's Tony-Award-winning South Pacific, which Crossed-over several stories from James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific and is the only musical to win the Pulitzer Prize that is based on *another* work that also won a Pulitzer.

Geraldine Brooks' March, a parallel retelling of Little Women (from the point of view of an off-screen character) and winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for literature.

Michael Chabon, who wrote and published The Final Solution, an unabashed piece of Sherlock Holmes fanfiction set in World War II, 2 years after winning the Pulitzer for Kavalier and Clay.

Jonathan Larsen's Rent, winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, which is an AU fanfic of Puccini's La Boheme (much like the movie Moulin Rouge, an AU hybrid crossover fanfic of La Boheme and La Traviata). (Puccini's opera is itself fanfic of Henry Murger's novel, Scenes de la vie Boheme.)

John Corigliano, 2001 Pulitzer-Prize winner for Music, who wrote the opera Ghosts of Versailles, a postmodern fantasy RPF/fanfic crossover AU about Pierre Beaumarchais and the characters from his play La Mère coupable.. Those characters were previously fanficced twice over, in two separate operatic masterpieces: Rossini's The Barber of Seville and Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, both based on the other 2 Figaro plays by Beaumarchais.

Amy Lowell, winner of the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her volume What's O'Clock, whose celebrated poem "The Sisters" not only praises the sisterhood of female poets, but enacts fictional conversations with the poets Sappho, Elizabeth Barret Browning, and Emily Dickinson in a delightful example of poetic RPF.

Not a Pulitzer, but how about a Nobel? Laureate Jose Saramago's New Testament RPF, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

How about another? Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee's novel Foe, fanfic which uses the narrative of Robin Crusoe to explore issues of power and colonialism.


But those are just rare exceptions, you say.

Have some more!

Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, a fanfic parallel narrative of Jane Eyre

John Guare's decorated play Six Degrees of Separation, RPF of real-life con artist David Hampton and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

Tony Award-winning My Fair Lady, a fix-it fic of Shaw's Pygmalion (itself a fanfic of Greek mythology) which changed the ending. In the joint published scripts of Pygmalion and that great musical, Alan Jay Lerner wrote, "I have omitted the sequel [to the play] because in it Shaw explains how Eliza ends not with Higgins but with Freddy and--Shaw and Heaven forgive me!--I am not certain he is right." (pandarus notes that Pretty Woman is also a modern AU retelling of My Fair Lady, right down to the scene at the races.)

Cultural monument West Side Story, an AU (Alternate Universe) retelling of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, itself fanfic of an Italian poem. More Romeo & Juliet fanfic? The Phantom Lover, a modernized Hong Kong film crossover of R&J and The Phantom of the Opera.

The American Western classic The Magnificent Seven, an Americanized retelling of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Reworking the plot of a story in a completely different setting, with completely different characters? That's also considered Alternate Universe fanfic.

Kurosawa's film Yojimbo is a retelling of Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest, with one scene additionally lifted directly from Hammett's novel The Glass Key. Taking a hard-boiled crime novel plot set in America and turning it into a Japanese Samurai AU? Fanfic.

Yojimbo was in turn adapted into the classic spaghetti western Fistful of Dollars (AU fanfic), which was later re-spun into Robert Rodriguez's Desperado (Remix fanfic).

Kurosawa also created Shakespearean fanfic, in the classic films Ran and Throne of Blood, retellings of King Lear and Macbeth. Shakespeare in Japan? AU fanfic.

The silent film masterpiece Greed, based on Frank Norris's McTeague, which was later turned into an opera by William Bolcom and Robert Altman. Do adaptations count as fanfic? Yes, if they substantially recontexualize the storyline (for example, by putting it into song or changing the ending), or if they add to the story with original material that wasn't in the original.

Literally hundreds of published works of Jane Austen fan fiction, including, but not limited to:
- the classic 90's satire Clueless (a modernization of Emma)
- the recent BBC hit Lost in Austen, a Pride & Prejudice AU with a time-traveling Mary Sue.
- Bridget Jones Diary, the modern retelling of Pride & Prejudice that single-handedly invented "chick lit"
- Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. Need I say more?
- "Pride and Prometheus," John Kessel's acclaimed short story that mixes characters from Pride & Prejudice and Frankenstein. Let me just repeat that. The 2009 Hugo-Award Winner for Best Novelette is crossover AU fanfic.

Speaking of Pride & Prejudice, Andrew Davies' much-admired script for the 1995 BBC masterpiece included a certain notorious bit of fanservice known to all Austen fans as "the lake scene." You will note that this scene appeared nowhere in the source text. Filling in scenes the author left out of the original work? Not only is that fanfic, but over at the largest Austen fandom fic archive, there is an entire subcategory of fanfiction devoted to doing exactly what Davies did when he had Mr Darcy strip down and go for a swim.

Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October, a fantasy RPF of Jack the Ripper. See also: Time After Time (film), From Hell (the comic and film), "A Toy for Juliette" (the short story by Oscar-Winner Robert Bloch) and its fanfic tag by sci-fi legend Harlan Ellison, "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World," among so many others.

John Gardner's classic novel Grendel is a retelling of Beowolf from the perspective of the monster, much like the many fics that tell stories from the antagonist's POV.

Other drastically varying fanfictions of the Phantom of the Opera include the blockbuster Andrew Lloyd Webber musical; Phantom, another musical by Frank Wildhorn; the novel Phantom by Susan Kay, which builds on the original to create a complicated backstory; the dubious novel Phantom of Manhattan; the classic Lon Chaney silent film; and of course, the equally dubious sequel to the aforementioned ALW musical.

Want some Arthurian Legend with your fanfiction? Gawain & the Green Knight. Le Morte D'arthur. The Canterbury Tales. T.H. White's The Once & Future King. Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon. Tennyson's masterpiece, Idylls of the King. Waterhouse's Arthurian Legend fanart. Or BBC/NBC's "Merlin." English historical romance writer Mary Stewart wrote five Arthurian novels--The Hollow Hills (1973) is best known. She also wrote an AU of Shakespeare's Tempest, called This Rough Magic (1964).

How about some Homerian fanfic! James Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses. W.H. Auden's poem, "The Shield of Achilles." Tennyson's "Ulysses." Christopher Logue's poetic retelling of the Iliad, War Music. Firebrand by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Inside the Walls of Troy, a YA novel by Clemence MacLaren. Homer's Daughter by Robert Graves. Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad fanfics the Odyssey from Penelope's POV, and the brilliant Coen Brothers film O, Brother, Where Art Thou transports Ulysses to America, turns him into a convict, and turns the Odyssey into a trip across the Depression-Era South. But, as [profile] charamel says, "Why stick to the present day? I seem to recall Aeschylus writing a 'missing scene' from the Iliad, Euripides writing fix-it fic of Helen's entire backstory, Virgil turning a minor character into a massive Gary-Stu, and don't get me started on Ovid's Heroides..." [profile] oneiriad adds, “Ancient Greek author Lucian of Samosata deserves to be among the Homerian fanficcers - among other things, his "Dialogues of the Gods" are just full of awesome missing scenes from Greek mythology :-)”

The Aeneid is a fanfic of the Iliad by the original Homerian fanboy Virgil, starring Aeneas as a Gary Stu who founds Rome. The Aeneid itself has been fanficced in Black Ships by Jo Graham and Lavinia by Ursula LeGuin, as well as David Gemmell's Troy trilogy, based on the Iliad and drawing from the Aeneid. "This particular piece of fanfic was written over a period of ten years--from 29 to 19 B.C.E. It has been around for more than two thousand years. People have studied it, read it and considered it a work of genius for almost that entire length of time. Do NOT underestimate the staying power of fanfic." redex also throws in “Cassandra by Christa Wolf, a stream-of-consciousness Mary-Sue Cassandra!POV feminist retelling of the Iliad taking the Aeniad as canon.” And missdirector adds: Of course, we can't forget the extremely famous first published self-insert RPF fanfic, Dante's Divine Comedy ("And then I met Virgil and we became BEST FRIENDS...") :D

Various plays by French classic authors Racine and Corneille are fanfics of Greek mythology and plays by Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles. Les Mouches by Jean-Paul Sartre is also fanfic about Electra. La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu (The Trojan war will not take place) by Giraudoux is fanfic about Homer again. Jean de la Fontaine's Fables are fanfic of Ovid's Metamorphoses. And valentinite adds that Plato's Symposium is “cracked-out RPS as teaching tool. And still relevant, almost two and a half millennia later.

Lots of very famous writers wrote fanfic based on Molière's The Misanthrope. Marmontel wrote Le Misantrope corrigé (The Misanthrope cured). Courteline wrote Alcest's Conversation. Rampal wrote Célimène and the Cardinal. And let's nor forget that Molière often got the idea of his plays in Plautus's plays.

Biblical fanfiction is everywhere: the novel & film Ben-Hur, the film Last Temptation of Christ, and the musical Jesus Christ Superstar are all RPF about the life of Jesus Christ and the people in his life. Want Disney!fic with your Gospels? Try The Small One. Or take the absurdist version: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, by acclaimed writer Christopher Moore, in which Christ has a lifelong best friend named Biff who has a crush on Mary Magdalene, aka "Maggie." Prefer modern AU New Testament fanfic? In the musical Godspell, Jesus appears in modern-day New York City. In Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi, Christ and his disciples are all gay men living in the 90's. In The Messiah of Morris Avenue by Tony Hendra, Christ comes back as an Irish-Hispanic Catholic living in the U.S. Jesus isn't the only one to be fanficced: take The Acts of Paul and Theckla, a
second-century Mary-Sue fic based around the New Testament character Paul. Or the acclaimed album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (yes, with three exclamations) by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, which is unabashed filk about the second life of Lazarus. And if you're feeling ironic, there's vocal anti-fanfic writer Anne Rice's Christ The Lord series.

Or how about the Old Testament! The original God fanboy, Milton, wrote Paradise Lost "to justify the ways of God to man." (and made Satan the original Draco in Leather Pants in the process.) Glen Duncan followed suit with I, Lucifer. Anita Daimant's The Red Tent is fanfic of Dinah from the Old Testament.

Pulitzer-nominee Lee Blessing's play Fortinbras, about the events that happen immediately after Hamlet. Pure fanfic.

Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight, directed by and starring Orson Welles, which is based on the Falstaff storyline of Shakespeare's Henriad. Another fanfic about Falstaff is the Verdi opera, Falstaff, which is based on The Merry Wives at Windsor. (The Merry Wives of Windsor is itself spin-off fic written by Shakespeare in order to build on the popularity of his character Falstaff from the Henry plays.)

The BBC's "Shakespeare Retold" series, including a retelling of Much Ado About Nothing set in modern-day broadcasting, and a revamp of Macbeth where the three witches appear to Macbeth in the form of "supernatural binmen." Then there's A Tempest by Aime Cesaire, a post-colonialist response to Shakespeare's The Tempest. Teen-comedy films Ten Things I Hate About You and She's the Man, satirical riffs on Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night, respectively. There's O, the modern-day retelling of Othello, and another Shrew remix, Cole Porter's operetta, Kiss Me Kate. For another helping of irony: Weird Tales From Shakespeare, edited by anti-fanfic author Katherine Kerr. Season 1 of ”Slings And Arrows” is a clever clever metatextual modern Hamlet AU (Hamlet= Geoffrey, King Hamlet = Oliver etc etc) whilst Season 2 does the same thing with 'Macbeth' and Season 3 with 'Lear'. (- via pandarus) Then there's Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, a postmodern fanfic of Hamlet, and that other Tom Stoppard work, the Oscar winner for Best Picture and RPF fanfic Shakespeare in Love.

And what about Shakespeare himself? Of all his body of known work, only 2 of his plays were not readily cobbled together or lifted directly from previously existing sources. It's a popular thing to call Shakespeare a plagiarist; what he was, more accurately, was a writer of excellent fanfic. All's Well That Ends Well was fanficced straight out of Boccacio's Decameron. Cymbeline was hodpodged together from the Decameron, Holinshed's Chronicles and Geoffrey of Monmouth, while The Merchant of Venice was a veritable mixed source gumbo.

Oh, hell, let's just give The Decameron its own bullet point for being such "an irresistible source" text from which great writers wrote great fanfic. That's okay, though, because Boccaccio stole the plots of all his stories from other sources too. Are you noticing a pattern yet?

Where were we? Right, Shakespeare. As You Like It was stolen from Thomas Lodge. Apollonius of Tyre by Anonymous provided the source plots of Pericles, Twelfth Night, and part of The Comedy of Errors. Plautus provided the other part, and also graciously loaned Shakespeare, centuries after his death, many of his stock plot and character tropes. Measure for Measure comes from an Italian novel by Cinthio, and an English play by George Whetstone that, lol, is *also* based on Cinthio. Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing was adapted from another Italian story; A Midsummer Night's Dream lifts plot tropes from Ovid and Apuleius.

[(Anonymous)]

Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles gave us the source plots of Macbeth, King Lear, and most of his English histories. The Roman tragedies he took from Plutarch.

The entire War of the Theaters, in which Ben Jonson, John Marston, and a host of others wrote RPF plays about each other. We could move on to the Restoration, during which Poet Laureate John Dryden remixed two or three of Shakespeare's plays, and tried to get a musical version of Paradise Lost off the ground (that one didn't quite make it). In the same period, Nahum Tate rewrote King Lear with a happy ending, Cordelia/Edmund OTP (and the play was performed with that ending for centuries).”

Tom Stoppard writes fanfiction frequently: Travesties is a crossover parody of The Importance of Being Ernest; and The Real Inspector Hound parodies murder mysteries in general and The Mousetrap specifically. Stoppard's drama The Invention of Love is literally Historical AU RPF--A. E. Housman/Moses Jackson slash.

jonquil informs us that Tom Stoppard also wrote the play On the Razzle, which is a retelling of Johann Nestroy's Einen Jux will er sich machen, which, according to Wikipedia, “previously was adapted twice by Thornton Wilder. The first 1938 version, entitled The Merchant of Yonkers, was faithful to the original material, but the second 1955 version, renamed The Matchmaker, expanded the previously secondary role of Dolly Gallagher Levi, who later became the heroine of the Jerry Herman musical hit, Hello, Dolly!. Nestroy's play itself was adapted from John Oxenford's play A Day Well Spent (1835). Jonquil adds: “Reworking. It's what authors do.”

Greg Maguire's entire literary career; or, if Wicked is too commercial for you -- for Wizard of Oz fanfic, look no further than Geoff Ryman's acclaimed retelling Was, of which the wiki article reports, "Teresa Nielsen Hayden has compared the novel to fanfic, saying that the only difference is that Brooks, Alcott, and publisher Viking Press are "dreadfully respectable."

Or take Charlie Smalls' classic musical theatre celebration of black urban life, The Wiz. Is it really illegal and immoral if Diana Ross, Lena Horne, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and Quincy Jones are all involved?

How about Alice in Wonderland? SyFy's recent AU feminist modernization in which Alice is a judo instructor, and Tim Burton's recent follow-up film in which Alice returns to Underland--both of these are unequivocally fan fiction in all but name, as are Jeff Noon's Automated Alice and Frank Beddor's Looking Glass Wars.

Then there's the hundreds of times and ways Richard Connell's classic short story "The Most Dangerous Game" has been Remixed, revamped, parodied, and remade by popular culture, in everything from radio plays to the Onion.

Or the thousands of retellings and reimaginings of the Faust Legend.

Or the Robin Hood legend.

Or the legend of Monkey / Journey to the West.

Dorian, Will Self's 20th C. AU riff on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Let's not forget the various murder mystery series where Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, Jane Austen's characters, Abigail Adams, Mozart, Louisa Mae Alcott, Beau Brummel, a string of Vintage film stars, The Algonquin Round Table, and Eleanor Roosevelt all fight crime, to name just a sampling.

The wonderful Disney films The Great Mouse Detective, a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes based on the Basil of Baker St. children's book series, and Oliver and Company, a retelling of Oliver Twist. See also The Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island. Turning the characters into lovable animals? Fanfic.

In fact, nearly all Disney animated films are fanfic: The Jungle Book, a retelling of Rudyard Kipling; Robin Hood, where the animals sing and dance to folk songs penned by Roger Miller and Johnny Mercer; the films Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Black Cauldron are both significant departures from their literary sources; Pocohontas is historical RPF; and, as mentioned later in this post, all the classic Disney fairy tales are fanfiction, most recently The Princess & the Frog, a modernized historical AU fanfic adding all-new characters and themes and relocating the setting to America.

Philip Jose Farmer's Hugo-winning Riverworld series is time-travelling AU Historical RPF fanfic.

Georgette Heyer's The Spanish Bride is historical RPF based on the autobiography of Harry Smith.

A Thousand and One Nights, which spawned not only derivative works but spinoffs: Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.”

Neil Gaiman's Sandman, virtually published fanfiction of the original series, reworked and remastered. Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - published fantasy AU crossover fanfiction and RPF. See also Alan Moore's Watchmen, in which a character is reading a book based on a song from Bertold Brecht/Kurt Weill's Three Penny Opera, itself an AU modernized retelling of The Beggar's Opera. Or take the highly acclaimed graphic novel It's a Bird, autobiographical Superman fanfic.

The classic F.W. Murnau film Nosferatu, which was later re-envisioned in a completely unauthorized remake by Werner Herzog, and even later, made into an RPF fanfic AU in the Oscar-winning Shadow of the Vampire, a fic *about* the making of Nosferatu.

Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Cats is a fanfic of T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.

Michael Cunningham's The Hours, a modernized reworking of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.

Robert Altman's acclaimed Gosford Park, which features Jeremy Northam as Ivor Novello, darling of music halls and cinema in Edwardian England. The songs Northam sings during the film's centerpiece were actually written by Novello. This example of RPF is also certainly the only one in history to feature three knights (Alan Bates, Michael Gambon, Derek Jacobi) and three dames (Eileen Atkins, Helen Mirren, and Maggie Smith) as part of its narrative. Can you really call fanfiction illegitimate when you're involving British Royalty? :)

Numerous adaptations of Huckleberry Finn, including Nancy Rawles' My Jim, fanfic told from the perspective of Jim's enslaved wife Sadie, Finn by John Clinch, fic about Huck's father; several anime adaptations, and my personal favorite, Big River, the Tony-winning Best Musical of 1984, with a folk score by Roger Miller.

Boris Akunin's postmodern AU hybrid of Crime and Punishment, F.M.

Pat Barker's Booker Prize-winning Regeneration trilogy, which is largely RPF about WWI soldiers, poets, and doctors, including Wilfred Owen and others.

Stephen Sondheim's groundbreaking and devastating musical Assassins, historical RPF about U.S. presidential assassins.

Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, which starts with Jane Eyre and moves on to fanfic of various great works of literature in turn. (Fforde, ironically, is anti-fanfic.)

Tracy Chevalier's novel Girl with a Pearl Earring and Susan Vreeland's novel The Girl in Hyacinth Blue, and the 2 Vermeer paintings they are fictions about, real and imaginary.

Neil Gaiman's 2004 Hugo-Award-winning Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft crossover fanfic, "A Study in Emerald," and his Lovecraft fanfic, "I, Cthulhu." Lovecraft, incidentally, supported and encouraged fanfiction of his works. Gaiman also claims to have derived his novel American Gods from Diana Wynne Jones' Eight Days of Luke, and his Newbery/Carnegie Award-winning The Graveyard Book is a retelling of The Jungle Book set in a graveyard.

the Weezer album Pinkerton and the Tony Award-winning D.H. Hwang play M Butterfly, both fanfic of the Puccini opera Madame Butterfly. wombat1138 adds, “The musical Miss Saigon is arguably another fanfic adapation of Puccini's opera-- but Puccini based his opera on a one-act play by David Belasco, which was in turn an unauthorized adaptation of a story/anecdote(?) by John Luther Long; Long's story itself seems to've been RPF.”

Speaking of Pinkerton, the album, there's also the friggin' huge series of science fiction novels that are fanfictions of iconic rock albums. The series, 33 ⅓, contains over 83 novels as of this year.

On the subject of opera, verowyn adds: “Wagner's opera Der Ring des Nibelungen is fanfic of the Poetic Edda, the Volsunga Saga and the Nibelungenlied, which are in turn fanfics of one another or fanfic of earlier Indo-Germanic mythology. Wagner's Parsifal is fanfic of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzifal, which is fanfic of Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval ou le Conte du Graal which is fanfic of Wace's Brut, which is fanfic of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britaniae. --and Terry Gilliam's film The Fisherking is AU fanfic of all the previous Percival material.”

Tim Powers' award-winning Drawing of the Dark also lifts The Fisher King out of Arthurian legend, and literally every novel he has written since 1987, including several award winners, is a work of historical RPF.

Stephen Fry has written two published works of fanfiction: The Star's Tennis Balls, which he notes, quote, "is a straight steal, virtually identical in all but period and style to Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo," and Making History, an AU RPF about Adolph Hitler.

Hundreds upon hundreds of Sherlock Holmes riffs, continuations, crossovers, spinoffs, and remixes, including Young Sherlock by Stephen Spielberg, the 1988 Without a Clue, starring Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley in a remix where Watson is actually the crime-solver; the Guy Ritchie film, and most recently the BBC Modern AU “Sherlock”; also, most notably, the tale of Arsène Lupin, the gentlemen thief created by Maurice Leblanc as a character for Sherlock Holmes to do battle with in "Arsène Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes" and many other books. 50 years later, Boileau-Narcejac would publish five more books based on the Lupin IP, official fanfic of what was already fanfic. The Lupin mythos has spawned countless movies, the most recent in 2004. In 1967 Kazuhiko Kato, a Japanese manga writer, began Lupin III, the story of Lupin's grandson and his gang of thieves: i.e. fanfic of fanfic of fanfic. It was also hugely popular, with the original series running for 5 years and spawning three cartoon series, six movies. and twenty video games.

T.H. White,'s novel, Mistress Masham's Repose, is fanfic of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

Michel Tournier's novel Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Friday), which won the prestigious Grand prix du roman de l'Académie Française, is fanfiction of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.

The winner of the 1992 Campbell Award for best novel, Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede by Bradley Denton is sci-fi RPF that tells us what happens when supernatural events herald the second coming of the crooner himself.

Ron Moore's 2003 "reimagining" of the 1970's tv series “Battlestar Galactica,” complete with genderswap.

Victor Hugo's masterpiece Les Miserables has been adapted into at least 50 films and television miniseries, some of which are modern Aus, 5 radio plays, 1 legendary musical, 6 plays, 2 games, 2 animated series, and 3 manga / anime series, including Shoujo Cosette. It has also spawned 3 sequels: Cosette by Laura Kalpakian, and Cosette and Marius by François Cérésa, which retcon a huge chunk of the novel, bring Javert back from the dead, and fashion him into a hero. Descendants of Hugo tried to have the novels banned, claiming that they “breached the moral rights of the author.” The courts, however, sided with Cérésa.

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, a Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Best Book and a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, is original fic remixed with Great Expectations. And let's not forget the thousands of remixes and remakes of A Christmas Carol, including the aforementioned Muppet retelling, and Bill Murray's modern AU Scrooged.

George M Fraser's Flashman, a character lifted from Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) and given a life of his own.

Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen, historical RPF

David Cronenberg's film Naked Lunch, which is a crossover of William S. Burroughs' novel Naked Lunch and Burroughs' own biography, making it half fanfic, half-RPF. (- via verushka70.)


Literally thousands upon thousands of modern reworkings of fairy tales and folk tales, including Jean Cocteau's film masterpiece La Belle & La Bete, Sondheim's postmodern musical theatre classic Into the Woods, nearly every animated Disney film ever, and all of Angela Carter's feminist fantasy anthology The Bloody Chamber. And when you expand the folklore into the realm of mythology, the reworkings are virtually endless.

Orson Scott Card, who hates fanfiction, has not only written Asimov fanfic (as well as Old Testament fanfic) himself, but done so in the most hilariously hypocritical way imaginable. ryenna sums it up better than I ever could, while @chudleycannons contributes the link to Card's defense of his own fanfiction as being inherently superior to everybody else's fanfiction. (Skip to page 268 for maximum ego-inflation). ETA: Now it seems Card has taken his vitriolic self-loathing one step further, by writing very, very dubious fanfic (even though he crusades against fanfic) of Hamlet and The Taming of the Shrew--and razing the plot of the former in order to continue his much-documented and well-known crusade against homosexuality. (Look, I don't care how amazing Ender's Game is: at some point, taking this guy seriously whenever he starts to rant about morality, be it literary or social, just becomes an insult to everyone's intelligence.)

Novelist sarahahoyt notes that “Half of my published books -- Shakespeare. The Musketeer Mysteries-- could be called fanfic,” and then adds, “I've got more fan mail for some of my Austen work than for my published books. Which one has the greater reach? I'd be unable to say.”

When Vincent Van Gogh's brother Theo sent him reproductions of Millet's paintings, Van Gogh created his own pieces of fanart, directly fashioned after Millet's paintings.

"They are not copies," Van Gogh told Theo, "but translations into another language".



But, you say, fanfic operates totally outside of the consent of the original authors. The only way someone can profit from fanfiction is if they wait until the author or subject is dead!

Oh, really? Have some examples of professional works written outside the consent of the original authors and/or subjects, while the subjects are still very much alive and/or the original author's works are still very much under copyright:


Jules Verne, the original Poe fanboy, published a sequel to Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym called An Antarctic Mystery while Poe was still very much alive.

The 2008 Oscar Winner for Best Picture, The Departed, Martin Scorsese's liberal remixing of the movies Infernal Affairs & Infernal Affairs II.

The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall's bestselling parallel novel to Gone with the Wind and the most-cited example of fanfiction being upheld in court, was deemed an acceptable example of “parody” under U.S. Copyright law despite being a serious literary work. (Another work of published fanfiction from the same timeframe, Lo's Diary, Nabokov's Lolita told from Lo's POV, split royalties with the Nabokov estate.)

(Note: parody, remixes, and fanfiction all operate under the same exception to copyright law: the "fair use" clause.)

Neil Gaiman's published Chronicles of Narnia fanfic, "The Problem of Susan." The works of C.S. Lewis are still very much under copyright.

[(Anonymous)]

Look out, we got a butthurt plagiarizer over here trying to justify their theft.
Armed and angry.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

[i]Yes, because nobody in the history of ever has based their fictional, published work on someone else's work. EVER.[/i]
They have. But they have generally fleshed out their own world and their own characters, just basing it on the original. Such as reimagined fairy tales. Or Shakespeare brought forth to the present day (10 Things I Hate About You, for example). Or something along those lines. Almost all of fanfic is nowhere near that. If someone takes the characters and makes an AU with a fully realized world, then that is an original fic, not a true fanfic, just inspired by the canon. (And actually, I hate when those are listed as fanfic.) I would have no issue with those stories that are inspired by an existing canon but which take it and completely reinvent it somehow being charged for.

[i] nor is it competing with it, even if people charged for it--it supplements it and is sometimes better than the source.[/i]
And yet with that attitude you don't see why creators would possibly have an issue with you writing fanfic for their creations and charging for it? You are saying that the fanfic is better than the source material. Which I can very much see a creator taking issue with. Yes, it is competing with the original. And if somehow an author sees fanfic and it is too close to an idea they already had, then they theoretically would have to rework their idea so as not to be accused of copying it from the fic writer. There have been a couple of famous examples of that very issue. So, yes, it can take away from the original work. And again, fanart doesn't have that competing element usually. Most of the time one cannot say that the fanart is better than the source, because it is so different from the source.

[i]I've discovered new fandoms because of fanfic. Strangely enough, a piece of fan art has never inspired me to watch a show or movie.[/i]
And I'm the exact opposite. I only seek out fic for fandoms where I am already familiar with the characters. The [i]vast[/i] majority of authors write for an audience that is already familiar with the world and the characters. Thus, there isn't as much exposition and description as there would be in an original work. I have tried to read some crossovers with shows I was not familiar with and it didn't work and didn't even come close to making me interested in the other fandom. Whereas I have seen art from various fandoms on Tumblr (usually comics art) that intrigues me and makes me want to go find the original source.

[(Anonymous)]

lmao taking from PUBLIC DOMAIN - fairytales, history, public figures, mythology, urban legends - that is not fanfiction. And if you get permission from the original creator, it's not illegal or unethical.

Stop trying to make money off of your fic, anon. It's gross.

[(Anonymous)]

tell that to fanartists

[solticisekf]

+1

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, the vast plethora of fanart and comic AUs on tumblr and pixiv are just in my imagination then!

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Do they directly copy the comic? Are they tracing it? If not, if they are just fanart of the characters, but completely different (different style or whatever) then I'm fine with it. Creating a comic off of a comic wouldn't work for me, as again, it is telling a story in a world that isn't theirs. And would assumedly being trying to keep it in character with that source and keep the tone the same.

[(Anonymous)]

Um, writing fanfiction = tracing art? Seriously?

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, because no one buys Dante's Inferno!

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

That is vastly different. I have no issue if someone takes inspiration from another work and uses it to create their completely original story. I do have issue with people who barely describe the characters or the setting or anything in the world because it is the exact same as the canon they are borrowing from. If they write something that is enough of an AU that it is their own world and their own take on the characters, then I feel that isn't actually a fanfic but rather their own work. People are inspired by other stories and plots and characters all of the time. There aren't that many original ideas out there. However, playing in someone else's sandbox, using the same tools, the same characters, the same tone, etc. isn't theirs. Plus, that example is really not at all the same given the nature of the source material that Dante's Inferno plays with and the source material that most fanfic authors play with.

[(Anonymous)]

nyart

98% of the characters in Dante's Inferno are not original. Every named demon, sinner, saint, angel, creature, they are all copied by Greek mythology, Roman literature, dead real people like Caton, dead fictional people like Tristan&Isolde, and Christianity.

All the settings are not original. Hell, Purgatory and Heaven were all described in detail in many different ways for centuries, and Dante copied plenty from those interpretations and images.

All the story is, is Dante taking a stroll with his favorite poet at all the realms in Christian religion.

[(Anonymous)]

By your logic, if I draw a fantastic painting of Achilles slaying Hector for someone, I deserve no pay because I'm "using someone else's world and characters!"

[(Anonymous)]

On the other hand, writing stories set in that world is taking away from that world.

Every time I write a fanfic, a piece of canon disappears! Or perhaps not. I have to admit, it would be amusing (and somewhat alarming) if it did work that way. This is why fandoms die; fanfics eat up all the canon.

Thus it is competing with the original work.

This is a slightly more valid argument, but depends on how you parse it. What about mostly defunct fandoms? My preferred fandom is a television show that's been cancelled for 20 years. Am I competing with the original? Not to mention that TV shows are on TV. When I write supplemental fanfic, how am I competing with the TV show?

If I write Harry Potter fanfic, then yes, I'm competing with JK Rowling in the written media. But even so, despite the many many terabytes of data of good, bad and mediocre Harry Potter fanfic, I still don't see how it has taken anything away from the actual canon.

[(Anonymous)]

"I like reading fanfic, but if you want to be paid for writing, create your own world, your own characters. Don't base your work off of the work of someone else; do your own."

THIS. Get off the fucking cross and write your own characters/world. If you want to piggyback, you can't charge. You cannot have it both ways.