Waking up to the news that “All the Young Dudes” is being sold and published as an original work ruined my day, I can tell you that.
The sad part is it is not the first major fanfiction work that saw this fate and frankly I have had enough of it.
Fanfiction is an underrated genre of fiction that many don’t even consider as one. Because it takes inspiration from other sources, many do not consider it an original piece of work.
Whether it is or isn’t is a different conversation.
But the truth is, no matter what side of that argument one stands on, there are some fanfictions that are so engraved into different fandoms, that taking them out should not be possible. And yet that is the trend that has steadily become the norm.
If you think you have never read or seen a fanfiction before, think again. Ever read “Fifty Shades of Grey?” “After?” “The Mortal Instruments?” “The Love Hypothesis?”
All of them started as fanfictions, and pretty popular ones at that.
But the thing all of these books/the fanfictions they came from have in common, is that they were not that important.
Harsh, but hear me out.
A fanfiction is the author’s original work. No matter how many creative liberties the author takes — whether it is a very similar story with a different ending for example or a completely different one with just the same characters — it is still something that the author sat down and wrote.
If they want to publish their work and make money that is completely understandable, we all need to get paid somehow.
What I get annoyed at is when it comes to pieces of work that quite literally started a completely different fandom.
Take the aforementioned “All the Young Dudes,” a piece of work from 2017, that is based in the world of “Harry Potter” or more exactly, the sort of prequel with the previous generation called Marauders. This fanfiction, that is over 500,000 words long, is what basically created the fandom based on Marauders, which online grew arguably even bigger than the original text.
How can you take that and turn it into something completely different?
In order for it to be officially published, the characters and the world it is set in needs to be changed. And the worst part, the original “All the Young Dudes” needs to be taken off of the site it was published on — which in this case is AO3.
Uhm, excuse me, how dare you?
Take another example. “Manacled,” also a piece of work set in the Harry Potter world, is a fanfiction that started the entire 2020 DracoTok era. It is an alternate universe that merges Harry Potter with “The Handmaid’s Tale” and it is still being quoted till this day.
Last September it was published as “Alchemised” and “Manacled” is only available as a pirated pdf.
You want to publish your work and earn money for it? Don’t write fanfiction.
Again, a harsh statement, maybe, but it is true. Fanfiction writers aren’t writing these stories because they don’t have any original thoughts and have to copy someone else’s work like it is a homework assignment. They are doing it because they love the original story or characters and want to enhance that preexisting world. Trust me, I would know.
The fanfiction authors are doing it for the love of the game; if they wanted to write something original and publish that, they would’ve. Most of them are more creative than half of published authors anyways.
Taking your fanfiction, which became as great as it was because of the fandom it built, and turning it into something else is cheap and that’s when I will call you unoriginal. Because while your fanfiction piece enhances something, stripping it of its core and “creating” a new story acting like its original piece of fiction counts in my dictionary as copying.
And “After” or “The Idea of You” lovers put the pitchforks down. Fanfictions that were based on any One Direction member do not count in this argument — God knows not a single one of those was original in the first place.
