The mention of Twin!Harry stories on the archetype thread made me re-read The Santi's Harry Potter and the Boy Who Lived, and after I finished I stumbled upon a link to nonjon's very angry post responding to a suggestion that somebody finish an abandoned story. But even at the risk of being banned for it, I'd like to talk about the ownership and adoption of fanfiction.

First, consider authors like Cory Doctorow, Jim Butcher, and Mercedes Lackey: their stance on fanfiction is that it's fine as long as it's CC-licensed with the Non-Commercial clause. Creative Commons licenses are, in my mind, a perfect way to frame the debate. Specifically, nonjon's post and thus DLP's stance seems to be that all fanfiction should, unless otherwise noted, include the No Derivatives clause as well.

On the surface that seems fine since all original writing is automatically protected by copyright with all rights reserved, but it goes against the very spirit of fanfiction, and is impossible to claim when you're writing fanfiction anyway. I've seen the disclaimers that imply (if not say outright) something like, "everything you recognize is JKR's, everything else is mine and you can't use it without my permission."

Even disregarding the selfish attitude (so *you* can use someone else's ideas but they can't use yours?), how do you even defend from that? Even the threat of a lawsuit means you claim some commercial rights to your fanfiction, which is a quick path to an actual lawsuit from people with tons of money and actual commercial rights to the original work. Obviously none of the copyright/IP law stuff matters without a court case decided by a judge and not a settlement, but my personal belief is that anybody should be able to look at a fanfiction and use the characters, finish the story their way, expand upon it, or what have you. Once I get around to it, I'll add such a note to my stories/profiles explicitly adding my permission to do so, but while I believe it's certainly polite to get the author's permission to do so, I'm not sure that it should be necessary. Note that permission from the original author is not necessary for CC-licensed works.

I get that it could be against DLP Terms of Service to finish someone else's story (FFnet only disallows exact copies, if I'm reading their ToS right), which is perfectly fine though I may disagree. I know nonjon positioned himself quite against it when he wrote that post, but I also think it's a reasonable topic for discussion instead of unilaterally dropping the banhammer on anybody mentioning it. The evils of zero tolerance and all that.

Also note that I am most emphatically not talking about someone simply copying your work wholesale and claiming they wrote it. I want to be extra clear that claiming someone else's fanfiction as your own is abhorrent to me and I think most everybody else would agree...not to mention that such an act goes against Creative Commons licenses, where all the official ones require proper attribution. But writing new words that connect with someone else's fanfiction while giving that story credit doesn't seem as cut-and-dry as nonjon implied, especially since the three authors I mention above arguably require fanfiction writers to allow it (though unofficial CC licenses don't need the attribution clause).

Lastly, I'm not planning on doing it myself (I couldn't do my favorite abandoned fics justice), but I certainly wouldn't mind if someone did write their own ending to some of the best ones out there.

 

It just wouldn't work out well imo. I mean look at the fanfics of fanfics that exist already, they're trash.

 

I agree. DLP's stance on this is hypocritical at best. And... so what if they're trash? 99.9% of all fanfic is trash already. The topic under discussion is why DLP forbids such continuations, not whether they can produce anything worth reading.

 

BAN HIM!!!

/10 Charles.



Don't know if there are authors skilled enough to continue some of the abandoned stories from the Library.

Mmmm.. "skilled enough" is not the word. They're not the same person... yeah, that.

 

As long as the squared fanfic is sufficiently different from its parent as a normal fanfic would have to be from its source material (meaning straight continuations or even AUs are perfectly valid), I don't really see how people can have a problem with it. GRR Martin is pretty much explicitly against fanfic, and it's only HBO loopholes that even let it happen, and people still post and glorify it willy nilly, even (especially) on this site.

Just because something is posted on the internet doesn't make it any more sacred than if it was written on dead trees or recorded on DVD.

 

I'm also hoping to convince good writers that it shouldn't be taboo, though I think maybe being "good" in the first place generally means wanting to write your own stuff.

Mostly I'm just bitter over the lack of closure since I've been reading some of the high-rated unfinished/abandoned fics lately. Right now I'd rather have a mediocre ending to The Santi's story written by someone else, though I might regret it later.

 

Well, I've read fanfiction based on fanfiction before, and it wasn't all horrible (though one comes to mind as truly bland and awful). As Rhys said, they were sufficiently different, but the quality always seemed to drop.

And then the whole "adopting" an abandoned fic. It's okay if you get permission, but it's a dick move if you don't.

And even worse is if you just take scenes from fics, slightly change the wording, and pretend its yours without giving credit. There's a reason quite a few skilled authors on this site abhor "writers" that do this.

But in the end, it's all still fanfiction, and while I can understand being angry that someone stole your words and simply rearranged them, getting mad when someone uses the same plot or idea is just absurb.

 

It may look good on paper, finishing an abandoned fic, but the reality would be far removed, I reckon.

However good the author, the voice changes. I'm willing to concede that it may change for the better, as I believe it did with Sanderson when he finished Jordan's Wheel of Time, but for the most part... It won't be the same story anymore.

I think it somewhat reasonable to say I'm capable in the writing department, but finishing some of the good abandoned fics? I dunno... feels like I'd be sleeping with my cousin, or something. Authors have different flavours and style--some are saucy, fluid, and some are substantive.

What I'm saying is you wouldn't put tomato sauce on your ice cream, would you?

Sure there may be a bite or two in there of pure ice cream, but for the most part you've ruined something sweet.

 

I just want to point out that if you're an author of something you cannot forbid fanfiction. You can scream how much you don't want it all you want, but that doesn't mean shit legally. Derivative works are protected by law.

So, GRR can go fuck a goat.

 

I think it's a matter of perspective. If you think of it as a continuation of a fic then you are right. A different perspective is thinking of it as a fanfiction of a fanfiction from a point where the writing stopped. You are not writing what you think would happen, but what you wanted to happen.

 

Considering the fact that no fanfiction is perfect, I imagine approaching adopting a fanfiction with that perspective would ultimately lead to an author needing to write the story entirely for themselves. The results is a fanfic that is only base from the original story, but is decidedly different. Hence why we even have archtypes.

Would it be nice if so-and-so story was finished? Sure. But the likelihood of an author remaining true to the original peace is highly unlikely.

Like some others have said, everyone has thier own writing style and what they want to see in a fic.

 

I think part of the problem here is that when people think of 'adopting' an abandoned fanfiction, they envisage someone reposting what's already been written under a new account and adding to it - which is what always happens in these cases. It's natural that people would be against that because you're effectively posting another author's work as your own. For pretty much the same reason, people don't like to see huge chunks of canon material in a 'fanfiction' either.

On the other hand, if I were to (to continue with the OPs chosen story) post a story called 'The Other Boy Who Lived - The Unofficial Sequel' and write it as a continuation fic from Santi's story, without reposting any material, just with a note at the start explaining what it was and that it was unauthorised, then I don't really think there would be anything wrong with that.

That's not to say that many authors wouldn't be upset by that sort of thing - and I can understand why, but given the nature of fanfiction itself, they wouldn't really have the moral high ground.

TL-DR - if you write an unauthorised continuation of a fanfic without reposting any material then you are doing absolutely nothing wrong, but you might still piss people off.

 

Wasn't LoTR finished by the author's son? Using his notes at least but there was never an ending written down right? Not even a "Frodo wins and lives happily ever after." was there?

Edit: Thanks Saot.

 

Fanfiction is as full to the brim of bitchy little primadonnas as every other niche of the internet and you can't go far wrong by doing the complete opposite of what they want you to do at every opportunity.

That said.

'Adoption' is basically fanfiction of a fanfiction. However, while JK can't obliterate all HP novels from the face of the earth in a fit of pique, a petty little bitch can delete their fanfiction to spite whoever's writing a continuance of their perma-hiatus'd fic. I've seen more done for pettier reasons.

So if you don't have permission, don't adopt. Not because it's impolite, but because it leaves you in the position where your effort can be rendered effectively meaningless by the actions of another.

Edit: Oh, and this is assuming you're just posting from the point your continuance starts. If you post the chapters before that, it's a greyer area. Without citation, it's plagiarism, ergo fuck you and the horse you rode in on. With, it's piracy, which I'm not so much against but will still get you yanked from FFN et al.

 

No, LotR was published nearly 20 years before he died. It was The Silmarillion and everything after that was assembled from his notes by his son.

 

I've had permission from author to finish his abandoned fic for about 3 years now, and I've attempted to do it, but I've time I've tried, I can't get it right. I guess it stems from the fact that I was literally starting from the abandoned part, and not redoing the first 30 chapters, so the logistics were a bit messed up, but it just wasn't working. Could just be that I'm a bad writer though...

 

Err, this isn't a case of DLP being especially intolerant. Pretty much the entire fanfiction community, before HP fanfiction, before ff.net, was extremely hostile to any kind of plagiarism, continuations, copying of characters, etc. without permission from the originating fanfic author. Back when most fanfics were distributed by usenet and mailing lists, this was the attitude.

It's a long-standing community-wide consensus. You should understand why it exists before trying to change it.

 

Ok, why does it exist? Was it a good reason 7 or 8 years ago? Is it a good reason today?

 

Sounds like that was before the rise of Wikipedia, Creative Commons, and the other giants of Free Culture. It is interesting that it arose in the opposite way of software, which was originally most popularly shared as public domain before the likes of Bill Gates. It'd also be interesting knowing the demographics of fanfiction writers back then compared to now, and their opinions on it.

I didn't think that DLP was alone in that opinion, but when I read nonjon's post it didn't make logical sense to me to lump plagiarism with story adoption/continuation (not counting the "claiming someone else's story as your own" kind of adoption).

Anyway, lots of good comments about the actual viability of having someone else finish an abandoned story. Like I implied earlier, I'd personally rather read a pretty good completed story than an awesome abandoned one (but I know not everybody agrees).

 

There are a couple of differences, I think.

Firstly, the relationship between published work and derivative work is very clear, less so than fanfiction to fanfiction. There is a sense that JKR's works are the authoritative ones. They're the "real" books, and all the others are inherently inferior no matter how well written. No fanfiction is in competition with its source material.

Fanfiction is, however, in competition with other fanfiction for audience. If someone writes a superior version of my fanfic, there is no sense in which my fanfic retains some authority or position as the superior version. This isn't an entirely theoretical exercse: remember the drama with Project Dark Overlord and his imitator Kurinoone? Her fic The Darkness Within was almost an exact copy of his A Shattered Prophecy (initially without permission, but eventually she sought it out), but slightly better written and pandering more to the shipping crowd. It also had a rather higher word count and a sequel.

Now Kurinoone's fic is considered a classic of the fandom. Reviews: 6,754 - Favs: 5,282. Project Dark Overlord's fic? Reviews: 1,032 - Favs: 1,013. The imitation fic completely stole his potential audience.

There's also a difference in the sense of community. People have a tendency to think in terms of what you have a right to do, what you can get away with, etc. But that's not how a community should work. This came up a few months ago when Zeph used the same title for a story as Rusty Red's fanfic. No, Rusty Red had no ownership of the name. Yes, Zeph could get away with using it. That wasn't the point. When you're both members of a community you should respect each other and go further than the bare minimum the rules require of you. Zeph should have used a different title not because RustyRed had a right to the word "Ectomancer", but because it was the respectful thing to do.

Similarly, while a person might be able to get away with a continuation story by some kind of legalistic argument, the question is should they even want to, being part of a community where you respect your fellow members? The bonds of friendship should prevent us doing things like this without needing to make rules about it.