Should Authors Profit off Fan Fiction?
As someone who claims to write Saturday morning cartoons that f**k, I am obviously inspired by the fandoms I grew up with: X-Men: The Animated Series, Batman: The Animated Series, Power Rangers, Gargoyles, and Super Mario Bros. to name a few. However, as much as these had an impact, my works never started as fan fiction. I’ve had reviewers compare Saint of the Shadows to Gotham, but I’ve never seen one single episode!
Just because I don’t write fan fiction, I want to make it clear that there’s nothing wrong with writing fan fiction. I’d be flattered if people took my characters and started writing their own stories with them. I’ve read some gorgeous Sherlock fan fiction that I wish was an actual episode of the series! The fan fiction world, however, becomes murky when it makes a profit off the intellectual property it’s based on when the property isn’t in the public domain. When fan fiction writers have gone pro, they “file the serial numbers” off the original work to create something of their own. Take how Ali Hazelwood put Reylo (the pairing of Rey and Kylo Ren from the Star Wars sequels) in a contemporary college campus in The Love Hypothesis. The fact that it began as Reylo fan fiction is more of a fun fact, and the Reylo aspect leans more into grumpy/sunshine trope than anything else. In the past as a reader, I found out that a popular series began as fan fiction well after their initial publishing. It was trivia only those attuned to the book world knew.
Lately, however, the bookish profiteers advertise the reworked fan fiction with the property it borrowed from. It’s not whispered. It’s shouted from the roof tops. Which brings up the tricky question: who is benefiting? It could be the author of the new work unfairly profiting off another author’s work. Think how an AI software uses characters from popular romance books and creates chats with them. Navessa Allen and H.D. Carlton are not seeing any money from these programs that have appropriated Josh and Zade, respectively.
Clearly, publishers benefit from advertising with the original IP. The problem I see besides the morally gray property theft is that it overshadows the new author’s work, feeding the original fandom and further entrenching the industry in safe bets rather than risks and ingenuity. Readers may not even truly immerse themselves in the clever world-building or characterization of the new work if they’re only thinking about the source material.
Most egregiously, however, is when the original property is problematic or the author has become a detrimental presence through the policies they support or the hurtful behaviors they perpetuate. The reworked fan fiction only brings these issues back into the spotlight.
Ultimately, if the reworked fan fiction can’t stand on its own either by the publisher’s or author’s part, it shouldn’t make a profit.
Fan fiction belongs to the fans.
