This … issue arose tonight and it just made me wonder. I mean obviously canon-compliant fanfic/fanart is obviously not original but AU is far murkier territory.

We take characters we know and love and transplant them into completely different settings. We give them new backstories and new motivations. We change things about them, we make them experience new defining moments. We give them family or take it away. We do role reversals (Light!Rumple, Dark!Belle for instance).

Ooops I went on longer than intended so I’ll use a cut 🙂

Then there are aspects of the character. We take the downtrodden scared spinner, or the ruthless business man, or the lonely man behind the mask. Each are just one aspect but we exaggerate, we change, we use our impression of the character and not the actual character.

AU can change things so much that if we changed the names would anyone know? Some people have taken their fanfic and turned it into original works because there is a lot of originality in there. By the time the AU story has been told how much is fanfic and how much is original?

I ask this because like I said the ‘issue’ arose tonight when I spoke with someone who was adamant the drawing I was signing up to do had to be original. I explained that I used references as I’m still pretty bad at drawing, and they said that was fine but it couldn’t be fanfic.

I don’t do well talking with people face to face so it was only on the drive home that I started musing that maybe we were talking at cross purposes. Perhaps what they were afraid of was canon-ish fanfic, whereas what I had in mind would basically only share the faces of these characters. (It was a Beauty and the Beast adaptation in case you were wondering, and they said they’d throw something (me or the drawing I’m not sure) if I drew Robert Carlyle).

This reminds me of that graphic where someone simply told the story of Star Wars, Harry Potter, King Arthur and a couple of others because they can break down the same. Young Orphan is the Chosen One, sees their mentor die, has a special skill, defeats the bad guy etc. Which brings up the age old argument of what is an original story in the first place?

If we get inspiration from another piece of media and take one aspect e.g. the lonely man behind the mask, as I used it as an example earlier, and put it in a new setting, new name, new looks, new backstory, new everything else – is that still fanfic?

Anyway, I’ll stop now before I go on any further as I’m hoping someone will read this and respond – I’m really interested to hear other opinions – and if I ramble on too long then nobody will read heh 🙂