/lit/ - Literature

>>22064151
>If you are profiteering off of others original ideas
You need to get more precise than that, everybody uses other people's ideas all the time. Your favorite book surely draws inspiration from dozens of sources.
In practice whether something is considered fan fiction seems to have little to do with originality and everything with whether it's official-looking. It may be governed by copyright but it's more similar to trademarks in spirit.
Fifty Shades of Grey is a nice case study because it's a Twilight fanfic with the names filed off, yet before the names were removed it was already unrecognizable. I haven't read it but it seems that it aged the characters up and removed all supernatural traits and moved them to a business setting and tweaked personalities to make it fit. What's even left at that point? Only a few things:
- The names of the characters. But those are unremarkable.
- Some vague tinge of the original personalities and dynamics. But those have been done thousands of times, Stephanie Meyer didn't invent them.
- The idea that you are in some metaphysical sense reading about the Twilight characters.
That last one is both the appeal and the problem. I believe this particular kind of fan fiction is written and read because the characters have taken up residence in people's minds and are thought about as Real People and so the mere labels and vague resemblance is enough to get people going. (Remember, this Twilight fanfic didn't have vampires, and that's not even uncommon! There's honest-to-god Pokémon fan fiction without Pokémon. People are willing to drift very far.)
And this is also where people start objecting to fan fiction. If you look carefully at what's considered okay and not okay it's about control, about the idea that these characters have some sort of Platonic existence that must be protected. It's not so much about original ideas and lack of creativity.
Fifty Shades became okay the moment it replaced the names. That was the actual border. Not any of Twilight's other ideas, most of those got ditched long before and many could have been kept without trouble. It was just the formal connection. That's what mattered.
That's weird, right?

>>22064176
Lately I'm kind of drifting without a comfortable niche. But two authors I particularly like are Nabokov and Greg Egan.
>with an actual point
Yeah, I need something to chew on.
Ideally I should be a little confused most of the time.