When Fan Fiction and Reality Collide

Thank you, Nate. I understood the beginning and the bit about "Fifty Shades..." but they lost me somewhere and I can't even find where.
There's no "where" there.
Mitzi, almost 70 and a writer who contemplated Fan Fic but is slowly backing away

I'm with you.

I'm not that old and I found it confusing too. For starters, it's talking about RPF - real people fiction - not fanfiction. But then it transitions into talking about fanfiction, and poorly, at that. It's just a poorly written article.

You bring up some good points, but I think it's a lot more than just loving the characters. In the world of literature, characters are like building blocks. They fit together in different ways and create different situations when they do. Imagine a fanfiction writer as a kid with a lego sculpture who takes it apart and puts it back together in a different way. You're using all the same building blocks, but what you've created is fundamentally different than the original. I agree that most fanfiction isn't very good, but most of the good fanfiction is actually written by published authors. These authors already make money, but they write fanfiction because they can experience all the fun of writing without the hard work of creating an entirely new story.

It's not plagiarism, but (sometimes) copyright infringement. There's nothing wrong necessarily with using characters and settings from another work, besides the legal ambiguities, and humans have been retelling the same stories with the same characters for ages (Aeneid, Divine Comedy, all the James Bonds after Ian Fleming died, etc). A whole lot of it isn't any good but that can be said about most all media.

They're not making a buck. They do it because they enjoy it, not because they hope to make money at it.

It's true that many fanfics are highly sexualized and poorly written--but many aren't, too. There are a lot of excellent stories out there, written by people who have enjoyed a show, who know that even very good writers usually can't find a commercial publisher today, and who find an outlet and audience for their creativity this way. It's a hobby; they're not making money from it. What's the harm in that?

In traditional societies, stories are told, retold, added to and changed by many tellers. Homer's epics probably didn't originate with him. Shakespeare borrowed most of his characters and his plots, then made them his own. William Thackeray wrote fanfiction for Ivanhoe (Rebecca and Rowena). Andrew Motion has written fanfiction for Treasure Island (Silver). The creators of the hit BBC show Sherlock have admitted that the show is a form of fanfiction. All writers actually build on the work of other writers--literary historians used to spend a lot of time tracing patterns of influence--and literary critics spend their lives obsessing over the value and significance of tiny details in other people's creations, just as fans and fanfic writers do. It's time we got past condemning writers for finding inspiration in other people's work and dubbing it "plagiarism". That word should be reserved for those who are dishonest in representing another's work as their own.