letsreadlotsoffanfic

[letsreadlotsoffanfic]

Words: 43,115 Rating: Teen Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Summary:

Responding to an unusual distress signal, a team of Lost Lighters set out to investigate an abandoned Decepticon base and get locked in with a forgotten weapon from a long since ended war. When their plan to deactivate the weapon goes awry it leaves Rewind temporarily without his memories, and now he has to race to remember who he is and how to shut this weapon down before they all fall victim to a fate worse than death.

My Thoughts:

This was another fantastic intrigue/mystery fic from SatelliteSoundwave! I've been trying not to post the same author more than once or twice (otherwise, you'd end up getting recommended sroloc's fics every day), but this author doesn't write a whole lot so I figure it's fine

I love the worldbuilding bits of it, woven in with the Rewind/Chromedome relationship. Like Satellite's last fic, though, I can't say too much without spoiling it. It's a great ending though!

[letsreadlotsoffanfic]

Words: 295,860 Rating: Mature (Definitely check the tags, what you see is what you get) Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Summary:

Ratchet joined the crew of the Lost Light with a sense of finality, his swan song. Now he finds himself unexpectedly looking at a future. While hardly a tale of starcrossed lovers, a new relationship with Drift and a new lease on life in general sees him struggling to transition. Meanwhile, the fighting between Autobots and Decepticons may not have entirely stopped, but the war is over and the Lost Light fumbles its way to peacetime anyway, almost despite itself.

My Thoughts:

This is a lovely "fix-it fic" for MTMTE that averts most of the death in the series: basically, folks are a lil less horrible to each other (though I don't want to go further than that, b/c spoilers).

Only regret is that it didn't continue into the Megatron portion of MTMTE... though at nearly 300k it is a bit ungracious of me to complain about not having enough XD It was really good!

[letsreadlotsoffanfic]

Words: 15,548 Rating: General Audiences Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Summary:

When Wheeljack and Starscream are chosen as representatives from their respective factions to enter into an arranged marriage to end the war, everyone expects it to implode almost immediately. Nearly everyone is pleasantly surprised when it doesn’t.

My Thoughts:

Wheeljack/Starscream pairings aren't super common but have a lot of potential. I love Wheeljack's attitude going into the arranged marriage. There's a lil bit of intrigue in this too, which keeps it interesting, but I find their growing relationship to be rather cute

[letsreadlotsoffanfic]

Words: 11,048 Rating: Teen Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Summary:

“I mean,” said Bumblebee, “Ratchet’s lying.”

“What makes you think that?” said Prowl.

“Uh, hello? How about everything?” Bumblebee waved a hand. “Like, look at the facts! Ratchet has this conjunx that we’ve never heard about, who’s super handsome and also apparently one of the greatest martial artists to ever live? Ratchet? That grumpy old sack of bolts who’s no treat on the eyes either? He has to be making it up! It has big stinking lie written all over it!”

My Thoughts:

Aaa, I love the Dratchet multiverse! Dratchet in TFA works well, too- there's lots of backstory and implications to latch on to. Definitely left me wanting more, this author's Drift would've made a neat guest character in a mythical TFA season 4

[letsreadlotsoffanfic]

Words: 16,671 Rating: Teen (Definitely some explicit stuff - probably should've been rated Mature, but it isn't the focus of the fic) Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Summary:

Whirl had a plan. It was a good plan. By the end of it, he’d be rich, Cyclonus and Tailgate would be together, and all would be well. And then the plan went awry. Because Whirl? He fell in love, too.

My Thoughts:

I really love this trio's dynamic, and the author does a good job of writing through Whirl's perspective.

And I always love the off-hand indications of Rung being the eldritch being he is (we never got too much of that in the 'canon' but that was to preserve the reveal. Now, I love when authors lean into the dramatic irony)

Rung gave him a long, incisive look. Whirl didn’t particularly like those looks. It was like Rung could peel open his armor, crack apart the layers of his spark, and examine every little flare and flicker to see what he was really about.

Overall, though, this was all very cute :)

[letsreadlotsoffanfic]

Words: 6,835 Rating: Teen Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Summary:

Soundwave, being the sane and intelligent mech that he is, is not really in the habit of responding to mysterious messages that find themselves in his inbox. Especially not mysterious messages with mysterious file attachments.

But with this one, the possible pros just so happen to outweigh the theoretical cons.

My Thoughts:

It's a creative and authentic way to spark up a cross-faction friendship between Soundwave and Jazz. The story doesn't go too far into it (it is just shy of 7k after all), but I love the characterizations and the interactions

[letsreadlotsoffanfic]

Words: 18,851 Rating: Teen Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Summary:

The Prime Basilica survives the war mostly intact, to Optimus's bewilderment and dismay. Even worse, the Autobots are insisting it belongs to him.

My tfBigBang2022 submission! Thank you to Arienhope for the wonderful companion artwork! Find them on tumblr

My Thoughts:

Reads a bit like throwing a party at your house while your parents are gone and trashing it anyways b/c they suck XD

Background's pretty close to IDW events, though it's a post-war where Autobots and Decepticons ended up a bit more amicable. It's a bit of a common trope at this point for OP to "not have known the real things the senate was up to" to try and make the Decepticons more sympathetic, and the fic plays with this a bit. I do like it when the Autobots aren't just boy scouts and girl scouts, though Prowl does tend to be picked on when that happens XD

All-in-all, a fun megop fic dealing with post-war politics

[letsreadlotsoffanfic]

Words: 23,123 Rating: Teen Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Summary:

While foraging for supplies in a recently abandoned battlefield, the Scavengers make a shocking discovery: they find a survivor! Misfire pulls a very damaged, very angry Deadlock from the rubble. Still in denial about the loss of his squad, Krok is determined to save the wounded bot, no matter how much he growls at them. The first several chapters are basically providing the backstory for their happy reunion on the Lost Light, many years later!

My Thoughts:

The author does a fantastic job of nailing the scavengers' characters, and the "meet cute" (?) was also an entertaining story. I love it when characters win more by their wits.

[letsreadlotsoffanfic]

Words: 39,339 Rating: General Audiences Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Summary:

Optimus Prime drives Jazz insane by refusing to die. Jazz drives Optimus Prime insane by refusing to explain whether he sleeps in a maintenance duct or not. They become best friends.

My Thoughts:

Is it obvious yet that I'm a big fan of "continuity soup" semi-AUs? Transformers fandom just has so much potential for it.

I really like this particular take on "jazz starting as an enemy" and the implicit worldbuilding going on in the background. Cyclonus/Tailgate's one of my favorite canon ships, so it's always nice to see them get some love even when they aren't the focus of the story. I'm also a big fan of OP reforming The System.

[letsreadlotsoffanfic]

Words: 25,547 Rating: Teen Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply and Creator Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings (nothing explicit/involving sex/interface occurs) Summary:

In the bright lights of a party in honor of a prevailing peace treaty, all is consumed by noise and cheap high-grade. In a short-lived journey to replenish a pair of drinks, caught amidst a set of familiar faces, one can’t help but wonder.

How much poison does it take to kill a faction leader?

Well, it depends on which one.

My Thoughts:

This is a fun (recent) post-war attempted murder mystery!

Thundercracker offering his services as a detective to solve the mystery is the best part of it all XD

[letsreadlotsoffanfic]

(Peace)Time Constraints

Link (It's archive-locked, so tumblr's link doesn't work)

Author: Insecuriosity

Words: 11,465 Rating: Teen Archive Warning: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings (Nothing sexual/explicit happens, just some casual mad science experimentation) Summary:

Where there was war, there were ceasefires. Shockwave must have experienced nearly a half-thousand of the things at this point, and they never lasted. By the time he realised that the peace was sticking this time around, it was too late to pack up his lab and re-establish it somewhere else.

Legal science under the watchful optics of the director boards, journalists, and enforcers is not Shockwave’s idea of fun. Thankfully, there is enough of a black market to get a test subject or two when he plays his cards right …

A light-hearted Post War fic where Shockwave makes an unlikely friend. :)

My Thoughts:

The First Aid & Shockwave friendship is hilarious. I find it funny that Shockwave's cruelty in past experiments isn't just in the pursuit of science, but from a lack of knowledge of "less useful" fields XD

Also pretty funny that somehow a kidnapee is the best lab assistant that Shockwave's ever had. I guess that was true in TFP, too! It could also lead to some wacky wartime team-ups, in an AU of this (e.g., Decepticons and Autobots have to work together to stop some sort of rust plague or whatever).

[letsreadlotsoffanfic]

Little Black Classics Box Set, pt 2

Continued from this post due to post size limits.

The Steel Flea by Nikolay Leskov - Original Russian English translation

The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe - Short story. Collection

The Terrors of the Night by Thomas Nashe

The Tinderbox by Hans Christian Andersen - Fairy tale. Original Danish only has a few. The English translation of all of them is collected here. According to this site, some of his works were published in English in the US before they were even published in his native country Denmark, so it's tricky to find a Danish omnibus online that's free & legal.

The Voyage of Sir Francis Drake Around the Whole Globe by Richard Hakluyt - Hakluyt has a lot of documented voyages, it may be best simply to peruse his author page on gutenberg

The Wife of Bath by Geoffrey Chaucer - Excerpt from "The Canterbury Tales"

The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Three Tang Dynasty Poets - Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu. This looks like a recent translation of their works, or at least a recent collection.

Wang Wei - Original Chinese English translation

Li Bai - Original Chinese with English translations

Du Fu - Original Chinese with English translations

To-morrow by Joseph Conrad

Traffic by John Ruskin - Some of Ruskin's essays. Traffic is taken from The Crown of Wild Olive

Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls by Marco Polo - Excerpt from the Travels of Marco Polo. Original Italian English translation vol 1

Trimalchio's Feast by Petronius - Excerpt from the Satyricon. English translation (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5225) Original Latin (https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2007.01.0001%3Atext%3DSatyricon)

Wailing Ghosts by Pu Songling - A few short stories. Original Chinese English translation vol 1 & 2

Well, They are Gone, and Here Must I Remain by Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Poem. Collection

Woman Much Missed by Thomas Hardy - Poem. Collection

[letsreadlotsoffanfic]

Little Black Classics Box Set, pt 1

Not "fanfic", but… I came across the "Little Black Classics Box Set" published by Penguin Random House recently, and the list of books looked great! $140 for 80 books is also fantastic, even when they're mostly novellas. A lot of it looked like stuff I wanted to read.

It was also all mostly in the public domain, too. So I figured that I could just find most of it on gutenberg or another archive, legally and for free!

Below the cut is the list of books in the collection, as well as where to find them online:

A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees by Kenko - Excerpt from "Tsurezuregusa" (Essays in Idleness). Original Japanese English translation (labelled "The Miscellany of a Japanese Priest: Being a Translation of Tsure-Zure Gusa")

A Hippo Banquet by Mary Kingsley - Excerpt from "Travels in West Africa"

A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift - Gutenberg

A Pair of Silk Stockings by Kate Chopin - Excerpt from "The Awakening"

A Simple Heart by Gustave Flaubert - Excerpt from "Trois Contes" (Three tales/three short works). Original French English Translation

A Slip Under the Microscope by H G Wells - Excerpt from "30 Strange Stories"

Anthem For Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen - Poem. Collection

Antigone by Sophocles - English collection of Sophocles plays. Gutenberg has a few other translations of this

Aphorisms on Love and Hate by Friedrich Nietzsche - Excerpt from "Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits". Original German English Translation

As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins - Poem. Collection

Caligula by Suetonius - English translation Good site for original Latin and a French translation

Circe and the Cyclops by Homer - Excerpt from the Odyssey. English translation. Good site to read original Greek

Circles of Hell by Dante - Excerpt from the Divine Comedy. Original Italian. English translation

Come Close by Sappho - I could not track down all the translations, since some are more recently uncovered than public domain limits. Here are some. And here's a good site for the original Greek

Femme Fatale by Guy de Maupassant - Selected short stories. Original French English translation

Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti - Poem. Collection

Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov - Original Russian Collected English translation

How a Ghastly Story Was Brought to Light by a Common or Garden Butcher's Dog by Johann Peter Hebel - Original German

How Much Land Does A Man Need? By Leo Tolstoy - Short story. Original Russian English collection with other stories

How to Use Your Enemies by Baltasar Gracián - Excerpts from the Pocket Oracle. Original Spanish English translation

How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing by Michel de Montaigne - Excerpts from his essays. Original French is in 4 volumes on Gutenberg. Vol 1 Complete English translation

I Hate and I Love by Catullus - Poem in collection Original Latin

Il Duro by D. H. Lawrence - Excerpts from Twilight in Italy.

It Was Snowing Butterflies by Charles Darwin - Excerpts from The Voyage of the Beagle

Jason and Medea by Apollonius of Rhodes - Excerpts from the Argonautica. English translation Original Greek

Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands by Ivan Turgenev - Excerpt from A Sportsman's Sketches. Original Russian English translation

Leonardo da Vinci by Giorgio Vasari - Excerpt from volume 4 of Vasari's "Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects." Original Italian English translation

Lips too Chilled by Matsuo Basho - Selection of some of Basho's haikus. Original Japanese collection. I couldn't find any "complete collection" in English, but the external links on Basho's wikipedia page have a large number of them

Lord Arthur Savile's Crime by Oscar Wilde

Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield - Excerpt from The Garden Party and Other Stories

Mrs Rosie and the Priest by Giovanni Boccaccio - Excerpt from The Decameron Original Italian English translation

My Dearest Father by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Some of the letters Mozart wrote. Original German scans English translation

O Cruel Alexis by Virgil - Poem from the Bucolics and Eclogues of Virgil. English Translation Original Latin

Of Street Piemen by Henry Mayhew - Excerpts from London Labour and the London Poor. There are four volumes of this on Gutenberg. Vol 1

Olalla by Robert Louis Stevenson - One of Stevenson's short stories. Collection

On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts by Thomas De Quincey - Collection of essays.

On the Beach at Night Alone by Walt Whitman - Poem. Collection

Remember, Body… by C. P. Cavafy - Poem. Greek and English collection

Sindbad the Sailor - From "Arabian Nights"/"The Thousand and One Nights" Original Arabic English translations (One) (Two)

Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Excerpts and essays. Wolfgang von Goethe was very prolific, you may be best off just looking at his author page on Gutenberg

Socrates' Defence by Plato - excerpts from Apology. English translation Original Greek

Speaking of Siva - selection of Virasaiva vacanas (religious verses). I cannot find the original kannada or english translation collection of these outside of this book: The ones that do have one of these poems cite A. K. Ramanujan, who translated and annotated this. This is "the" source. You can borrow it from the Internet Archive's library. Please message me if you find a good alternative source for this!

The Atheist's Mass by Honoré de Balzac - Short story. Original French part of a collection English translation

The Beautiful Cassandra by Jane Austen - Excerpts from Austen's youth

The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels - Original German English translation

The Dhammapada - English translation. Older manuscripts are in a few different versions, mostly Sanskrit/Pali, but this is a good site to read it on

The Dolphins, the Whales and the Gudgeon by Aesop - Selection of Aesop's fables. English translation Greek, Latin, French, and Spanish

The Eve of St Agnes by John Keats - Poem. Collection

The Fall of Icarus by Ovid - from the Metamorphoses. English translation Original latin

The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James

The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows by Rudyard Kipling - Short story. Collection

The Great Fire of London by Samuel Pepys - Excerpt from his diary. Gutenberg Annotated online

The Great Winglebury Duel by Charles Dickens - Short story. Collection

The Life of a Stupid Man by Ryunosuke Akutagawa - From 羅生門 (Rashomon). Original Japanese. I cannot find an English translation available free & legal online.

The Madness of Cambyses by Herodotus - Excerpt from the History of Herodotus. English translation Original Greek

The Maldive Shark by Herman Melville - Poem. Collection

The Meek One by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Also translated as "A Gentle Creature." Original Russian English translation

The Night is Darkening Round Me by Emily Brontë - Poem collection

The Nightingales are Drunk by Hafez - Poem. Original Persian English translation

The Nose by Nikolay Gogol - Short story. Original Russian English translation

The Old Man of the Moon by Shen Fu - Excerpt from "Six Records of a Floating Life". Original Chinese. I cannot find a free & legal English translation online, but you can borrow the Internet Archive's copy

The Old Nurse's Story by Elizabeth Gaskell - Short story. Collection

The Reckoning by Edith Wharton - Short story. Collection

The Robber Bridegroom - One of Grimm's collected fairy tales.

The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue - Author unknown, this is one of the sagas of Icelanders. Text with modern icelandic spelling English translation

[letsreadlotsoffanfic]

Words: 7,851 Rating: General Audiences (Note that the "Soundwave/Raf/Bumblebee" relationship tag is not actually slash or romantic whatsoever, and I suspect it predates the use of & on AO3) Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Summary:

Accidentally trapped on a battlefield between the Autobots and Decepticons, Rafael finds his life saved by the last person he expected.

My Thoughts:

Again, I'm a sucker for interesting and underdeveloped rival dynamics like this. I also like the background politicking in the decepticons.

The third work in this series is my absolute favorite, but it's incomplete (was probably only a quarter of the way through) and was last updated in 2013 when the user ported their stuff over from fanfic.net.

[letsreadlotsoffanfic]

Words: 301,006 Rating: Not Rated (No sexual content/"interfacing", but it does get pretty violent) Archive Warning: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Summary:

For Sideswipe, finding out he has a brother was one thing. Finding out said brother is his split-spark twin was another. Finding out that said split-spark twin was forged before the War of the Threefold Spark while Sideswipe wasn’t due to stigmas against split-sparks, which left Sideswipe’s spark locked away for megacycles while Sunstreaker fought in a war…? Yeah, Sideswipe has some feelings about that and would like to share them with someone, thanks. Unfortunately, Sunstreaker doesn’t seem interested in getting to know his younger twin brother.

Or: Sideswipe meets Sunstreaker, the twin he never knew he had but who he should have been with their whole lives. It goes about as well as he expected and worse than he’d secretly hoped.

My Thoughts:

This fic just has incredible world-building and character dynamics built into it. It's a great action/adventure fic. It's not canon compliant with IDW 2019 (though I haven't read the second IDW run so that didn't bother me...)

It also has really good looks at the morality of different autobots, decepticons, the gladiators, and so on. Really, just an entertaining and fun read all the way through with fantastic pacing. I kinda wish it wasn't anon so that I could read the authors' other works, though XD Even after 300k I still want more, it's good.

[letsreadlotsoffanfic]

Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/17/dastar-dly-deeds/#roast-in-piss-sonny-bono

In 1976, Congress set fire to the country's libraries; in 1998, they did it again. Today, in 2024, the flames have died down, and out of the ashes a new public domain is growing. Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate!

For most of US history, copyright was something you had to ask for. To copyright a work, you'd send a copy to the Library of Congress and they'd issue you a copyright. Not only did that let you display a copyright mark on your work – so people would know they weren't allowed to copy it without your permission – but if anyone wanted to figure out who to ask in order to get permission to copy or adapt a work, they could just go look up the paperwork at the LoC.

In 1976, Congress amended the Copyright Act to eliminate the "formality" of copyright registration. Now, all creative works of human authorship were copyrighted "at the moment of fixation" – the instant you drew, typed, wrote, filmed, or recorded them. From a toddler's nursery-school finger-painting to a graffiti mural on a subway car, every creative act suddenly became an article of property.

But whose property? That was on you to figure out, before you could copy, publish, perform, or preserve the work, because without registration, permissions had to start with a scavenger hunt for the person who could grant it. Congress simultaneously enacted a massive expansion of property rights, while abolishing the title registry that spelled out who owned what. As though this wasn't enough, Congress reached back in time and plopped an extra 20 years' onto the copyrights of existing works, even ones whose authors were unknown and unlocatable.

For the next 20 years, creative workers, archivists, educators and fans struggled in the face of this regime of unknowable property rights. After decades of well-documented problems, Congress acted again: they made it worse.

In 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, AKA the Mickey Mouse Preservation Act, AKA the Copyright Term Extension Act. The 1998 Act tacked another 20 years onto copyright terms, but not just for works that were still in copyright. At the insistence of Disney, Congress actually yanked works out of the public domain – works that had been anthologized, adapted and re-issued – and put them back into copyright for two more decades. Copyright stretched to the century-plus "life plus 70 years" term. Nothing entered the public domain for the next 20 years.

So many of my comrades in the fight for the public domain were certain that this would happen again in 2018. In 2010, e-book inventor and Project Gutenberg founder Michael S Hart and I got into a friendly email argument because he was positive that in 2018, Congress would set fire to the public domain again. When I insisted that there was no way this could happen given the public bitterness over the 1998 Act, he told me I was being naive, but said he hoped that I was right.

Michael didn't live to see it, but in 2019, the public domain opened again. It was an incredible day:

https://archive.org/details/ClosingKeynoteForGrandReopeningOfThePublicDomainCoryDoctorowAtInternetArchive

No one has done a better job of chronicling the fortunes of our fragile, beautiful, bounteous public domain than Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle of Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Every year from 2010-2019, Boyle and Jenkins chronicled the works that weren't entering the public domain because of the 1998 Act, making sure we knew what had been stolen from our cultural commons. In so many cases, these works disappeared before their copyrights expired, for example, the majority of silent films are lost forever.

Then, in 2019, Jenkins and Boyle got to start cataloging the works that were entering the public domain, most of them from 1923 (copyright is complicated, so not everything that entered the public domain in 2019 was from that year):

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2019/

Every year since, they've celebrated a new bumper crop. Last year, we got Mickey Mouse!

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/15/mouse-liberation-front/#free-mickey

In addition to numerous other works – by Woolf, Hemingway, Doyle, Christie, Proust, Hesse, Milne, DuBois, Frost, Chaplin, Escher, and more:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/20/em-oh-you-ess-ee/#sexytimes

Now, 2024 was a fantastic year for the public domain, but – as you'll see in the 2025 edition of the Public Domain Day post – 2025 is even better:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2025/

So what's entering the public domain this year? Well, for one thing, there's more of the stuff from last year, which makes sense: if Hemingway's first books entered the PD last year, then this year, we'll the books he wrote next (and this will continue every year until we catch up with Hemingway's tragic death).

There are some big hits from our returning champions, like Woolf's To the Lighthouse and A Farewell to Arms from Hemingway. Jenkins and Boyle call particular attention to one book: Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, its title taken from a public domain work by Shakespeare. As they write, Faulkner spoke eloquently about the nature of posterity and culture:

[Humanity] is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance…The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

The main attraction on last year's Public Domain Day was the entry of Steamboat Willie – the first Mickey Mouse cartoon – into the public domain. This year, we're getting a dozen new Mickey cartoons, including the first Mickey talkie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse_(film_series)#1929

Those 12 shorts represent a kind of creative explosion for the Disney Studios. Those early Mickey cartoons were, each and every one, a hybrid of new copyrighted works and the public domain. The backbone of each Mickey short was a beloved, public domain song, with Mickey's motion synched to the beat (animators came to call this "mickey mousing"). In 1929, there was a huge crop of public domain music that anyone could use this way:

Blue Danube, Pop Goes the Weasel, Yankee Doodle, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, Ach Du Lieber Augustin, Listen to the Mocking Bird, A-Hunting We Will Go, Dixie, The Girl I Left Behind Me, a tune known as the snake charmer song, Coming Thru the Rye, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Auld Lang Syne, Aloha ‘Oe, Turkey in the Straw, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, Habanera and Toreador Song from Carmen, Lizst’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, and Goodnight, Ladies.

These were recent compositions, songs that were written and popularized in the lifetimes of the parents and grandparents who took their kids to the movies to see Mickey shorts like "The Barn Dance," "The Opry House" and "The Jazz Fool." The ability to plunder this music at will was key to the success of Mickey Mouse and Disney. Think of all the Mickeys and Disneys we've lost by locking up the public domain for the past half-century!

This year, we're getting some outstanding new old music for our public domain. The complexities of copyright terms mean that compositions from 1929 are entering the public domain, but we're only getting recordings from 1924. 1924's outstanding recordings include:

George Gershwin performing Rhapsody in Blue, Jelly Roll Morton playing Shreveport Stomp, and an early recording from contralto and civil rights icon Marian Anderson, who is famous for her 1939 performance to an integrated audience of over 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial. Anderson’s 1924 recording is of the spiritual Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.

While the compositions include Singin' in the Rain, Ain't Misbehavin', An American in Paris, Bolero, (What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue, Tiptoe Through the Tulips, Happy Days Are Here Again, What Is This Thing Called, Love?, Am I Blue? and many, many more.

On the art front, we're getting Salvador Dali's earliest surrealist masterpieces, like Illumined Pleasures, The Accommodations of Desire, and The Great Masturbator. Dali's contemporaries are not so lucky: after a century, the early history of the works of Magritte are so muddy that it's impossible to say whether they are in or out of copyright.

But there's plenty of art with clearer provenance that we can welcome into the public domain this year, most notably, Popeye and Tintin. As the first Popeye and Tintin comics go PD, so too do those characters.

The idea that a fictional character can have a copyright separate from the stories they appear in is relatively new, and it's weird and very stupid. Courts have found that the Batmobile is a copyrightable character (Batman won't enter the public domain until 2035).

Copyright for characters is such a muddy, gross, weird idea. The clearest example of how stupid this gets comes from Sherlock Holmes, whose canon spans many years. The Doyle estate – a rent-seeking copyright troll – claimed that Holmes wouldn't enter the public domain until every Holmes story was in the public domain (that's this year, incidentally!).

This didn't fly, so their next gambit was to claim copyright over those aspects of Holmes's character that were developed later in the stories. For example, they claimed that Holmes didn't show compassion until the later stories, and, on that basis, sued the creators of the Enola Holmes TV show for depicting a gender-swapped Sherlock who wasn't a total dick:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/22/lawsuit-copyright-warmer-sherlock-holmes-dismissed-enola-holmes

As the Enola lawyers pointed out in their briefs, this was tantamount to a copyright over emotions: "Copyright law does not allow the ownership of generic concepts like warmth, kindness, empathy, or respect, even as expressed by a public domain character – which, of course, belongs to the public, not plaintiff."

When Mickey entered the public domain last year, Jenkins did an excellent deep dive into which aspects of Mickey's character and design emerged when:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/

Jenkins uses this year's entry of Tintin and Popeye into the public domain to further explore the subject of proprietary characters.

Even though copyright extends to characters, it only covers the "copyrightable" parts of those characters. As the Enola lawyers wrote, the generic character traits (their age, emotional vibe, etc) are not protected. Neither is anything "trivial" or "minuscule" – for example, if a cartoonist makes a minor alteration to the way a character's pupils or eyes are drawn, that's a minor detail, not a copyrightable element.

The biggest impediment to using public domain characters isn't copyright, it's trademark. Trademark is very different from copyright: foundationally, trademark is the right to protect your customers from being deceived by your competitors. Coke can use trademark to stop Pepsi from selling its sugary drinks in Coke cans – not because it owns the word "Coke" or the Coke logo, but because it has been deputized to protect Coke drinkers from being tricked into buying not-Coke, thinking that they're getting the true Black Waters of American Imperialism.

Companies claim trademarks over cartoon characters all the time, and license those trademarks on food, clothing, toys, and more (remember Popeye candy cigarettes?).

Indeed, Hearst Holdings claims a trademark over Popeye in many traditional categories, like cartoons, amusement parks, ads and clothes. They're also in the midst of applying for a Popeye NFT trademark (lol).

Does that mean you can't use Popeye in any of those ways? Nope! All you need to do is prominently mention that your use of Popeye is unofficial, not associated with Hearst, and dispel any chance of confusion. A unanimous Supreme Court decision (in Dastar) affirm your right to do so. You can also use Popeye in the title of your unauthorized Popeye comic, thanks to a case called Rogers v Grimaldi.

This all applies to Tintin, too – a big deal, given that Tintin is managed by a notorious copyright bully who delights in cruelly terrorizing fan artists. Tintin is joined in the public domain by Buck Rogers, another old-timey character whose owners are scumbag rent-seekers.

Congress buried the public domain alive in 1976, and dumped a load of gravel over its grave in 1998, but miraculously, we've managed to exhume the PD, and it has been revived and is showing signs of rude health.

2024 saw the blockbuster film adaptation of Wicked, based on the public domain Oz books. It also saw the publication of James, a celebrated retelling of Twain's Huck Finn from the perspective of Huck's enslaved sidekick.

This is completely normal. It's how art was made since time immemorial. The 40 year experiment in life without a public domain is at an end, and not a minute too soon.

You can piece together a complete-as-possible list of 2025's public domain (including the Marx Brothers' Cocoanuts, Disney's Skeleton Dance, and Del Ruth's Gold Diggers of Broadway) here:

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/

[letsreadlotsoffanfic]

Words: 3,582 Rating: General Audiences Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Summary:

A Captain position on the Lost Light is nothing like Megatron expected. If only being an Autobot came with a handbook…

My Thoughts:

This was all frigging hilarious XD I'm worries about spoiling the punchlines of things if I talk too much about what I liked, so you'll just have to make do with the summary.