#fanfictions are derivative works

[wynncass]

i feel like a ragdoll being manipulated

[twopoppies]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DC2ReTAIlCF/?igsh=MW13bXFqd2x3MDRiag==

i think you’ll find this interesting!

i wasn’t expecting the harry mention in the end 😭

Yes! This is exactly what we were talking about yesterday. It’s so nice to see fanfiction get the respect it deserves. There are so many “real books” that could fall into this category. I know RPF has an additional layer of complexity to it. But I think there are so many examples of fanfiction that only use characteristics and perceived personalities to create their characters. For me, it’s really simple to differentiate between the actual humans and the book characters. I mean, there are “real“ books of fiction (or movies) that are entirely imagined scenarios and have real people included in them. Is there really a difference?

[adhd-merlin]

yes, prolific fanfic writers are awesome but you know what else is cool? people who take only a passing interest in a fandom (usually early on), do not interact with it in any way, write one, maybe two fics with their mind completely unsullied by fanon and then move on to the next shiny thing. and sometimes it'll be the most amazing fic you've ever read and you'll look for more but you won't find it, because paperclipbitch69 has already moved on with her life

[trucksquared]

Sooo much "original fiction vs fanfiction" discourse would be more bearable if people replaced "original fiction" with "published fiction" and "fanfiction" with "unpublished/self-published fiction". Also distinguishing between "professional writing" and "hobby writing"

So many arguments that "fanfiction is bad" have nothing to do with them being derivative works and everything to do with the fact that there is no quality control on most self-publishing sites

[colombinna]

But the thing is... You physically CAN NOT write fanfic of public domain works. Because if fanfic is about ownership, then you're just making an adaptation, reimagining, or whatever. And if fanfic isn't about ownership, it's about direct derivation, then we're gonna have to start calling a loooot of highly praised classic stuff fanfic too.

[annabelle--cane]

I understand the argument that while transformative and derivative works have always existed, "fanfiction" as a medium is inherently connected to the concept of IP law and thus is a specifically contemporary art/craft movement, I get it I really do, but also twenty years after the canterbury tales were finished an english monk wrote his own additional chapter and added himself as a character, and I'm sorry but that man should have been on wattpad

[batgovernor]

Sonnet: Jenna Le, 'Guilty Pleasures'

Half of my favorite works of fanfiction are stories that anesthetize the pain produced by the original’s depiction of harsh events: the person whom the main character loved who met a tragic end is resurrected in the fan-made sequel; the star-crossed couple gets a chance to mend, and consummate, a bond that has no equal. The other half are stories that prolong the pain and also boost its magnitude…

[playingonedchess]

and this is why fanfiction isnt the same as proper books

[auressea]

LOL- so true! and then once 'internet' we had web-ring based zines

...and if we go FURTHER back- we can pity poor Sir Conan Doyle's endless frustration at receiving unsolicited fan-letters with all manner of derivative works about Sherlock Holmes. By the late 1890s he was fending off Self-Insert fics from young women! And him a Married Man!

[luulapants]

If there's one piece of advice I can give to fic writers who feel discouraged by the "content creation" culture and lack of community engagement in modern fandom, it's to try writing for an audience of one.

And I don't mean write for yourself!

Find one weirdo friend that enjoys sharing ideas with you, and write fanfiction for them. Get to know their taste, and tailor your writing to it. One person who will message you while reading your stuff and want to discuss it deeply and dig into and challenge your ideas - they will give you more creative satisfaction than a hundred vague, vacant comments of praise.

Maybe some other folks will end up reading and enjoying your work! If they do, they will probably have more in-depth things to say, too, because you'll be writing deeply on a specific set of concepts, not creating broadly palatable, derivative, marketable drivel meant to appeal to a large audience.

And if no one else reads it, you'll still have that one weird friend.

[olderthannetfic]

Are there fandoms where the amount of male fanfiction writers significantly outweighs female writers? I think there was a survey or study that proved that female fandom goers tend to gravitate towards transformative ways of engaging with a work (so fanfic and fanart etc), while male members tend to gravitate towards archival methods (wiki, writing guides, etc). I know for a fact that there are plenty of male fic writers though. The only fandom I can think of where men dominated in fanfic circles is My Little Pony

--

Supposedly, Ranma had a lot back in the day, but I frankly doubt that they were an overwhelming majority.

Men don't all just compile canon wikis or collect action figures. The true difference I've noticed is that cis dudes are socialized to expect to get something for their labor. They, broadly and on average, show up more writing spec scripts or derivative but saleable works.

People researching this tend to be far too focused on the actual fic part, but I think it would be more valuable to look at it in the context of unpaid labor in general. Cis dudes do a lot of unpaid coding labor, but it tends to be stuff that will get very obvious payoffs from their communities, and it's directly relevant to getting jobs. Many of the less prestigious volunteer spaces are dominated by women. It's a whole brew of who expects what, who's underemployed and thus has the wrong kind of free time, who has job prospects beyond unpaid labor in that field, etc.

Anyway, maybe there are some more corners we don't know about, but I would not expect to find all that many fandoms of any real size where the men vastly outnumber the women.

[nightmare-chaser]

Dante's inferno is essentially bible fanfic complete with dante finding his haters in special torment pits on his walking tour of hell and thats gone on to become part of the literature canon, so like follow your dreams i guess

*This poll was submitted to us and we simply posted it so people could vote and discuss their opinions on the matter. If you’d like for us to ask the internet a question for you, feel free to drop the poll of your choice in our inbox and we’ll post them anonymously (for more info, please check our pinned post).

[lizleeships]

---> Read below the cut. (It’s not that saucy, just a lil’ spicy, so obviously I’m all kinds of timid about posting this.) 

Wasn’t it sometime during Season 10 that Dean discovered fanfiction (aka: ‘Winchester Gospel Derivatives’) and that Cas had already done his homework? ....I can’t remember exactly. 

(Please don’t repost)

________________________________

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[2dmenenthusiast]

Okay I keep seeing this and I need to talk about it because it's clearly become a problem.

STOP PUTTING YOUR FANFICTION BEHIND A PAYWALL.

Why? Because it's straight up not cool dude :) fanfiction is derivative, uses source material from another authors ORIGINAL work, and you are profiting off of it without permission. It would be different if the writer/creator came out and was like yes, you have permission to use this, but that is rarely the case.

Also by doing this, you are RISKING the future of fanfiction and fan creations. They're have already been arguments and pushbacks against creators, and fanfiction is already in such a grey area of legality, you are only jeopardizing it's creation.

In conclusion, please use critical thinking skills and do research 💖

[homosexualworkaccount]

Jason Todd’s “Replacement” nickname for Tim Drake, Origins and Popularisation

So, making a 2500-word essay on how a fanon nickname that only me and like two other people care about is not how I expected to spend my time in between exams.

A lot of Batfam fans are very, very much aware of the fanon “Replacement” nickname Jason has for Tim, and a lot of us very, very much hate it due to the connotations of fanon characterisation that it has. I don’t personally, I think it’s an alright enough one that fits into the established canon ones – but to be fair, I haven’t read the comics in a hot minute, so my memory could be screwy.

I got curious one day on where the nickname came from when a user on TikTok mentioned that it might’ve originated from a Batfam incest fic (They weren’t too sure and told me to take it with a grain of salt) – so shout out to them for starting me down this rabbit hole! I looked over on here and saw that notion repeated, though no one could pinpoint me to a specific fic beyond “It was popularised from a Batfam incest fic.”. I also saw a few people say that it was derived from canon, which piqued my interest further so I decided to go down a rabbit hole of fandom history purely for some fun.

The aim of this essay is just to clear up some misconceptions around the origin of the name, all fun and no harm. Don’t send harassment to people referenced in this either over a silly nickname, it's been well over a decade since they wrote the works used here.

Preface

Alright, first things first – all sources are going to be ones that were published after August 2005, the official date the first issue of Batman: Under the Red Hood was published, where Jason was established to be alive again.

While there could be a chance that the nickname was derived from a website/fanfiction before 2005, it’s highly unlikely due to the fact it was only popularised in the early 2010’s, and well, because Jason was dead and no one gave a shit about him. Also good to remember that most websites that ran before 2005 are defunct and purged from the internet now, particularly fanfiction websites (such as Quidzillia) due to various issues (taboo, copyright, costs to run ect).

Small note to make again – the Batfam fandom was fairly small at the time, the more fandom-y part of the DC community usually sticking to their own websites like Quotev, Quidzilla (again, defunct now), AO3, Fanfiction.net, LiveJournal and independent websites (again, defunct) while the rest stuck to discussion sites, so the entire fandom functioned more as a insular community from what I could tell. I will be working with the assumption that the nickname was created on one of the larger platforms, as any other platform didn’t have large enough influence to popularise the nickname.

The nicknames that I specifically looked for was simply Jason calling Tim Replacement in place of his actual name. Something like “Replacement Robin” was on very thin ice, but still counted as an offshoot. Anything else was off bets.

This whole thing will be split into a few sections to make some things for myself easier. Preface, Sources, Pre-cursor Fanfiction, Fandom Opinion and Language, First usage, Popularisation, Conclusion, Questions, Final Notes.

Sources

Fanfic.net – Created 1998, was and remains one of the larger fanfiction sites. Note; Fanfiction.net had various periods of time where there were large scale purges of fanfictions that held more mature content. Most notable instances were in 2002 and 2012.

Archive Of Our Own – The holy grail for my research. Created in 2008. For the information I got from there I used the search filter Date Updated, tagged Jason’s and Tim’s individual tags and followed from there.

Live Journal – Created 1999 and was used as one of the larger sites for fandom and fanfiction. Was used by DC fandom goers regularly so I used it to get an idea of the fandom at the time.

Tumblr – Created 2007. Theres various people on here who have compilations on DC timelines and comic sourcing that helped me correlate fandom growth with specific comic releases (Shout out to @ectonurites for their meta posts and timeline posts, they were a major source for this!). Dogshit filtering system, so I couldn’t find posts pre 2012 about DC.

Note; Quotev and Wattpad weren’t used in this as their filtering systems don’t account for searching for older fanfictions, so sadly had to be discarded as most fanfictions between 2006-2010 on those websites are now very difficult to find.

Pre-Cursor FanFiction

So, before we get to the actual first proper use I could find of “Replacement”, I first want to mention a fanfiction that had something very similar that I think would be important purely for archiving reasons around how the nickname came to be. And also because it fits the nickname criteria I mentioned earlier.

Published on the 29th of November 2006, last updated on the 28th of November 2007, was the fanfiction My-Enemy-My-Brother on Fanfiction.net by user theunknownvoice – featuring the first use of Jason referring to Tim with a nickname including replacement, Replacement Robin. Kudos to theunknownvoice, they created the very first nickname that would kickstart the rest.

While Jason doesn’t explicitly refer to Tim as Replacement – the main subject of this essay, it comes very damn close, so I wanted to include it. There is a part where Jason repeats replacement in his head multiple times, and I think he’s supposed to be referring to Tim, but the sentence isn’t very clear on that part, so I won’t count it, but it is important to acknowledge.

Though this isn’t the fanfiction that influenced the development of Replacement. This fic had barely enough reach to influence any future works years later. I couldn’t find any connection with this work and later works that officially did just have Jason call Tim “Replacement”

Fandom Opinion and Language at the time

I promise this is important and that I’m not a pretentious linguistic, English isn’t even my first language.

I like to think we all know how fandom discussion just seeps into fanfiction (See; the nickname green bean for Deku from MHA leaking into fanfiction) so I just want to quickly point this out.

Discussion around the two blew up after Jasons return in late 2005, people going “What does this mean” and “What does that mean for Tim”. Through the few posts I could dig up from this time and up to 2011, it seems people came to the conclusion that Tim was Jason’s replacement, and that their dynamic was Jason dealing with the fact that he had one. You can definitely see that in some of the posts and fanfiction written at the time that usually had Jason dealing with Tim being his replacement.

(Just a few examples from LiveJournal but more like this are still floating around, if they aren’t deleted anyway)

It’s very likely that the authors themselves engaged in similar discussions/had independent thoughts that ended in the same conclusions, seeping into the fanfiction itself later. In the comics pre-New 52 I couldn’t find any major instance of Jason explicitly referring to Tim as his replacement (only implied through speech), so this was mostly contained in fandom discussions from what I can tell. (Note, this was probably similar on comic discussion websites, but I couldn’t find any that still exist pre-2007, so I’m going to assume literacy skills are not any better on those sites. See; Batman dick riders)

The fact that Tim is explicitly described as having replaced Jason, and sometimes as “Being the Replacement” on posts/fanfiction definitely had a hand in the creation and popularisation of the nickname, influencing the fan content made around the two.

First usage of Replacement

Cain! Cain! Is the first use of the nickname Replacement really from a Batfam incest fanfiction?

Nope, thank God.

After filtering their character tags together on AO3, going to the oldest page and clicking through over 10 pages, reading every single fanfiction on each one (yes, even the weird ones, I was dedicated) I found the first instance where Jason explicitly refers to Tim as Replacement, that still exists today anyway.

Published on the 24th of January, 2009 by user shiny_glor_chan, is the fanfiction Four Calling Birds, a fanfiction detailing Stephenie Brown returning from faking her death (a whole headache from the comics that I can't be arsed to explain) and getting to meet Jason and Dick for the first time. Genuinely sweet, and a corner stone of fandom history, officially. Hip hip Hooray! Congratulations shiny_glor_chan.

I tried tracing to see if this person had any other accounts that I could find to see where they got the nickname from, but it seems it’s mostly a nickname they thought up out of the fact that they had consistently wrote Jason explicitly stating that Tim was his replacement

And reading through several more pages of fanfiction again, feeling like I want to bleach my eyes out, I found the second instance of the nickname being used. Published on the 26th of May, 2010 by user axiel-neesan, is the fanfiction The Only Piece You Get, where Jason basically acts as Tim’s cabbie and bonds with him. Another corner stone of fandom history, hooray.

These two authors are completely unrelated and have no connections to each other besides both frequenting LiveJournal, having taken prompts and having friends from that website, despite having no accounts I could find. I personally think they had a similar train of thought of “Huh, that would be a sick ass nickname.”. Chances are that axiel-neesan saw shiny_glor_chans fic and got inspired as the fandom was dead small on AO3 at the time – around 20 pages worth of fanfiction from 2008-2010 (And thats being generous if we’re counting now deleted ones)

These two fanfictions are immensely important because it’s the only early instances I could find of the nickname being used, and for about two years after the nickname pops up occasionally – but by no means was it popular, or even regularly used, I had to look for the fanfictions that used it.

Props to shiny_glor_chan and axiel-neesan! I pray that you two don’t see what the fandom thinks of that nickname now.

Popularisation

Early 2012 saw the proper explosion of fandom for the Batfam, and by extension the nickname.

By this point there were so many fanfictions that I couldn’t read them all, so I started picking random ones that tagged Jason and Tims relationship, platonic or not. Pre-April-ish of 2012 the nickname popped up every other page or so, but sometime after mid-2012 the nickname was in almost every fanfiction that I skimmed through – so that’s its official growth period.

Why though? Several factors probably.

The New-52 was in full swing by this time, DC massively promoting the reboot to get new fans interested, so people picked up comics from there. Young Justice – the more mainstream exposure of DC to surface level fans aired its second season in April of 2012, introducing people to Tim Drake and his story and getting them interested. Fanfiction and fandom as a whole was becoming less taboo and more accepted in fan spaces, so encouragement to write it was much better than it was in the early years of the internet (Example; Teen Wolf’s production team)

As for a specific catalyst for the growth of popularity for the nickname? There might be something worth pointing to.

Kudos for @ectonurites for helping me on this (Hi Sam! I was anon!) and giving me a publishing date on Tim’s and Jason’s first New 52 interaction – Red Hood and the Outlaws #8, published on the 18th of April, 2012. It features an instance of Jason and Tim interacting in a very friendly and familial way, Jason explicitly calling Bruce their Dad. Compared to their last major previous interaction of Jason leaving Tim for dead, fans of the two who enjoyed the more familial potential (and tragically, romantic potential) took it and ran with it.

All of these combined in some way to contribute to the popularity of the nickname in mid to late 2012, and lead to it’s infamy in DC fanfiction.

Conclusion

In conclusion, how do I think the nickname came to be?

I think it’s a combination of factors that led to it’s creation. As already established people very much did see Tim as Jasons replacement at the time, and the language could have shortened down from “Tim replaced Jason” to “Tim is Jason’s replacement” to “Tim is the replacement” which I think could be the train of thought the 2006 author went down to create the nickname Replacement Robin.

This definitely influenced the AO3 writers as shiny_glor_chan was present on LiveJournal at the time (where this language was very prominent), so they were already down the line of thinking this and probably went “Huh, replacement is kinda a funny nickname” and added it. As already stated, I think axiel-neesan probably had a very similar train of thought or may have seen shiny_glor_chan’s fic and was inspired.

And from there people saw it, used it in their own works, getting leaked over onto LiveJournal, which was the main website for prompt sharing, getting used a decent amount there before the explosion of fandom in mid-2012 that lead to it’s regular usage in fan works.

Questions

So, is the nickname from a Batcest fic?

Nope! The nickname mostly makes an appearance in platonic fics between Jason and Tim, it’s actually a chore to find it in their romantic ones, as in I think I found one instance of it being used somewhere in late 2010 but I can't think of it in a fanfiction that predates that. All early uses of the nickname were in platonic fics between the two.

I think this rumour is based around three fanfictions specifically on Ao3 that people are pointing to, I think, no one seems to be wanting to name names. They’re the ones that pop up when you search Replacement in the word search after tagging Tim Drake and Jason Todd together.

Wings to Fly. Published October of 2012. Jason Refers to Tim as Replacement. Jason/Tim

Replacement. Published 2009. The title implies it’s referring to Tim, but Jason never explicitly nicknames Tim replacement, the narrator only calling Tim “His replacement”, him being Jason. Jason/Tim. Non-con

The Replacement. Published 2011. Can't figure out if the title is supposed to refer to Tim or is simply just titled that for the sake of it. Jason talks a few times about Tim being his replacement, but the nickname never makes an appearance. Jason/Tim

Does the nickname have any bases in Canon?

From what I can tell, no. I haven’t read all the Batfamily comics Pre-New 52, or from after Batman: Under The Red Hood, I mostly stray towards Hal Jordans comics lol. I don’t think theres any major instance where Jason talks about Tim replacing him by specifically using replacement or replacing (It can be inferred from his speech sometimes, but Jason’s relationship with Tim was much more complex than that. I’d recommend reading @ectonurites metas about the two to get a better idea) Theres a few instances in 2015 post-New 52 reboot where Jason says explicitly that Tim replaced him, but that was way after the nickname was popularised.

Red Hood and Arsenal #7 (2015)

Final Notes

That’s about it! That’s the result of my month long dive into almost twenty years worth of DC fandom history as a fun side project. Please don’t harass anyone linked here, this was just project to pass the time and not a call out post for anyone that did contribute to the popularisation of the nickname.

Feel free to ask me anything else about this or any other DC fandom history and I’ll try to research it!! This was genuinely a fun thing to do to pass the time and work out my research muscles.

[paulgadzikowski]

I'm pretty sure the Organization for Transformative Works lawyers could offer legal opinions contesting that fanfiction is against the law. Among the legal experts' opinons I've seen knocking around in latter decades is that there's no violation of copyright law if there is no profit made (that's why it's against the TOS at AO3 to link to your Patreon or to your Ko-Fi) and if there is no infringement on the copyright owner's market; and that no work is copyright infringement until or unless it is found to be so in a court of law - which is to say, any given individual instance of possible infringement is innocent* until proven guilty.

Also, equating fanfiction to naturally just a step to plagiarism? Really? I've been writing and drawing fanfiction since you were two years old, Mr. Scalzi, how much longer in your expert opinion until I'm going to start misrepresenting the latest Doctor Who and Star Trek episode scripts as my own work? Derivative work (licensed if derived from a work under copyright or not) and plagiarism are wholly different acts, 1) from different intent (diametrically opposed intent really: one's the baring of your soul like any act of creation as well as an expression of passion for the work you're saluting, the other's pure deception no matter what work you're stealing) and 2) also, more importantly, under the law. There are legal, technical definitions of each, demonstrating the difference. Equating them amounts to slander against fanfiction authors and belittlement of the wrong done to plagiarism victims. I used to respect Scalzi. (EDIT Disclaimer: My link is to a writing from 2006. The writing at the 2007 link above doesn't seem to mention plagiarism, and basically restates no-profit-and-no-market-infringement. Perhaps Scalzi learned better, but he's still on thin ice for not seeing a distinction that ought to have been blatantly obvious to a fellow creator.)

I got into it over fanfiction on Twitter once with Scott Kurtz of PVP Online, one of the big names in webcomics (or at least he seemed one while I was drawing AKOTAS; once I stopped reading webcomics regularly, I stopped hearing about Kurtz, unlike others such as, e.g., Foglio and Willis). Kurtz tweeted you won’t look back on a lifetime of writing fanfiction and feel fulfilled. Scott Kurtz was born in 1971. Guess what year I started watching Star Trek and writing fanfiction (for printed, mail-distributed zines). Just guess. I voted "Someone Else" in the poll. I tried over three days to get clear to Kurtz that the reason he's wrong is that with fanfiction the base motivation of the act is the passion** for the characters specifically, which disallows "filing off the serial numbers" from being able to scratch the itch. Appropriately I seemed to convince him of the passion aspect only when I lost my temper. At least according to Twitter Advanced Search when I could still access Twitter, Kurtz never said anything against fanfiction ever again, and apparently deleted everything he said in 2013 that was trying to convince me that my having spent his lifetime writing fanfiction is something which must one day stop having been fulfilling to me.

Scalzi can come sit with Kurtz, watching me drawing my daily comic strips at The Hero of Three Faces, and wait.

*Master of unintentional alliteration!

**I was up an hour past my bedtime writing and revising this before I posted it, and I've been back at it another half hour or so since I got up

Authors Convinced Fanfic is Illegal/Requires Permission

Terry Goodkind: “Copyright law dictates that in order for me to protect my copyright, when I find such things, I must go out and hire lawyers to threaten these people to make them stop, and to sue them if they don’t.”

John Scalzi: “Let's remember one fundamental thing about fanfic: Almost all of it is entirely illegal to begin with. It's the wild and wanton misappropriation of copyrighted material”

Diana Gabaldon: “OK, my position on fan-fic is pretty clear: I think it’s immoral, I know it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters.”

Robin Hobb: “Fan fiction is like any other form of identity theft. It injures the name of the party whose identity is stolen.”

Anne Rice: “I do not allow fan fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.”

Anne McCaffrey: “there can be no adventure/stories set on Pern at all!!!!! That's infringing on my copyright and can bear heavy penalties…indiscriminate usage of our characters, worlds, and concepts on a 'public' media like electronic mail constitute copyright infringement AND, which many fans disregard, is ACTIONABLE!”

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro: “No. Absolutely not. It is also against federal law.”

Lynn Flewelling: “Whether you are writing about Seregil or Fox Mulder or Sherlock Holmes, if you do not have legal permission from the author, their estate, or publisher, then you are violating US copyright law. It is creative piracy. Doesn't matter how many disclaimers you put on, or if you're being paid. It. Is. Illegal.”

Someone Else, elaborated in the notes