e.g there’s this post going around saying “fanfiction is terrible writing and the way you can tell is that if you replaced characters’ names with random other names, no one would have an emotional connection to the characters or care about them any more. it’s just relying on the original work to make you feel things”
yeah, no shit if you change the words around in a story, they’ll mean different things and people will have different reactions to them. if you change all the words in recipes from ‘flour’ to ‘thumbtacks’, you’re going to get a different recipe too.
fanfiction isn’t claiming to be original work because that’s not what it’s trying to do. the whole point of it is to be a transformative medium that transforms an original work, so arguing that it’s not doing its job properly as an original work is like complaining that 2d animation isn’t doing its job because it’s not 3d enough
the fact that something relies on your existing knowledge and emotional connection to a previous work doesn’t mean that thing is bad. tons of published works use references to, for example, biblical events because many folks have established connections to those events and know what they mean. imagine getting mad at the divine comedy because if you changed all the references to the bible, it wouldn’t make sense. or getting mad at young frankenstein because if you aren’t familiar with horror movie tropes, it’s not funny
and then when you point out ‘this argument is both dumb and not exclusive to fanfiction; not only is being an original work not what fanfiction is trying to do, but also lots of established works rely on intertextuality and it’s not a bad thing’ they just reply with some shit like ‘LOL ARE YOU COMPARING THE DIVINE COMEDY TO SOME 50K WORD VOLTRON LARRY OMEGAVERSE SEXFEST’ like uhhh.. no, and the fact that that’s the only thing you can possibly associate with transformative works is 1, your own problem, and 2, clearly proof that you barely read the genre you have so many strong opinions about