Anyolduser

Again, it's real money people pay to experience fictional stories. If you don't understand that... I don't know what I can do for you.

The "just stories" employ the publishing, television, film, and video game industries (plus ancillary industries that support them). I can't even venture a guess as to how many thousands upon thousands of people feed their families on "just stories".

The reason why canon matters is because it presents a single, unified creative direction for the fiction. In a world where canon does not matter anybody creating an unsanctioned work can steer the fiction in an unsustainable or downright bad direction, literally taking the food out of the mouths of families.

Distinguishing between official and unofficial narratives keeps the responsibility (and the risk) in the hands of the people who staked their livelihoods on it succeeding. Taking that control away from them just so people respect some lonely teenager's shitty fan fiction is unconscionable.

They're also some people's livelihoods.

Old stories are muddied because they're old. Authorship is lost to history.

More recent works can be attributed to individuals or groups. Saying that anyone can ape a recent work and their schlock is just as valid as the work of the original author (or authors) is insulting to the people who worked hard to create original works.

You want to make a work inspired by another piece of art? Go for it, people will probably respect you for doing that. That's very, very different from writing some fan fic and screaming that your work is valid and you should be allowed to ride on someone else's coattails.

Ebony D'Arkness Dementia Raven Way couldn't have said it better herself.

Your argument falls flat when you take the wider audience into account. If some internet stranger writes a short story revealing that Sherlock Holmes was actually the Loch Ness monster all along, nobody gives a shit. If someone discovers an unpublished manuscript written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle before his death, his words have weight.

Fan fiction can do whatever bullshit it wants. The general public can, do, and should give greater respect to the people who created a story or those they handed their creation off too.

I mean, yeah. It's important to know which works are sanctioned by the creator/owner of a fictional work.

Without that My Immortal is as much of a part of Harry Potter as the Prisoner of Azkaban.

The producer blew a conch and yelled "FILM CREW, ASSEMBLE!" and everyone got together to film the new scenes that the revised script called for.

Oh fuck me, you're right. I got that mixed up with Timeline!

My bad, I'll delete the other comments.

The longer one spends on Lemmy the more untreated mental illness one finds.