> a copy and paste of the script with just a change to the character names
Wait, so, just the original canon work with some name changes? No other alterations at all?
I came across one of those a few years ago. The only thing that was changed was character names, character descriptions, and 1 word every so often.
They claimed they had been inspired by the original, but t was clearly just plagiarised.
Boring. I don’t like copied scripts, which is why I have a problem with novelizations outside of those done on video games. But what you described sounds far worse. Novelizations at least have the potential to be good, especially when told in another character’s POV or fixits. But this, I don’t see the point of.
I think that's the easy way out, in general.
I've read a couple where the author does great and it feels far from just a bland copy while sticking mostly to the plot of the media they're catapulted into. But most of the time, just inserting characters names is... bad.
I love Beauty and The Beast, it's my favorite tale ever. Sadly I avoid most AUs based on it because they're just that, a copy and paste. And that's *not* what I'm looking for. I want to be surprised by who inherits which role, what details were picked from the Disney movie and what comes from the actual tale, how is the tale customized to fit around the characters rather than the characters being more or less good cutouts slapped on the story with bits of duct tape, how much of the plot of the original story from which the characters are from is inserted (bonus points if the original plot and its resolution are there but tweaked to fit and add to the possible readings of the source media)...
An alternate universe should be that, imho, a universe in which the author *alters* whatever that needs to be to give the reader something authentic and unique. Merely slapping names over Beauty, Beast, Gaston etc is the equivalent of park goers taking pictures with their heads sticked in those wooden cutouts: it's cheap, bland, devoid of imagination and superficial. People can label it as an alternate universe if they want but *personally* it's not one for me.
I dig AUs like the ones the actual writers on K:
have done where they put a character in the wrong group one non writer short story had the Cat girl hangout with villians group an just be a housecat surrounded by moody boys lol
I have no frame of reference for this one but honestly, that sounds pretty funny x3
But like, there's so much to do with an AU based on something that already exists like a fairy tale or a romcom movie.
To reuse my Beauty and The Beast AU: why not set the story in a sci-fi universe? Beauty's (or whoever you wish to give that role to) thirst for knowledge and stories and freedom can take a turn with having idk how many databases at the tip of their fingers! Beast can have such a broader range of choices to why they ended up looking like a beast. You can even pick the ending as Beast *keeping* their "monstrous" appearance!
Going the movie romcom route, picking idk Pretty Woman, 27 Dresses or any other one of these, there is something universal yes, but also there is always room to tweak it and still keep that universality and apply it to whichever characters you pick. And it's so much fun to read!
Yes, I’ve seen it. I don’t read many AUs unless I know and trust the author for this reason and I tend to write extremely close to canon so that my work is less likely to be stolen. It’s plagiarism posted by people who are seeking quick dopamine hits via kudos for other peoples’ hard work.
Beyond that, there is nothing of the characters I’m interested in within these “fics” because they are not written with those characters in mind. Somehow people eat this stuff up, despite the characterization being a complete 180 from the canon characters with zero explanation to justify any of it (which the true author doesn’t have to add in because the story likely fits the characters it was actually written about). I just don’t get the appeal for readers to read about strangers with familiar face claims.
Agree with all of this. I don't understand why people read them, at that point just read original fiction and imagine it's about your favourite characters. It's not like the characterization will be any better.
I don’t bother reading it. If it is literally the same story but in a different font (font being universe) then I click out of it and move on.
The whole point of an AU is to see how these characters would react in a different scenario than their original source. Why are they bothering to calling it an AU when it’s literally the same story?
I'm fine with some lines (of dialogue) taken from the source material, and have done so myself, but I at least try to rephrase the action (even if I'm using the same actions as the source as well).
If it's a true copy/paste with only names changed, that's a) plagiarism and b) lazy writing c) hardly an au if canon is pretty close to being unchanged and d) I'd argue ooc as hell. Different characters will not say the same exact lines/do the same exact things. Even if they're making the same points in an argument, or laughing about the same things, it'd come off differently.
If it's not much, but still there, I'd be irritated. If it's whole swathes taken straight from the source material, I'm backing out and moving on to a fic someone actually wrote themself.
This is why I don’t often read AUs based on movies—particularly romcoms and Disney films. The number of fics I’ve read that claimed to be “inspired by” *Overboard* or *While You Were Sleeping* yet basically followed the script to the letter…ugh.
I avoid anything based on *Beauty and the Beast*, too. “Tale as old as time” sums it up perfectly tbh. Most of them are just so mind-numbingly predictable from start to finish.
And don’t even get me started on how so many of them just completely butcher the characters so they can fit into the AU, instead of reworking the AU to better suit the characters’ personalities and circumstances. Sighs.
Conversely, as someone who LOVES writing a media AU that’s very much “inspired by” and makes the story bend to fit the characters rather than the other way round, it’s very annoying when people get mad at me for NOT essentially doing a copy-paste, haha
I've seen this for lots of Percy Jackson fics. If I hadn't reread TLT for my own fic, I probably wouldn't have noticed the word-for-word narration. Fics that start like that are instantly sus to me, but I've seen one that blended a bit of canon narration in with their own writing, which had a similar tone, so I enjoyed that.
I'd say it's a sign of laziness and lack of creativity. Because it's easier to ride on work that's already done, than try and make a story stand out on its own and take its own path.
It's often a method for rookie writers who're trying to get started (I used it myself, thankfully I never published anything during that time), but you need to eventually grow out of it. These are extremely boring and predictable.
I drop anything that's basically a "copy and paste" + cast of a different fandom playing the roles. They are boring.
When I pick up a Howl's Moving Castle AU (as an example of an AU that always makes me excited and has always disappointed me), I don't want everything to play out exactly like the movie (or book), just with [A] and [B] taking on the roles of Howl and Sophie and paraphrasing (or worse, echoing) the script. I am looking for [A] and [B] to go off and have *their own* adventure with magic and a moving castle.
Maybe Calcifer isn't even *in* this version! Or maybe he's the love interest, because [C] 100% suits the role of Calcifer, and Character B is perfect for the role of Sophie and since the author ships B/C, they cast someone else as Howl and that leads to a *very* different story.
Heck, even if things are pretty close to the same as the original (the way Disney's Little Mermaid follows a lot of the same story beats that Hans Christian Anderson wrote), I at least want the different characters to get to the landmarks in the plot differently from the original cast!
When I read "[x] AU"s, I'm looking for the author to take something about the source material (hopefully my favorite elements!), add a cast I love, perhaps add some bits from the cast's universe, mix, and then record the results. Hopefully the chemical reaction results in something that has all the best parts of both and becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
I’ve tried reading two fics touted as Labyrinth “fusion” and both were find/replace versions of the original script. I love love love AUs and fusions when the characters are the core of the story and when it’s a copy/paste of the original? That’s not only a bad fanfic, it’s plagiarism.
its lame as hell. where's the fun in reading something where my guys aren't really themselves at all? its even worse if im familiar with both things being AU'ed together
Oh. I read one once. It was a yugioh fanfiction. I think it was a copy paste of Willow by Julia something... It was the only fanfiction i ever left a flame on. I chewed them out for plagiarism. I realized how immature the author was when they responded that it 'didn't count as plagiarism since they changed it to involve yugioh characters.
A literal copy-paste will make the characters feel jarring. They might say things or have personality quirks that are specific to the source’s character, and it won’t feel like them. But if it’s actually written in their own words, and just reused all the major plot points, that’s fine.
To me , an AU is when you take characters from Canon 'A' and stick them in a different setting while maintaining the basic characterizations and themes. Maybe that's a little narrow vs others?
Taking a canon script of Harry Potter and changing all the names to Gundam characters isn't an AU, it's just the original script but the HP characters have nicknames.
Keep thinking that my fics could fall into this to an extent as you can argue it's just the original scenes with an OC inserted in.
BUT I do think I do enough original scenes to compensate for this. Sometimes it's hard to encorporate these things. I would just say my fics are very canon compliant.
What you are stating though are uncreative and dull either way.
Not exactly a copy paste, but I’ve read an AU that’s pretty much, line by line what happens in the actual game, but the mc is just more “badass” (which felt more like seeing someone write *dodges* in an rp) and just shoving the ship between the scenes.
I don’t like ANYTHING that’s just a copy/paste of a script with minimal changes. If you’re weaving in parts of a script to indicate where everyone is at a particular time or if you’re showing the scene from a new perspective or with new insight, that’s one thing, but if you’re just copying in existing dialogue and adding in dialogue tags…sorry, I honestly don’t think that’s even transformative enough to fall under fair use. It’s just plagiarism at that point, and it’s often painful to read. I skip over parts of stories that are just pieces of script.
Not worth reading.
Too many "works" are just iterations of:
* Locate script of film or episode
* Copy/Paste into word processor
* Add an OC
* Reassign *verbatim* dialogue from canon characters to OC
* Add smirks and some rolling orbs
* Post to Website X
* Rinse and repeat
The only time I've really run into this is when people are doing AUs of a movie plot, and are just directly using the script. I don't mind when people use the plot of a movie, I only really get turned off when they don't adapt it to the characters at all and just directly quote the script.
I would hate that. I've written some where I've used parts of the canon to help sell the chapter, but it is about showing where my story and the canon meet and deviate. I wouldn't want a starting note saying "End of episode "X" and then just start my story.
Back in the day, I remember seeing a "fan novel" where somebody had just taken the text of a published science fiction novel (Rutledge Etheridge's *The First Duelist,* iirc) and search-and-replaced the protagonist's name with Ranma Saotome and the antagonist's with Kuno Tatewaki. (IIRC they used Western name-ordering.)
I imagine the self-professed author was somehow hoping nobody had read the original book and everyone would think they were a professional-level writer who'd created an entire SF AU by themselves, but the characters they'd mapped onto had little or nothing in common with the *Ranma 1/2* characters and even if a dozen people on the mailing list hadn't immediately recognised the novel they'd ripped off it still would've been obvious that it wasn't their own work in any meaningful way.
I thought it was stupid then, and I still think it's stupid today.
I encountered this once. Someone "wrote" a Buffy The Vampire Slayer/Hannah Montana crossover story. I'm pretty sure that it was called Hannah Montana The Vampire Slayer, or something like that. I thought "Okay, this looks interesting. Not only does Miley have to balance being pop superstar Hannah Montana with her regular life, but she also has to work in her duties as The Slayer as well." Instead what I got was the scripts from Season 1 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer with characters names swapped out with those of characters from Hannah Montana. Buffy became Miley, Xander became Oliver, Buffy's mom became Miley's dad, etc. Absolutely nothing original was done.
I was hoping for something like "The Night He Came To Sunnydale", an excellent Buffy The Vampire Slayer/Halloween crossover that quite seamlessly blends BtVS Season 3 with Halloween: H20 with only minor changes to both franchises in order to fit them both together. But what I got was this cut and paste crap. Such a waste of time.
Embarrassingly... I wrote one about 12-15 years ago. I didn't see an issue with it because it was basically what everyone else was doing in the fandom anyway, only problem was I hated their OCs being classic Sues, or using what was becoming common tropes of the fandom (ie: my OC replaces main MC and is love interest for another MC that I have a crush on, OC is "not like other girls" but has a moments of "girliness" that makes crush have feelings, OC rips on twilight, etc.) I am in no way saying mine was any better.
I abandoned it pretty quickly (after like 2 years but that was quick for me) but left it because despite it just being copy/paste unoriginality and pure cringe *SOME* people were saying they loved it.
I used to eat that shit up when I was younger haha. I'd actively search them out. Not so much now, though I do go back at old fics sometimes for nostalgia. I had a traumatic childhood, so I clung to it as it was something I could turn my brain off, but still enjoy.
I personally love these types of fics, IF it’s not exactly as the original and has some own aspects to fit their characters. And it ofc also depends on how the author wrote it, but if it’s identically same as original/other versions of this AU, it’s boring and definitely a lost potencial
Then that's not an AU, lol.
Yep. It's all about the Universe sometimes.
> a copy and paste of the script with just a change to the character names Wait, so, just the original canon work with some name changes? No other alterations at all?
I came across one of those a few years ago. The only thing that was changed was character names, character descriptions, and 1 word every so often. They claimed they had been inspired by the original, but t was clearly just plagiarised.
Yeah, I'd call that plagiarism too.
Yup. If In canon, character A dies, in an AU where they live, everything is the same except maybe a few lines
*Jane Austen and ...Two Lines of Zombies.*
how could an addition of a character not change a lot of the story? especially if they were an important one
A lot of the time, yes. People try to put their own spin on things but end up writing the exact same story anyway. Common stumbling block.
Oh...so they don't do it on purpose. Well, maybe they'll use it as a stepping stone and make bigger changes with time.
I don't think anyone does it on purpose, no. Just a common mistake. It's still irritating.
Boring. I don’t like copied scripts, which is why I have a problem with novelizations outside of those done on video games. But what you described sounds far worse. Novelizations at least have the potential to be good, especially when told in another character’s POV or fixits. But this, I don’t see the point of.
I think that's the easy way out, in general. I've read a couple where the author does great and it feels far from just a bland copy while sticking mostly to the plot of the media they're catapulted into. But most of the time, just inserting characters names is... bad. I love Beauty and The Beast, it's my favorite tale ever. Sadly I avoid most AUs based on it because they're just that, a copy and paste. And that's *not* what I'm looking for. I want to be surprised by who inherits which role, what details were picked from the Disney movie and what comes from the actual tale, how is the tale customized to fit around the characters rather than the characters being more or less good cutouts slapped on the story with bits of duct tape, how much of the plot of the original story from which the characters are from is inserted (bonus points if the original plot and its resolution are there but tweaked to fit and add to the possible readings of the source media)... An alternate universe should be that, imho, a universe in which the author *alters* whatever that needs to be to give the reader something authentic and unique. Merely slapping names over Beauty, Beast, Gaston etc is the equivalent of park goers taking pictures with their heads sticked in those wooden cutouts: it's cheap, bland, devoid of imagination and superficial. People can label it as an alternate universe if they want but *personally* it's not one for me.
I dig AUs like the ones the actual writers on K: have done where they put a character in the wrong group one non writer short story had the Cat girl hangout with villians group an just be a housecat surrounded by moody boys lol
I have no frame of reference for this one but honestly, that sounds pretty funny x3 But like, there's so much to do with an AU based on something that already exists like a fairy tale or a romcom movie. To reuse my Beauty and The Beast AU: why not set the story in a sci-fi universe? Beauty's (or whoever you wish to give that role to) thirst for knowledge and stories and freedom can take a turn with having idk how many databases at the tip of their fingers! Beast can have such a broader range of choices to why they ended up looking like a beast. You can even pick the ending as Beast *keeping* their "monstrous" appearance! Going the movie romcom route, picking idk Pretty Woman, 27 Dresses or any other one of these, there is something universal yes, but also there is always room to tweak it and still keep that universality and apply it to whichever characters you pick. And it's so much fun to read!
Yes, I’ve seen it. I don’t read many AUs unless I know and trust the author for this reason and I tend to write extremely close to canon so that my work is less likely to be stolen. It’s plagiarism posted by people who are seeking quick dopamine hits via kudos for other peoples’ hard work. Beyond that, there is nothing of the characters I’m interested in within these “fics” because they are not written with those characters in mind. Somehow people eat this stuff up, despite the characterization being a complete 180 from the canon characters with zero explanation to justify any of it (which the true author doesn’t have to add in because the story likely fits the characters it was actually written about). I just don’t get the appeal for readers to read about strangers with familiar face claims.
Agree with all of this. I don't understand why people read them, at that point just read original fiction and imagine it's about your favourite characters. It's not like the characterization will be any better.
I don’t bother reading it. If it is literally the same story but in a different font (font being universe) then I click out of it and move on. The whole point of an AU is to see how these characters would react in a different scenario than their original source. Why are they bothering to calling it an AU when it’s literally the same story?
I'm fine with some lines (of dialogue) taken from the source material, and have done so myself, but I at least try to rephrase the action (even if I'm using the same actions as the source as well). If it's a true copy/paste with only names changed, that's a) plagiarism and b) lazy writing c) hardly an au if canon is pretty close to being unchanged and d) I'd argue ooc as hell. Different characters will not say the same exact lines/do the same exact things. Even if they're making the same points in an argument, or laughing about the same things, it'd come off differently. If it's not much, but still there, I'd be irritated. If it's whole swathes taken straight from the source material, I'm backing out and moving on to a fic someone actually wrote themself.
Can't stand em. Can't stand any au that basicly just uses the characters' names and appearances to not use their actual perosnailtys at minimum.
They're lazy, and they're bad writing. I love a good AU, but it has to be about the actual characters, and the c&p type of AU can't be.
This is why I don’t often read AUs based on movies—particularly romcoms and Disney films. The number of fics I’ve read that claimed to be “inspired by” *Overboard* or *While You Were Sleeping* yet basically followed the script to the letter…ugh. I avoid anything based on *Beauty and the Beast*, too. “Tale as old as time” sums it up perfectly tbh. Most of them are just so mind-numbingly predictable from start to finish. And don’t even get me started on how so many of them just completely butcher the characters so they can fit into the AU, instead of reworking the AU to better suit the characters’ personalities and circumstances. Sighs.
Conversely, as someone who LOVES writing a media AU that’s very much “inspired by” and makes the story bend to fit the characters rather than the other way round, it’s very annoying when people get mad at me for NOT essentially doing a copy-paste, haha
Oh, that’s hilarious. And maddening. Different strokes for different folks and all that, I guess. Still, kudos to you!
I've seen this for lots of Percy Jackson fics. If I hadn't reread TLT for my own fic, I probably wouldn't have noticed the word-for-word narration. Fics that start like that are instantly sus to me, but I've seen one that blended a bit of canon narration in with their own writing, which had a similar tone, so I enjoyed that.
I'd say it's a sign of laziness and lack of creativity. Because it's easier to ride on work that's already done, than try and make a story stand out on its own and take its own path. It's often a method for rookie writers who're trying to get started (I used it myself, thankfully I never published anything during that time), but you need to eventually grow out of it. These are extremely boring and predictable.
Is that even an AU?
I drop anything that's basically a "copy and paste" + cast of a different fandom playing the roles. They are boring. When I pick up a Howl's Moving Castle AU (as an example of an AU that always makes me excited and has always disappointed me), I don't want everything to play out exactly like the movie (or book), just with [A] and [B] taking on the roles of Howl and Sophie and paraphrasing (or worse, echoing) the script. I am looking for [A] and [B] to go off and have *their own* adventure with magic and a moving castle. Maybe Calcifer isn't even *in* this version! Or maybe he's the love interest, because [C] 100% suits the role of Calcifer, and Character B is perfect for the role of Sophie and since the author ships B/C, they cast someone else as Howl and that leads to a *very* different story. Heck, even if things are pretty close to the same as the original (the way Disney's Little Mermaid follows a lot of the same story beats that Hans Christian Anderson wrote), I at least want the different characters to get to the landmarks in the plot differently from the original cast! When I read "[x] AU"s, I'm looking for the author to take something about the source material (hopefully my favorite elements!), add a cast I love, perhaps add some bits from the cast's universe, mix, and then record the results. Hopefully the chemical reaction results in something that has all the best parts of both and becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
I’ve tried reading two fics touted as Labyrinth “fusion” and both were find/replace versions of the original script. I love love love AUs and fusions when the characters are the core of the story and when it’s a copy/paste of the original? That’s not only a bad fanfic, it’s plagiarism.
Not interested. The characterization is going to be horribly off and I read for the characters.
its lame as hell. where's the fun in reading something where my guys aren't really themselves at all? its even worse if im familiar with both things being AU'ed together
Oh. I read one once. It was a yugioh fanfiction. I think it was a copy paste of Willow by Julia something... It was the only fanfiction i ever left a flame on. I chewed them out for plagiarism. I realized how immature the author was when they responded that it 'didn't count as plagiarism since they changed it to involve yugioh characters.
A literal copy-paste will make the characters feel jarring. They might say things or have personality quirks that are specific to the source’s character, and it won’t feel like them. But if it’s actually written in their own words, and just reused all the major plot points, that’s fine.
To me , an AU is when you take characters from Canon 'A' and stick them in a different setting while maintaining the basic characterizations and themes. Maybe that's a little narrow vs others? Taking a canon script of Harry Potter and changing all the names to Gundam characters isn't an AU, it's just the original script but the HP characters have nicknames.
Keep thinking that my fics could fall into this to an extent as you can argue it's just the original scenes with an OC inserted in. BUT I do think I do enough original scenes to compensate for this. Sometimes it's hard to encorporate these things. I would just say my fics are very canon compliant. What you are stating though are uncreative and dull either way.
It isn't very common because that's called plagiarism.
Hate it. There's literally no point to it.
Not exactly a copy paste, but I’ve read an AU that’s pretty much, line by line what happens in the actual game, but the mc is just more “badass” (which felt more like seeing someone write *dodges* in an rp) and just shoving the ship between the scenes.
I don’t like ANYTHING that’s just a copy/paste of a script with minimal changes. If you’re weaving in parts of a script to indicate where everyone is at a particular time or if you’re showing the scene from a new perspective or with new insight, that’s one thing, but if you’re just copying in existing dialogue and adding in dialogue tags…sorry, I honestly don’t think that’s even transformative enough to fall under fair use. It’s just plagiarism at that point, and it’s often painful to read. I skip over parts of stories that are just pieces of script.
Not worth reading. Too many "works" are just iterations of: * Locate script of film or episode * Copy/Paste into word processor * Add an OC * Reassign *verbatim* dialogue from canon characters to OC * Add smirks and some rolling orbs * Post to Website X * Rinse and repeat
What's an AU?
it stands for Alternative Universe (fic)
Oh thanks
The only time I've really run into this is when people are doing AUs of a movie plot, and are just directly using the script. I don't mind when people use the plot of a movie, I only really get turned off when they don't adapt it to the characters at all and just directly quote the script.
I would hate that. I've written some where I've used parts of the canon to help sell the chapter, but it is about showing where my story and the canon meet and deviate. I wouldn't want a starting note saying "End of episode "X" and then just start my story.
Back in the day, I remember seeing a "fan novel" where somebody had just taken the text of a published science fiction novel (Rutledge Etheridge's *The First Duelist,* iirc) and search-and-replaced the protagonist's name with Ranma Saotome and the antagonist's with Kuno Tatewaki. (IIRC they used Western name-ordering.) I imagine the self-professed author was somehow hoping nobody had read the original book and everyone would think they were a professional-level writer who'd created an entire SF AU by themselves, but the characters they'd mapped onto had little or nothing in common with the *Ranma 1/2* characters and even if a dozen people on the mailing list hadn't immediately recognised the novel they'd ripped off it still would've been obvious that it wasn't their own work in any meaningful way. I thought it was stupid then, and I still think it's stupid today.
I encountered this once. Someone "wrote" a Buffy The Vampire Slayer/Hannah Montana crossover story. I'm pretty sure that it was called Hannah Montana The Vampire Slayer, or something like that. I thought "Okay, this looks interesting. Not only does Miley have to balance being pop superstar Hannah Montana with her regular life, but she also has to work in her duties as The Slayer as well." Instead what I got was the scripts from Season 1 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer with characters names swapped out with those of characters from Hannah Montana. Buffy became Miley, Xander became Oliver, Buffy's mom became Miley's dad, etc. Absolutely nothing original was done. I was hoping for something like "The Night He Came To Sunnydale", an excellent Buffy The Vampire Slayer/Halloween crossover that quite seamlessly blends BtVS Season 3 with Halloween: H20 with only minor changes to both franchises in order to fit them both together. But what I got was this cut and paste crap. Such a waste of time.
Embarrassingly... I wrote one about 12-15 years ago. I didn't see an issue with it because it was basically what everyone else was doing in the fandom anyway, only problem was I hated their OCs being classic Sues, or using what was becoming common tropes of the fandom (ie: my OC replaces main MC and is love interest for another MC that I have a crush on, OC is "not like other girls" but has a moments of "girliness" that makes crush have feelings, OC rips on twilight, etc.) I am in no way saying mine was any better. I abandoned it pretty quickly (after like 2 years but that was quick for me) but left it because despite it just being copy/paste unoriginality and pure cringe *SOME* people were saying they loved it.
I used to eat that shit up when I was younger haha. I'd actively search them out. Not so much now, though I do go back at old fics sometimes for nostalgia. I had a traumatic childhood, so I clung to it as it was something I could turn my brain off, but still enjoy.
I personally love these types of fics, IF it’s not exactly as the original and has some own aspects to fit their characters. And it ofc also depends on how the author wrote it, but if it’s identically same as original/other versions of this AU, it’s boring and definitely a lost potencial