Some of Y’all Just Don’t Want to Admit You Actually Like Fanfiction

Fanfiction is defined, at its core, is a piece of new work created by the fan of an existing work that borrows characters, settings, and other elements to craft a new narrative.
A retelling is defined, at its core, is a piece of new work created by the fan of an existing work that borrows characters, settings, and other elements to craft a new narrative.
What’s the difference? In one sense, copyright law. In another sense, our perception of fanfiction and the artistic merit therein.
A major stopping block when we’re talking about the distribution and consumption of fanfiction is the fact that you cannon profit off a copyright that you don’t own. Therefore you can’t sell fanfiction. Even the writing and distribution of fanfiction without the exchange of money is a sticky legal space. Fanfiction writers have received Ceases and Desist letters. The stories of the havoc Anne Rice alone wreaked on the fan community are immense. We don’t hear more about this because most IP holders don’t press the matter when it comes to fan creation as long as it doesn’t affect the perception of the original work.
So, by its nature, a lot of fanfiction has to remain the venue of the amateur in order to avoid legal censure.
Until public domain opens the walls for fanfiction to go pro.
Now copyright law can be very complicated. In the case of Sherlock Holmes, for example, the early stories went into public domain before the later stories. This got the Netflix series in the trouble because they used a “later” version of the character of Sherlock in the Enola Holmes movie. And while the story of Cinderella is in public domain by nature, the specific version of Cinderella as presented in the Disney film, is owned by the Disney Company. So you couldn’t use the blue dress or the design of the fairy godmother without licensing, but there are obviously thousands of Cinderella based stories floating around.
Sometimes public domain can be very straight forward, however.
Dracula by Bram Stoker in its entirely entered public domain in 1962. In the sixty since the number of books, movies, and television shows that pull from Dracula directly is probably in the triple digits. In books alone, we probably average between one and three Dracula prequels, sidequels, sequels, or retellings a year. All of these books are fanfiction, by definition, yet you will not see that term anywhere in the marketing for those books.
While free works that ostensibly do the same thing as these published works will still be called fanfiction.
This tells us that even when faced with robust exceptions and the technical definition of the word, we inherently consider the platform of the work as part of our internal definition and sorting algorithm. If it at least mimics the path of traditional publishing, it’s a retelling. Otherwise, it’s fanfiction.
And fanfiction isn’t considered “real” literature.
This underlines our bias in how we perceive works of fiction from different sources instead of actually letting a piece of writing stand on its own merit.