I did say I understood what you were trying to say but that that was just my first thought.
Also hahahaaa if only they were just teenagers writing out their romantic fantasies. It starts with "this real person is actually a serial killer" stories and only gets weirder from there.
Ooooh, I see now! 
And yep, lol, I just went with what looks like one of the most popular options out there... but there's definitely lot of weird crap around featuring real life celebrities (which I definitely have NO interest to explore :'D)
For me the only reason I have a hard time calling Dante's Inferno fanfiction is because it ended up influencing the very thing it was, well, a fanfic of?
I do, however, agree that there are lots of talented fan fiction writers out there. I've read a number in recent memory where, the entire time I was reading, I kept thinking, "damn, just change the names of the characters and you have a solid manuscript that might even win a few awards." And this is BEFORE it's been through an editor! I'm a librarian, I see the average quality of published books (I usually have ~20 books at home at any given time, most of them I don't get through more than a few chapters), and there are so many UNEDITED fanfics that surpass that average. It's actually kinda nuts and very impressive.
I've always defined fanfiction as being about something that you don't have the copyright to technically publish but it's the internet and you're not making money off of it, so it gets a pass (not all the time, but most of the time). Writing about the bible, whatever--that's fair game. Writing about batman--yo that's fanfiction. But, people who write Batman under contract and under copyright--not fanfiction.
It's not really about whether it's bad or good (and I do agree that a lot of people look down on it, and it is because a lot of it isn't that great, you have to dig a little to find the good stuff.) It's that some things just aren't fanfiction.
Oh I fully consider it fan fiction. Self-insert fan fiction! And by most people's standards I think it could even be called a crack-fic for the wish-fulfillment cameos and lust ring alone. I feel like instead of pointing to other fan fiction in a way that implies their quality is too low to be on level with The Inferno, I feel like we should be pointing to The Inferno when people say that all fan fiction is poorly written or never matters to anyone.
To be clear, I love The Infirno as a story, but like, he shipped himself with a lady he met thrice and dissed every person he's ever disliked. Dude also eternally tortured everyone he didn't like, so he basically pulled a "cannon death but it only applies to Mineta" Also the sequel fits get even crazier. I mean I can wrap my head around what happens in the Purgatario, but the Oresteia is just bonkers
I feel like this is so often overlooked in discussion about how awesome Dante was. Like, there's a reason Inferno is the one people talk about. Lots of people don't even know it's more than Inferno. There is a reason for that.
Also, I hate to like drag Dante down because I liked Inferno too, but the argument that he defined so much in a way modern works (not just fanfiction) can't, I feel sorta falls under the umbrella of because there were far fewer people doing it. Like, if I had written my story back when reading and writing was a pretty rare occurrence, maybe I would have been held up as a classic, maybe I would have defined generation and languages. It's not really a surprise that fewer people doing it means the better ones stand out more.
How do you feel about works in the pubic domain like Bram Stoker's Dracula? If someone wrote a self-insert into that story, would you consider it fanfiction? Also, some translations of the Bible are under copyright. If Dante's Inferno was based on a copyrighted translation, would that make it fanfiction? Although, copyright law had not been invented when Dante wrote his epic.
@Audahlys If you do a vampire fiction that has dracula in it--it's not fanfiction, that happens all the time. Like Castlevania isn't fanfiction, it's just Castlevania. And whether or not parts of the bible are copywritten, is only dependant on the translation used--the story itself is not copywritten.
If Dante's Inferno is a fanfic, than any work based off of religious, myths, or classic stories are concerned fanfics. So all those classic Disney fairytale films are fanfics. I guess it's more like defining the difference between retellings of public domain stories vs fanfic AUs.
However, I do consider Paradise Lost a fanfic, mostly because people keep confusing elements from it with the Bible canon. I have come across people who are religious Christians who think they are talking about something stated in the Bible but they are actually talking about something in Paradise Lost.
I meant more if someone put their original character in the story of Dracula. Everything else was the same except for the inserted character.
@audahlys it's pretty common to do spins on Dracula, especially since he's based on a real person. I don't consider even something that close to Bram Stroker's original fanfiction. Especially since the original Dracula is like...that's a real guy who inspired it.
All we need now is for someone to come along and make a Divine Comedy fanfiction so good (or bad) it becomes mandatory reading in English classes and people start to look at it as it's own original work. Then in another 700 years someone else can repeat the process.
If you consider Devil May Cry to be fanfiction of Divine Comedy (i apologize to any DMC fans out there if saying such a thing is blasphemy, i know very little about the games) , then that's kinda already happened. And Devil May Cry already has a bunch of fanfiction made of it too, so it looks like we've built something really special here as a species.
I've read Dante's Inferno (albeit translated into English, I've heard the translation can never truly capture the beauty of the original), and yeah, technically it is 100% a self-insert fanfic about a dude hanging out with his favourite legendary character and finding out about horrible things happening to people he hates. It's also absolutely incredible as a literary work; fantastically imaginative and beautifully written and structured.
A lot of Shakespeare's plays are also "fanfic". Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet etc. He based on these really vague "historical" accounts and then liberally made up details as he wanted. The Iliad is basically Greek Mythology Infinity War, where a bunch of characters from other things all go on an adventure together (like omg Herakles is there!?).
I think really it's a shame that in our era of corporate ownership of characters, especially ones who should be in the public domain (GLARES AT BATMAN) having long since passed the threshold of years since their creator's death, capitalist forces push us to place a value judgement on the use of an existing character or setting without permission, rather than just purely reading a work based on its objective quality. The only reason The Dark Knight Returns or Batman: White Knight are NOT fanfiction is apparently "these creators had permission"; neither of those comics was made by the original creators of Batman, they were both made so long after Batman's creation that it'd be reasonable to say that Batman could have been in the public domain by then, but somehow these works were canonised because they had permission.
The problem I have with this model is: Who gets permission is gatekept by an establishment that can be pretty exclusionary to certain groups. Who gets to write a "canon" Batman story? Mostly cishet white dudes who live in America. Are they the only people who can write a good Batman story? Probably not!
Yes, a lot of fanfic is bad because it's written by teenagers. But some of it is good. A lot of "canon" works based on established characters are at least decent because they're written by trained adult writers with editors, but that doesn't stop things from happening like "Fallout Equestria", a very highly regarded fanwork, and "One More Day", an official Spider-man story that's widely hated and considered badly written. Or hell, I think Homestuck^2, which is an officially sanctioned sequel to the epic webcomic written without the original creator's involvement, is bloody awful, and as a fan of the original, I absolutely think that there are tons of "unofficial" Homestuck fanfics I've read of vastly superior quality. A Homestuck fanfic writer wrote the excellent original sci-fi/Fantasy novel "Gideon the Ninth" after all.
So maybe yeah, some things are Fanfic and the main problem is we just need to remove the stigma from the word "Fanfic" rather than trying to explain that anything well written shouldn't count.
I really think you should... The poem checks off almost every single box of what a fan fiction does, from crossing over multiple sources (all Real Person Fiction sources) to using a self-insert protagonist to having a plot that mostly exists as an allegory for the author's real life, to imagining brand-new parts of the lore that wasn't covered in the source material, even when it contradicts the canon. I know barely anything about Dante the man, but Dante the story is one of the most blatant examples of prototypical fan fiction. An extremely political and extremely influential one, too.
I'm not sure why this thread was made, but it appears the thread is mostly arguing over the definition of the term fan fiction, and ugh semantic debates are always the ones that have the least interesting stuff in them. I think it should be fully focused just on the book itself.
The Maenad is even more of prototypical fan fiction, where it's an alternate POV ripoff of Iliad/Odyssey and used as a thinly veiled nationalistic saga, but that's for another day.
I did NOT know that and I am extremely happy to hear it. I love it when fan fiction writers become super successful original fiction writers (especially when they keep writing fan fiction, which is rare but does happen lol)
My gosh, she wrote Marchingstuck? That was a big part of my teenage years... I made some really close friends by bonding in marching band with Homestuck and Marchingstuck back in the days before Homestuck was mega-popular and gosh I'm happy she wrote an awesome book like Gideon the Ninth.
I agree with this, however since fanfiction is work inspired by original work, and original work being The Holy Bible , it could be fanfiction, then again i believe it's really disrespectful to call holy book of religion fiction ( no i won't debate on any religions, every religion should be respected).
Back to fanfictions, there is NOTHING WRONG WITH THEM. Yes, there may be a lot of bad ff, but im positive there are authors who put their soul in fanfictions.
edit: damn it seems as if im arguing with OP, please don't take it that way, i agree with you on this points
I see your point, however I think, as was pointed out in the thread, not only is the terminology new, but the reason for the continued use of the term "fanfiction" is new as well, which is to say:
What is fanfiction vs. What is just regular old fiction?
Well, fanfiction by nature can't exist without the concept of intellectual property. It's fanfiction because, by modern standards or by modern law/copyright or whatever, the core story it's referencing is someone else's intellectual property, right? Not only is it amateur, but it's referential and amateur, and the key part here is that it also is using someone else's intellectual property as reference point. The idea that someone can hold for themselves a canon of narrative and characters and themes and whatnot and that theirs is the only True version of this story is a fairly modern phenomenon, as in last several centuries (this is a guesstimate so feel free to fact check me on that). Stories used to be told and told again by different people, whose audience then told it again to different people, et cetera, up until the early days of publishing of course. Every narrator would leave their own mark. These days, that's fanfiction, because we have a sense of intellectual property.
Of course, there comes a point even today where something isn't fanfiction anymore. Names, setting, plot, themes etcetera being changed to the point of being almost or totally unrecognizable. But that's not applicable the Divine Comedy, necessarily.
Which is to say, regardless of scope or artistic intentionality or merit or whatever, what makes something a fanfic rather than the broader category of an iteration of a story, to me, is a few things: the parent work being someone else's intellectual property, and of course facial similarity to the parent work in characters, setting, or plot, though that of course isn't really a part of this specific example.
The other side of this is, it would be historically inaccurate to refer to it as fanfiction. This has nothing to do with fanfiction's merits, as a modern concept. Just as it would be historically inaccurate to use terminology such as Leninist to describe the politics of someone who lived pre-Lenin, or to refer to a music piece as post-punk if it existed before that era (even with any apparent similarity) - it wouldn't make sense to refer to anything before the era of intellectual property and sci-fi fanfiction as "fanfiction".
Edit: for screengrab; relevant.
I am very sorry if I skimmed some replies wrong and someone already said this.
