@unforth-ninawaters
Replying to all via one screen shot doober.

Yeah. I mean, I was mostly going off myself there. I’ve done 150k so far this year. And its fricken July. I could potentially get to 300k this year and it’s more than I’ve written in a long time. More than I’ve written since I told pro writting to shove it, anyway.

But yeah, I mean, if you took a random work from anyone who writes AUs and changed the names how easily could you tell they were supposed to be Cas or Dean or Sam or whoever? We might be able to, but could the general public? Probably not. They feel like Dean or Cas or Sam because we know how we interpret those characters from screen to text but honestly? They’re archetypes. Fleshed out archetypes with personalities and flaws and all but there are characters like Sam and Dean and Cas in everything, they just have different quirks and speech patterns and histories. We see the characters in an AU as spn characters because we’re told to by the author. I was talking to @samanddeaninpanties the other day about how easy it would be for me to switch names around in a recent fic and turn into into a different ship fic. If I changed the names completely and a few details, it would totally be an original fic. It would be easy.

And after all, how many fan authors have taken down fics to turn them into original work?

I dunno, I just get so frustrated. Fan artists can make money off their art and that’s acceptable but fan writers somehow shouldn’t. We work hard, too. If I want to set up a donation site or charge one cent per word for a commission, I’m going to. I’m really glad the tides are changing, too, because it’s always seemed so unfair to me that writers “shouldn’t” make money off their work. Yeah, I barely edit my stuff, so that’s probably a mark against it’s quality but I still put work into it. And hell, if I am getting paid I’ll put more work into fixing it but as it is I’m not so I don’t care as much.

I dunno. I just know fan fuc writers are some of the most dedicated writers I’ve ever met. What we do is hard and it’s just as meaningful and artistic as anything else.