azdak

I've been following the plagiarism crisis over on spiketara with a sort of appalled fascination. I know it seems bizarre that a person should be so desperate for attention and praise that they're prepared to pass someone else's story off as their own in order to gain it, but there are some awfully needy people out there. I've known two people with Munchhausen's syndrome, who were constantly inventing awful catastrophes in their lives in order to garner sympathy - a best friend who committed suicide, an abusive boyfriend, a baby who died at birth, a brain tumour etc etc. In its own way, that kind of behaviour is not so very different from nicking fanfic in order to gain attention. I'm not trying to say that the plagiarist in question suffers from Munchausen's, or any other kind of syndrome, but you don't have to look far in her lj to find signs that she's extremely emotionally needy (and I guess you have to be to need positive reinforcement so badly that you don't mind if it's completely unearned.)

It's a very sad story all round, and I feel really sorry for all those involved, for the author whose fic was stolen, for the moderator who had to deal with it, and for the plagiarist herself, who is unlikely to be good at taking justified criticism squarely on the chin. But the 'human interest' aspect of the case aside, something else struck me about it, and that was that the plagiarised story was originally about *Buffy*. The plagiariser merely made a handful of tiny changes so that the first person narrator appeared to be Tara rather than Buffy. Now, Buffy and Tara are two wildly different characters, and it's awfully hard to imagine a first person narrative by Buffy about her S6 relationship with Spike being convincing as a narrative by Tara about *her* relationship with Spike, even if it's an AU relationship. Yet, judging by the comments made when the story was first posted, this wasn't actually a problem. I'd always operated on the kneejerk assumption that the appeal of fanfic is that it deals with recognisable characters whom the readers already know and love/hate. Clearly the extent to which those characters are 'recognisable', though, is much more flexible than I realised. After all, this isn't just a matter of someone posting a 'my Tara' who is significantly different from someone else's 'my Tara', it's a story in which 'my Tara' is in fact a different character altogether. I'm not sure what to conclude from this, but I thought it was interesting. Although perhaps it's no more than an extreme example of a fanfic author remaking a character entirely in the image of what they would have liked to have seen.