Okay, putting aside that thinking your stories or game ideas might actually be picked up by official license holders makes you almost as delusional as the people who think their over-powered self-insert characters are legitimately good story concepts, this line of thinking still marginalizes the concept of writing for recreation, which I think is where a large portion of fan-created fiction, good or otherwise, comes out of.Dominic wrote:The idea is that if somebody is writing something with the intent of getting it *legitimately* published, then it is not fanfic. It is an attempt at getting published.
I have a half dozen or so scripts for short TF stories that are never going anywhere because IDW killed "Mosaic". The whole point of that was for fans to get their work out there in a semi-official forum where it was all but guaranteed to be looked at by people who matter at Hasbro and IDW. But, that is not an option. And, IDW is not supporting that sort of thing at this point. So, those stories (inluding "Unicron v/s the Death Star") are never going to happen.
Yes, I have an idea for a "Mega-Man" story. But, I am not posting about it at large because if I actually write it, I want to use it to break in to comics through Archie some other other legitimate license holder.
And, even that game I am (sort of) working on is something that I would like to pitch to Hasbro.
You asked why anyone would take time to write their own story content when there was plenty of official content out there to be digested, but that ignores that fact that reading and writing are two separate activities. I imagine the thinking for a lot of people is "I enjoy writing, I enjoy Transformers, so I'll write about Transformers because I enjoy it". I know I've equated the writing of fanfiction with toy customization before, and indeed that's likely the reason you spun the discussion off into this particular thread, but I can't help but think that might be an incorrect way of thinking, particularly in your case. You customize figures because you want to 'have' figures in your collection/lineup that you otherwise wouldn't be able to get, because they don't yet exist. In that respect, I can see how you might see fanfic writers as writing any given story because they wanted to 'have' that story amongst their collection of TF media, and see it as a legitimate entry, but I don't think that's the case at all. Most of these people just want to experience writing in a particular fictional setting, crafting a story with elements that they already appreciate. It's more about the process itself and flexing their own creative muscles in the process than 'getting' something at the end. Not to mention that you have to write random, one-off stuff that you never intend to publish anyway just to begin to get 'practice' at writing and polish your skills, and if you put it out there on the internet for others to read and provide feedback on, that can only be good for your developing skills regardless of if you actually plan on profiting from them, right?
Granted, there obviously *are* fanfic writers who just want to end up with a story that completely retcons Beast Machines or whatever so they can sleep at night, but I wager there are also 'cutomizers' who just go at a toy with paints and dremels because they enjoy the act of painting and resculpting and so forth, and don't particularly care about ending up with a figure that serves a particular 'purpose' in their collection.