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[muffiewrites]

I have no interest in reading 50 Shades of Grey to start with. The whole learning to be a sub melodrama is as bad as the average BDSM poem. The Hulk puked in Aunt May's washing machine on an Ultimate Spiderman rerun last night. Same thing. That said

Comments

[muffiewrites]

That's a little more difficult than a find and replace with a few spruced up to be original scene fixes. Plots repeat and, really, they aren't that original. Case in point: Hamlet and Sons of Anarchy or Taming of the Shrew and 10 Things I Hate About You. The basic premise of the plot is the same, the characters are the same "type", but the stories are refreshingly interesting. A good ficcer can take a fanfic premise and rewrite from scratch (not opening old fic) and come up with something that's different and refreshing, not the same story at all, despite similar characters and plot. It's kind of like how two people will write two separate fanfics with essentially the same plot, but both of them will look and feel different. Polly Bywater of Sentinel fandom calls that hivemind. I don't think it would be the same story, even if a few phrases here and there repeat. The reason: the setting and characters would necessarily be different. It's like Captain America and Superman. They're both perfect Boy Scouts. They're both "alien" in some way (time-displacement and non-human physiology). They both keep big cities safe in shiny red and blue costumes with their super powers. But nothing about them feels the same, even when the plots aren't much different. (Bad guy shows up, bad guy destroys things, hero shows up, hero gets beat up, at last minute hero wins, everyone rejoices).

It's not really the phrasing so much as that it's a case of selling a fic as something that hasn't been published before when most of it has.

Though to be fair to Ms. 50 Shades, I have no idea if she disclosed this information or if it got leaked. I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt and assuming she told people it was a mildly retooled fanfic for sale.