Derivative characters

Some decades ago, writer Alan Moore wanted to make a make a wild story with the characters of Charlton Comics, that DC Comics had recently acquired. But DC refused, because they had plans for those characters. So he made derivative versions of the characters, making some small changes here and there, and published Watchmen. Still, someone familiar with the source characters can still recognize them: Nite Owl is Blue Beetle, Silk Spectre is Night Shade, Ozymandias is Thunderbolt, Rorschach is The Question, Dr. Manhattan is Captain Atom, etc.

Still, Moore was working for DC Comics the whole time when he did this. What if he didn't? What if he wrote a fanfiction with Charlton characters, and then made those changes and published "Watchmen" elsewhere as if it was a completely original work? Can that be done, or can it generate problems?

I asked this way to make it easier to understand, but the real question is about me. I have an idea for a fanfiction (I have not started it yet, just have an idea), and I thought that instead of a fanfiction I may make a similar change of details and sell it as a novel. But before starting with that, I would like to know if it's a good idea, or if I should stick to a mere fanfic.

Edited by GrigorII on Jul 2nd 2020 at 9:14:31 AM

I mean, it depends entirely on how well you can pull it off. Fifty Shades of Grey was originally published as aTwilight Modern AU Fic on Fanfiction.net, and really only the names were changed for publication- Anastasia Steele was Bella Swan, Christian Grey was Edward Cullen, and so on. Its badness has very little to do with the fact that its substrate is technically derivative in nature, given that even when it was just a mere Twilight fanfic, it's my understanding that the characters were mostly In Name Only. On a less polarizing note, the Temeraire series began life as Aubrey-Maturin fanfic, but it switched tacks to original fiction while it was still in the planning stage- you can see its heritage in their superficially similar protagonists, and bits and pieces of the parent work's deuteragonist scattered across multiple characters. It's an excellent series and a highly atypical grandchild of the primary originator of the modern "Age of Sail" genre, but you have to be both familiar with an extremely long-running, jargon-dense series about 19th-century British naval men, and be actively searching for similarities between the two in order to tell it could have become a fanfic long ago.

If you think you can make the thing work, who cares where it "actually" came from? And since it's so early in the game, I think you should expect your concept and whatever derivative elements you're bringing over to evolve away from their roots as your story takes shape, further obfuscating your work's derivative origins.

Edited by CrystalGlacia on Jul 2nd 2020 at 1:02:12 PM

I understand you're asking more about legality. I am not a lawyer, but I believe even a for-profit work that used characters that were basically the same as more famous characters but with the Serial Numbers Filed Off would be in a better position for a defense against a cease-and-desist or lawsuit than a non-profit fanfiction. See "Fighting is Magic" vs "Them's Fightin' Herds." To my amateur understanding, as long as you're not infringing trademark (generally names and visual designs) or plagiarizing an entire work but with the Serial Numbers Filed Off, you're probably good. Copyright and trademark law is more judgement-based rather than explicitly clear-cut, which means no one would actually no who is actually legally "in the wrong" until after a decision is made by a judge. But again, not a lawyer.

One day, I realized how similar one of my protagonists was to a protagonist of a different book.

But I guess that the stories are different enough from each other otherwise.

However, I decided to at least change my protagonist's hair color to make her a bit less of an expy.

Edited by Kickisan on Jul 5th 2020 at 12:42:50 PM

I think Watchmen is a different scenario than stuff like Fifty Shades, because Watchmen is a very deliberate deconstruction and criticism of superhero tropes and stories, while Fifty Shades is an AU fanfic. I’m not trying to make a value judgment on either of these books (I haven’t actually read either) but I think an intentional expy universe designed to examine a genre is distinct from a fanfic with changed names.