ascending peculiarity

helens78:

fuckyeahfanficflamingo:

[AMAZING EPIC WIP STORY - ABANDONED (Fanfic Flamingo) “NEVER REVIEWED IT, NEVER SAW IT, DIDN’T KNOW IT EXISTED WHEN I STARTED MY EXTREMELY SIMILAR STORY.”]

I give people the benefit of the doubt on this.  God knows I’ve seen kinkmeme prompts that are literally exactly the plot I’ve been working on for months, even really detailed ones (one just yesterday, in fact, that is the World Domination AU plotline pretty much midline-to-finish).  And, er, I haven’t read 90% of the Big Stories in my own current fandom.  *facepalm*  I’d like to have read them, I intend to read them, but I haven’t had the attention span to read anything long in months.  (I think the only big, popular WIP I’ve read in XMFC is Carpe Brewski.)

That said, even if someone is writing another take on a popular story, I really don’t see what the problem is…?  People are different, and have different preferences on how they want to see things play out in fic.  A second story on a theme doesn’t take away the first one, and doesn’t make the first one worth any less.  It just adds another story to the world, and gives people another take on a situation/kink/trope.  No matter how popular something is, some people want something different.  And that’s fine!

I was going to make a joke here about us all just stealing plots from Shakespeare, who stole them from the classics, and so on and so on, but then I got distracted thinking about how a XMFC Twelfth Night AU might work. The main problem is figuring out a reason why Charles would be crossdressing as a woman after the shipwreck to begin with, but then Raven’s shapeshifting would explain the looking-exactly-alike thing way better than versions of the play usually do. (Erik is the Duke is this casting, natch.)