There’s a corner of the internet that’s existed for decades, largely unbothered, largely self-regulating, and largely misunderstood by the people who probably should be paying closest attention to it. It’s the world of fan fiction where millions of stories, updated daily, written by people who love a character, a world, or a universe so completely that they can’t stop at consuming it. They have to live inside it, push it, stress-test it, take it somewhere its creators never intended, and then share what they found with others who feel exactly the same way.

Fan fiction writers, almost universally and almost instinctively, understand something that intellectual property law has spent decades failing to articulate cleanly: there’s a fundamental difference between engaging with a character and exploiting one. The Archive of Our Own alone hosts over ten million works across tens of thousands of fandoms, and these people aren’t pirates nor are they counterfeiters. They are, in fact, the most engaged fans and audience that an author or creator could ever hope to have. These fans are people so invested in a fictional world that they contribute unpaid labour to expanding it. And the implicit contract they operate under is straightforward: this isn’t a commercial undertaking nor is it a challenge to ownership, and if it ever becomes either of those things, the rules change.

The unwritten rules of fanfiction

That implicit contract is more sophisticated than most formal licensing agreements, and what makes it remarkable is that it holds without legal compulsion or enforcement mechanisms. Fanfic communities self-police, tag content meticulously for audiences, distinguish between canon-compliant works and divergent ones, credit their sources, and pull works when creators object — not just because the law demands it but because the community understands that ethical norms around someone else’s IP matter more than what they can technically get away with. The irony is that IP lawyers are the people least equipped to understand any of this, because their frameworks were built for a world where creative engagement was a transaction rather than a relationship.

Why characters are different from everything else

Fanfiction works as a creative and ethical space precisely because it operates almost exclusively in the domain of character and visual identity, and that’s the hardest category of IP to abstract, remix, or adapt without taking something essential from its origin. A melody can be sampled and transformed, and a plot can be retold through a different lens without borrowing its architecture wholesale. But a character — especially a visual one with a fixed appearance, a known personality, a set of relationships and a history that audiences have internalised — doesn’t separate easily from what makes it itself. When fanfic writers work with Hermione Granger or Zuko or Geralt of Rivia, they’re not sampling an abstraction but working with something specific, coherent, and deeply associated with its origin. They know this, and it’s exactly why they don’t sell it

This is where the comparison with professional derivative works gets instructive, and uncomfortable. The film Brightburn, released in 2019, asks a genuinely interesting question: what if the Superman origin story produced not a hero but a predator? An infant of extraterrestrial origin arrives on Earth, humans raise him, he develops extraordinary abilities, and he chooses violence. The film never names Superman nor does it touch his iconography, his costume, his mythology, or his supporting cast. What it does it it interrogates the archetype because the foundling with hidden power is as old as Moses, as old as Romulus, as old as narrative itself. Brightburn earns its premise because it brings something to the archetype rather than borrowing an identity, and fanfic communities would recognize it immediately as a work that does the creative work rather than just taking the shortcut.

Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, released in 2023 after the 1926 A.A. Milne illustrations entered the public domain in the United States, is a different operation entirely. It takes Pooh and Piglet, characters with fixed visual identities, personalities, and a century of cultural association with innocence and childhood warmth, and turns them into slasher villains.

The horror framing adds nothing that required these specific characters, because any beloved children’s IP would’ve served the same shock-value purpose. Heck, you don’t even need an existing IP, Chucky, anyone? Or Gremlins, for that matter. Hell, Happy Tree Friends was something else altogether for the young Gen X and senior Millennials at the time.

The filmmakers chose Pooh entirely and cynically for the recognition by weaponizing familiarity, and there’s no coherent argument that the film engages creatively with what these characters are. It uses their faces because it legally could, and it markets itself on the dissonance that creates. It’s cynicism with a distribution deal.

How copyright law fails the character question

The distinction between these two films isn’t complicated: one engages with an idea while the other appropriates an identity. A fanfic writer understands this distinction reflexively because they live inside it daily. They know when they’re writing a story that genuinely engages with a character’s qualities and when they’re simply using a character’s name and face as a vehicle for something entirely unrelated to what made that character worth caring about. The law doesn’t make this distinction nor does it try to, asking only whether the copyright has expired or whether the use falls within fair use provisions, which are entirely the wrong questions when the issue isn’t legality but integrity.

Copyright, as a legal instrument, was constructed to solve an economic problem. It gives creators a temporary monopoly over their work in exchange for its eventual return to the cultural commons, but it was never designed to protect the dignity of a character, the integrity of a creative vision, or the relationship between a work and its audience. French law probably comes closest to addressing this through the concept of droit moral or moral rights that include the right to the integrity of a work, perpetual and non-transferable. Under a French moral rights framework, distorting a work in ways that harm the creator’s honor or reputation remains actionable regardless of copyright status. It’s an imperfect instrument, but it at least acknowledges that legal ownership and ethical stewardship aren’t the same thing, and that the law has an interest in the latter as well as the former. Importantly, parodies and satirical works are protected by French law but it works within a strict legal requirement that authors or creators must make it clear that their work is parody or satire.

What the law protects and what it doesn’t

Anglo-American copyright tradition has largely rejected moral rights, or incorporated them so weakly that they’re meaningless in practice. What it has instead is trademark, which fills some of the gap but anchors protection to commercial identity rather than creative integrity. Mickey Mouse, whose earliest incarnation entered the public domain in 2024, remains under Disney’s control through trademark because Mickey functions as a brand identifier, and nobody can use him in a way that implies Disney’s endorsement or creates consumer confusion. That protection doesn’t expire, but it exists to prevent commercial deception rather than to honor what the character actually is. Important to restate that anyone can now use the old Steamboat Willie character but they can’t use it to make people think their creation represents Disney or that it’s an official Disney release.

The law protects Mickey’s face because it’s a logo, not because he’s a character with a history and an audience that’s grown up alongside him, and that distinction matters because it means the protection is contingent on commercial association rather than creative investment — a standard that has nothing to say about what’s right and everything to say about what’s profitable.

When characters become bigger than their owners

The characters that sit in the most complicated territory are the ones that have genuinely worked their way into shared culture across generations. Tintin, Astro Boy, Superman, Sherlock Holmes, these aren’t merely IP assets but reference points through which people understand certain ideas, certain archetypes, certain ways of being in the world. People grow up with them and form attachments to them that have nothing to do with commercial relationships, and the claim that these characters belong entirely and permanently to a single entity sits uneasily against that reality. But so does the claim that their public familiarity gives anyone the right to do anything with them.

What Blood and Honey exploits isn’t the public domain. It exploits the care that audiences invested over decades in something they grew up loving, without those audiences ever being consulted about what someone could do with it. A.A. Milne built that, generations of readers sustained it, and filmmakers who contributed nothing to it cashed it out.

The Sherlock Holmes litigation makes this point sharply. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate spent years arguing that while the character of Sherlock Holmes was in the public domain, the specific traits and emotional dimensions that Doyle introduced in his later stories remained protected until those stories expired too. It was a legally awkward argument but an ethically coherent one — a recognition that a character isn’t a static entity but an accumulation of qualities developed over time, and that different layers of that accumulation might warrant different treatment. The courts were largely unsympathetic, because copyright law has no good tools for thinking about characters as evolving entities rather than fixed works, but the underlying instinct — that there’s something more to a character than its earliest legally unprotected iteration — points to a real failure in how the law handles visual and character IP.

From fanfic to commercial publishing

What fanfic writers have worked out through practice and community rather than legislation is a framework the law hasn’t managed to produce. Creative engagement with a character is legitimate when it comes from genuine investment in what that character is: their qualities, their relationships, their place in a larger world, and it becomes exploitation when someone uses a character’s identity as raw material while contributing nothing to what made that identity worth using. The line between the two isn’t always clean, but it’s rarely as unclear as the law pretends.

When a fanfic writer decides to go commercial, they understand they have to make it their own by changing the names, alter the iconography, build enough distance from the source that the new work stands independently, because they recognize that commercial benefit changes the terms of the relationship with the original IP fundamentally.

Fifty Shades of Grey started as Twilight fan fiction, and its journey to publication required it to become something else entirely. Similarly with the books The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley which started out as a fanfic about Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger titled Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being in Love, and Alchemised by SenLinYu — originally also a Harry Potter fanfic, titled Manacled, which was about what happened after Voldemort killed Potter and won the battle of Hogwarts. All these titles took significant rewrites to avoid copyright entanglements ahead of their commercial publications but they all have become their own thing.

The law isn’t equipped for any of this, and it was never built to be. It doesn’t ask the right questions, and where it does intervene — as in the Blood and Honey situation — it does so only to confirm that something is permitted rather than to assess whether it’s justified.

Legality has never been a reliable test of what’s right, and in the domain of creative IP it’s a particularly blunt one. What’s needed isn’t longer copyright terms or more expansive legal protection, but a willingness to treat creative integrity as something worth protecting on its own terms rather than as a byproduct of commercial interest.

The fanfic community figured that out decades ago, without legislation, enforcement, and lawyers. The people who actually care about these characters always understood where the line was. The law just never thought to ask them.