By: Sailor Chibi Earth
As the number of Sailormoon sites on the web grows, the
search for original and creative ideas to bring to
Sailormoon on the web becomes harder and harder. One
creative direction to take a Sailormoon website is the
not-so-infamous fanfiction.
Now althougth fanfic and fanart are not new to the
Sailormoon scene, they have been however, on the increase.
One area of fanfiction that has seen sudden interest is the
creation of brand new, never seen before senshi, created
entirely by the owner of the fanfic. These sites usually
contain fanfics, profiles, sometimes even fanart, all about
their "new senshi". While there are a few well established
sites of this kind on the web that have been around for a
while, many of these "new senshi" sites are fairly new to
the web, many of which were inspired by the older
established sites. So is this a problem? Not in itself.
Fanfics are a great way to produce something new and fresh
on the internet and it can be quite enjoyable. It's also
great to see all the creative and interesting ideas that
people come up with when creating their own senshi.
Sometimes a new senshi is made so well that a visitor to
the site often confuses them for the real thing. The
problem occurs when a person starting their own site
resorts to what I call "character theft".
Character theft is the taking of someone else's fanfic
and/or fanart character (not necessarily a senshi) and
using it for your site. Now we have all heard about images
theft and page theft as they have been around for as long,
if not longer, than Sailormoon has been on the web.
Character theft is not much different in that either images
or information is being taken. however, I feel that character
theft is far worse.
The stealing of a characters profile usually occurs because
the thief likes the way the character acts and the use the
character for their own website. Now sometimes the theft
isn't so obvious, particularly with the profile, but that
doesn't mean it's not there. It isn't hard to copy over the
profile of someone's new senshi, switch a name, a birthdate
and some likes and dislikes and vola, you have a new
senshi, but it is still theft.
With character fanart, however, it isn't hard to miss a
theft. Fanart theft ranges from direct links to the orginal
site to copy the image, and from altering the image to
printing, tracing and re-scanning the image.
Many of the creators of new senshi spend hours, if not
days, working on the information and images for their
senshi, only to find out that everything they worked so
hard on has been copied over to someone else's site, often
without credit. Not only does this usually occurs without
the permission of the original creator, but the thief
usually claims the character or fanart as their own and
then have the audacity to state the infamous "do not take
because I made it" warning, while others claim they got
permission to use the character when they never did. Some
are even stupid enough to have a link to the original site
they stole from in their favorite links. The worst insult
the original author can get is a flame mail from a visitor
claiming he copied the work that was original his to begin
with. It is obvious that people who steal have absolutely
no originality of their or, no consideration for the
orignal creator and have completely lost the original
meaning of fanfiction.
How bad is character theft? Not as bad as image or page
theft, but it is increasing. With a little searching, you
can probably find half a dozen sites all stealing either
profiles and/or fanart from just one site. What can a
author do about it? Beside the flame mails and creating a
link so visitors can flame as well, not much... and that's
assuming the original author even finds out about it.
Comments on this article can be sent to:
Sailor Chibi Earth.
