Oh good, another excuse to rattle on about my fic at length.
I love your "Have you ever's".
read someone's fanfic and thought of another way for the story to go?
I had one really blatant case of this: The Chrysalis. I mentioned it in the wingnut for
The Changeling. Speedbump wrote a fic called
The Resurrection of Man. (If you head off to read it, be aware that it's a sequel to a story called DeEvolution of Man, so you may need to either skim or find a synopsis for the first one to understand where the second one starts.) In her story, Speedbump got John more filthy and battered than I have ever managed to achieve. (That's "filthy AND battered". I think I've scored high on each one individually, but not the combined category.
) Then she spent about three paragraphs cleaning him up.
It was absolutely the right thing for the story. If she had taken longer, she would have destroyed the pace and detracted from the plot of the story, so I have no criticism of Speedbump for that decision. But I remember thinking, "What a lost opportunity!!!"
It had a lot to do with why I
needed to write The Chrysalis. I really needed to take some time washing John.
That's not quite what you're asking though.
I think the answer is yes, but usually not to the degree where I wind up writing something as a result of it. The one other exception is Tough Love. That is very definitely a backlash against some of the "family" fanfics I was reading at the time. So many of them had this vision of a safe, peaceful environment where John and Aeryn could raise the kids without any of the worries we ever saw on the screen. It's not so much that I thought that the story should go in another direction as it was that I have a different view of what the UT's are going to be like even after the Scarran-Peacekeeper Armistice. I think it's an incredibly dangerous universe, and that the Sun-Crichton kids will need to be tough, hardened, and capable in order to survive. I got tired of reading the "everything is rosy" fics, and wrote Tough Love instead, where an 8-year-old needs to kill in order to save his parents.
Or maybe read someone's story and wonder if they got into your head and stole your idea?
I don't recall ever running into this. (I mean, who would
want to get inside my head in the first place? It's a scary place in there!!
)
It's not what you're talking about, but there was an single instance of what ran dangerously close to plagiarism. Applying the extreme "interpret it nicely" end of the scale, I termed it a case of two of my fics providing an imagination 'springboard' for the person. That's what Farscape does for every fanfic writer, so I chose to call it that. On the other end of the scale, the person's fic was close enough to a merging of two of mine that several people noticed, used the "P" word, and wanted me to remove it from the forum.
I find it difficult to get upset about something like this when it involves fanfic. We're ALL playing in someone else's universe. By ignoring it or silently acknowledging that it would be impossible to get it to stop, both Rockne and the Henson Co. give us the latitude (not permission) to continue playing with their intellectual property. I'm not going to accuse someone else of playing with my creation unless it's blatant.
Although ...
... I did have someone take one of my shorter, more humorous stories and play off the end of it. In essence, they wrote a sequel ... without my permission. Okay, That one irritated me. Now they're really playing in my sandbox, and stole my red plastic shovel and bucket to boot.
