From a legalistic perspective, fanfiction authors are thieves. Taking copyrighted property and using it without permission from the owners? Yeeeeeah. But it's an action rarely, if ever, made in malice, so it doesn't really count, right?
You'd be surprised. Or maybe you won't. Either way, I'm not here to talk about the legal implications of fanfiction (which would be hypocritical, considering that I write them, too). In any case, we're just fans having fun beyond the medium of our interest, who love enough to create tributes, be they in the form of spur-of-the-moment ficlets or epics of, well, epic length.
And more than being just fans: even if the characters and/or situations aren't our own, or if the plot is one rehashed from a million other stories, we are writers who take pride in how we tell this particular story. In every word chosen, in every punctuation mark misplaced amidst the blaze of inspiration and the nattering of the voices in our heads, we use the emotions from our own experiences -- or information gleaned from hours spent on research, or the creative asspulls we're embarrassed and proud of at the same time, just so that the characters act somewhat right when we subject them to the horrors of our overactive imaginations -- and undeniably put a little bit of ourselves in the story.
In the end, the concepts may come from someone else, but the stories as we've written them are ours.
So what should you feel when someone comes along, takes one of your stories, and claims it for their own? Sure, they change the names and whatever else that makes it happen in this or that universe, but everything looks forced and awkward and beyond those changes it's the same story word for fucking word and most people won't ever know because it's a story taken from another fandom they're not familiar with.
Preaching to the choir? Maybe. I am just so fucking tired of DTs Rock On (ID: 2109967) and his/her bastardization of Devil May Cry characters by forcing them into stories written by someone else, for another section. I am well aware this rant is not fiction in any way (and most likely against the rules), but FFN is unreliable when it comes to handling stuff like this and it's frustrating to send reports every time this person submits a stolen story when nothing is done about it, so I might as well tell everyone and maybe something will happen this time.
...So now you know. Getting off the soapbox now.
Evidence gallery (please remove spaces): http : // s1017 . photobucket . com / albums / af296 / non_anon / 2109967 /
O - original; P - plagiarized