Hacker News Reader

Comment by aleph_minus_one | Hacker News Reader

> I really feel for the Wachoskis. They couldn't not do a sequel, but they had nowhere to go--The Matrix was already perfect.

I remember that at the time of the (non-existent ;-) ) sequels, being disappointed with these "sequels", fans wrote summaries of screenplays how a (good) sequel to Matrix might look like.

Basically all of them were much better than the official sequel attempt (because such fans really cared), and I bet if I had been looking much more deeply into these fan-fiction sequels, I could have found one that was as exceptional as the original Matrix.

Lesson learned: scripts for sequels of movies that have a strong fan-base should be written by people who really care about the franchise (and have good ideas).

View on HN

"Lesson learned: scripts for sequels of movies that have a strong fan-base should be written by people who really care about the franchise (and have good ideas)."

As the originators of the Matrix franchise, the Wachowskis certainly fit that description.

Except that there is something called "Intellectual Property" and "copyright" that makes any attempt to use fan fiction a libility and open to endless litigation.

J. Michael Straczynski (of _Babylon V_ fame, and many others) immediately blocks anyone who tries to ptch him ideas, and he's not the only one:

https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/j-michael-straczynski-would-l...

But as a franchise owner, you can have a look into such fan(fiction) forums to recognize writing talents who do care about the franchise and which you might want to hire to work on a screenplay for a sequel.

Yeah, if you 1) trust that they actually know how to write a screenplay (a very different skill from writing a novel) and 2) believe they won't sue you for stealing their idea.

That's a problem with fanfic in general. People who would have written fanfic ten or fifteen years ago are writing stuff like litrpg's now; you can steal the general concept as long as you don't rip off the details. And it's a big enough world that you can practice your writing and actually become decent at it before you try to take on a big work. If you compare early drafts of, say, Dungeon Crawler Carl to the latest books in the series? You can see the skill improvement.

Why can't you buy the idea from whatever forum poster?

I get aredox' point that copyright at least makes some things more complicated.

See for example the drama around Darkover fanfiction ([1], [2]):

Quote from [1]:

"For many years, Bradley actively encouraged Darkover fan fiction. She encouraged submissions from unpublished authors and reprinted some of it in commercial Darkover anthologies. This ended after a dispute with a fan over an unpublished Darkover novel of Bradley's that had similarities to one of the fan's stories. As a result, the novel remained unpublished and Bradley demanded the cessation of all Darkover fan fiction."

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Marion_Zimmer_Bra...

[2] https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/articl...

Because you have to find and pay everyone who had the same idea.

The alternatve is to do "cleanroom writing": you don't interact, therefore if you write something similar, you can argue you independently invented it.

I had the same problem in a scientific research lab where collaboration with another lab runs the risk of not being able to patent an idea, because if the other team had the same idea or anything close enough to it, we couldn't claim to be the inventors.

It's not that you have to pay everyone with the same idea, it's that it opens you up to claims you copied fanfiction writers you never copied.

If I somehow recreated Lord of the Rings from scratch, without having known about Lord of the Rings, it wouldn't be copyright infringement because I never copied Lord of the Rings.

The issue is nobody would ever believe me when I said I coincidentally recreated Lord of the Rings from scratch. The court would conclude I copied Tolkien's books without permission.

If you admit to reading fanfiction, it reduces your credibility when you claim you independently came up with the same ideas as fanfiction authors.

This increases your litigation risk, but there's no black or white rule that you need to pay every fanfiction author or anything like that.

> If I somehow recreated Lord of the Rings from scratch, without having known about Lord of the Rings, it wouldn't be copyright infringement because I never copied Lord of the Rings.

> The issue is nobody would ever believe me when I said I coincidentally recreated Lord of the Rings from scratch.

What do you mean? They believed Terry Goodkind; why not you?

> I bet if I had been looking much more deeply into these fan-fiction sequels, I could have found one that was as exceptional as the original Matrix.

> Lesson learned: scripts for sequels of movies that have a strong fan-base should be written by people who really care about the franchise (and have good ideas).

It seems like the lesson there is "if you make 2000 independent attempts at something, you'll probably get a better best result than if you make 1".

Perhaps it exposed how much of the Matrix was really iterated from Ghost in the Machine, Metropolis, Dark City, Strange Days, John Woo action scenes, etc.

It's a talent to recognize good ideas and combine them into a new and fresh story. It's another to tell an original story.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com