My fanfiction may have been plagiarised, and I don’t know what to do
Hello, everyone! I'm a fanfic writer, my nickname on ao3 is YueXiaLaoRen. Let me share my story.
You know, I love writing fanfiction and I love seeing people enjoy my work. I usually start writing fanfiction when I can’t find anything that takes my fancy. I thought: well, it does happen that when something new comes along, people get inspired and start following in that person’s footsteps. That was my idea: to write something that me and other Destiel fans would like and that would inspire them to write similar fanfics, so that I could read and enjoy them too.
As they say, ‘thoughts are material’.... (Or ‘be careful what you wish for’?) In any case, it happened unexpectedly. When I was checking new fics on the ‘possessive Castiel’ tag, I found at least two fics that were copying mine! And... I don’t know how to feel about it. I should be proud and flattered that my fic inspired someone, but they didn’t even give me credit. Not even a comment or a kudos.
I don’t want to discourage other creative people by writing bad things in the comment section or sharing their accounts. I don’t want to do anything until I’m absolutely certain that they’ve actually plagiarised me. Maybe I’m being biased, and they really did write it all themselves, and it’s just a coincidence that their fanfiction is so similar to mine, I don’t own the Supernatural fandom or the tropes.
But I feel hurt. For some reason, I feel absolutely gutted! 😭 Especially when I went into the comments section and started reading how people were praising the authors, saying they’d never read anything like this masterpiece in their lives. It’s really upsetting, and I know it sounds like I’m just an attention-seeking child who’s upset at being ignored, but I don’t really care.
I'm lost. I don’t know what to do. I’ve gathered all the evidence into one file and sent it to the AO3 team, but they haven't responded yet. I know their team is small and they’re flooded with work, so I don’t blame them and I don’t want to write any extra complaints to them. I asked someone if they could read my fic and compare it to theirs and help me find out for sure whether there are instances of plagiarism or if I’m just imagining things. They said that plagiarism is taking place, but I still don't know what to do.
Please, I desperately need an advice 😭
Update.
Thank you all for your replies and support!
Thank you for asking me questions, because after that I decided to reread these passages with a fresh gaze and cool head, summarise them briefly, then condense those summaries down to a single sentence... And if you look at them this way, people who said there was nothing new here were actually right. Because everything apart from the shower scenes and Cas’s lecture on healthy eating has appeared in hundreds of fanfics before mine, in various forms. My problem is that I don’t like the fact that these fanfics popped up straight after mine, using the same combination of tropes 🫤
Therefore, I’ve come to terms with the situation. I’ll leave this post up today so that people can see this update, but I’ll delete it tomorrow to officially close this thread and move on. Thank you to everyone who took the time to reply and helped me keep a level head. I’m very grateful to you all)