With all the discussions of plagiarism going on now, I wanted to ask about something that’s been bugging me for awhile, and that’s when publishers scrub the labels off of fanfiction and sell it.
Let me give an example: Silver Under Nighfall. This is a Castelvania the anime fanfiction with the names swapped out. The three main characters have the exact personalities as Trevor, Sypha, and Alucard from the show. Their powers and backgrounds are slightly altered, but clearly based on the show. As a specific example, Sypha in the show is from a foreign culture and uses magic, notably fire, to kill enemy vampires. Xiodan from the book is from a a psudo-Chinese culture and uses light magic (which acts like fire) to kill enemies. She’s probably the character with the most changes made thanks to her different apperance and being a half-vampire princess, but Zidan is straight up [discount Alucard down to his looks](https://d28hgpri8am2if.cloudfront.net/book_images/onix/cvr9781982195748/court-of-wanderers-9781982195748_hr.jpg).
The setting is basically the humans v. vampires medieval political tangle from season 3 Castelvania but without the cool war part. The monsters, instead of being hell demons, are vampire-zombie mutants made from a DNA blood virus, and they bear a suspicious resemblance to resident evil creatures.
This just doesn’t feel right to me. I would rather someone steal 5 exact sentences from my work and port them into a completely different story than lift my main characters and world building while not technically copying anything word-for-word.
I think an author should be ashamed of trying to publish something so clearly derivative, and the fact that traditional publishers, who are supposed to be the gatekeepers of quality, would openly advertise this book as “for fans of the Castelvania anime” looks highly unethical to me. Am I off base here? Where is the correct place to draw the line?
by Beautiful_Routine531