Once upon a time a very young author created a fantasy world. This author was only ten years old so the world they created was full of stories, novels, play enacted plot twists, hundreds of characters.
This author lived in a very secluded and abusive house and their only escape was through their imaginary friends (characters) in the world they'd created. They even often imagined these friends as young children do to be their actual imaginary friends that guarded them and got them through on a day to day basis. A way to survive if you will.
Well through an entirely different hobby they made friends with someone through a pen pal system that was quite older than they were. And these two became the best of friends. As best friends are wont to do they shared everything so this young author was excited to share their writing with this friend for their opinions.
Ten years into this friendship when the young author was still under-aged this best friend of theirs talked them into doing role-play with their world and characters. Which basically boiled down as a way this friend could control and abuse the young author by making them write things very adult things in very adult situations which were extremely inappropriate for how young the author was at the time. The author being a young sheltered child didn't know any better either they just wanted their friend to like them.
Their friend even used the young author's characters and world in other roleplays with other people without the author knowing or their consent.
They were so obsessed with the young author's characters and work and the roleplay that had happened they could actually quote it verse and date back to the author and claimed to know the author's characters better than the author did. At one point there was even mention of wanting a life sized anatomically correct statue of the author's main character made for their house.
Eighteen years into the friendship the young author made another friend. A more worldly wise friend that immediately saw the problems with what was happening and pointed them out. By this time the young author was very sick of writing the things they didn't want to write for this person and the friendship ended. Badly.
The best friend was not pleased that they lost control over the young author. At this point not only did they threaten things like sending the author dead animals in the mail they also did something else that was horrendously evil.
Knowing how important this world was to the young author's state of mind this person sought to completely destroy them by destroying their world.
They claimed to have published every work of the young author's online so traditional publishing houses would not consider them (first publishing rights were gone). They claimed if the author ever published them they would immediately sue for plagiarism.
They stole the author's characters and world and proceeded to use them for her own purposes (roleplay with other people without permission, stealing stories and just changing the names of the characters so it could look like the author copied her ideas/text).
They even took to stalking the author online and spouting their text/stories/ideas/characters in whatever public chats they could. As well as creating characters on online video games of the author's characters then performing x-rated text plays in front of the author in public.
They were on a campaign to destroy the young author's writing career because they knew that the young author had been trying very hard for years and had one book that had been in a critique circle for three years and was about to be sent out to agents.
The young author was distraught. Those characters and world were very important to them so they sought the help of published authors. The advice they got was because of the plagiarism threat it would be better for the young author to write something completely new that couldn't be associated with this person at all. The published authors were concerned that the stalker had made the waters so murky about who owned what and the fact that the author was much younger that even if the author took them to court and won they would have that shadow hanging over them for the rest of their career.
This person proceeded to stalk the young author for the next 10 years. To this day is probably still stalking the author.
So the young author shelved the ruined and violated characters and their world and has gone on to write different things. And gotten very careful who they share their characters and worlds with before they are published.
Comments