I recently had a conversation with a friend over the telephone I hadn't seen in a while, and when she asked about what I had been doing over the summer, I told her about my website and mentioned that I had written a lot of fan fic. Her reaction surprised me.

"But isn't that stealing from the author?" she asked.

Since her response surprised me so much, I stuttered a bit, trying to defend fan fic, but once we hung up the phone I got to thinking. Is fan fiction simply a fancy word for plagiarism? Are we, with all our plot decisions and our character developments, no more than literary thieves? Even though Victor Hugo is out of copyright, are we still committing a grand faux pas by taking his characters for our own devices? I decided to try and see if one certain genre had committed the offense above others, as my friend had implied later on in our argument.

Humorous fic tends to take itself very lightly--I have read very few fics that expect to be rewarded for their absurdity, so fics that tend on the funny side are fairly harmless. Not very scholarly, but harmless. Surely that wasn't what my friend meant, I decided.

Serious fic has a wider range-- and more room for error. While I have read a few stunning dramatic fics, most are just good or adequate. And of course there are many that fall short of the adequate description. But the authors of serious fic don't pretend to be Victor Hugo, or imitate his profusely wordy style-- fic authors each have their own style reflected very clearly in their writing. Some are better than others, but that doesn't change the fact that none of them pretend to be Hugo.

And crossovers-- the genre I expected most to have caused my friend's speech. Crossovers, like humorous fic, don't take themselves seriously, and don't expect to be rewarded for their literary value. While some crossovers should be labeled WARNING: TOXIC and kept out of the reach of children, I found no offense in them.

I was confused. If it had seemed to be that there was no plagiarism involved in any genre, was I right, or was I missing some glaring offense staring out at me from my computer monitor? Did I no longer have the ability to tell right from wrong? When did the fan fic stop and Laura Kalpakian's Cosette begin?

And then it came to me. Fan fiction was not a plagiarism. Fan fiction, while not using original characters or settings, was a tribute. While we may not always succeed, we strive to achieve the genius of Hugo, and try to keep his characters as pure and unchanged as we can.

We are not stealing, nor are we borrowing. The reason we love Les Mis is because we see something of ourselves in each one of the characters. We are using human nature in our stories, and if that is represented so well by Hugo's characters-- so be it. While we may start out with a full understanding of the characters, we finish our journey with an understanding of the human race, and through writing fan fic, we learn better to see the things around us, beyond our respective, complacent lives, and we can use that knowledge to improve the world. I can't speak for my friend, but I think Hugo would have approved.

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