your poll is both very interesting and yet pointless to me in the present debate regarding AO3. I shall explain... Because I believe in the existence of a vast grey area, and because I recognize that our issues regarding the AO3 policies are mainly that we're thinking about 'fannish sensibilities' versus mundanes yet without wanting to define fandom in a closed and selfish sense by excluding others who are doing fannishness differently (see the discussion on Zvi's post about whether we should define the fic by its community or the community by its fic, etc).. I do not think that these questions have absolute answers. What counts, for me, in the case of posting to the AO3, is whether or not their author thinks the fic is fannish.
In 'normal' circumstances, your last example, of "A professionally published story using other authors' characters and settings that the pro author loudly insists is not fanfic!", is fanfic in my view. By which I mean I do not think it is structurally or qualitatively different by nature from fanfic, and hence it should be called the same.
And yet, it's not fic that the author considers fannish, and it's not fic that they'd want posted on the AO3, so in the context of this discussion my answer might change!
So I took the poll as best I could (and I know you have asked for answers detached from the AO3 question - it's just where my brain is at, which does change things), but I was unmistakeably influenced not just by the vocabulary (use of Biblefic, etc) but the formulation of the questions, too; ie whether the question made it sound like the putative author counted it as fanfic themselves or not. In other words - self-identification and choices are important (to me) in this respect, too.
no subject
In 'normal' circumstances, your last example, of "A professionally published story using other authors' characters and settings that the pro author loudly insists is not fanfic!", is fanfic in my view. By which I mean I do not think it is structurally or qualitatively different by nature from fanfic, and hence it should be called the same.
And yet, it's not fic that the author considers fannish, and it's not fic that they'd want posted on the AO3, so in the context of this discussion my answer might change!
So I took the poll as best I could (and I know you have asked for answers detached from the AO3 question - it's just where my brain is at, which does change things), but I was unmistakeably influenced not just by the vocabulary (use of Biblefic, etc) but the formulation of the questions, too; ie whether the question made it sound like the putative author counted it as fanfic themselves or not. In other words - self-identification and choices are important (to me) in this respect, too.