Yeah, and I keep coming back to the fact that fanart is going to have *even more* gray areas than fanfic, when it comes to the question of original or not. I remember when I had an Elfwood account and kept submitting pieces to the fanart section that got rejected for not being fannish enough, and then sending them to the fantasy section and getting them rejected for being too fannish, which was a large part of why I stopped bothering with Elfwood, because it wasn't worth the stress.
To start with the most obvious case, it was a bit tricky to find example fic about fandom OCs that didn't have something that obviously identified what fandom they were in somewhere in the story. But finding art of fannish OCs like that is a dime a dozen. And then there are people who have standard OCs that they use across several fandoms and in original worlds...
I sort of feel like the gray areas would be different with vids, because I suppose if you had to you could make a rule that says vids must have less than X% of original-to-you footage (and at least X% transformativity, which you'd already have to have to keep AO3 from just turning into youtube - but then there are old AMVs that were basically four minutes of uncut footages with a song playing under them; that's part of fanvid tradition, are they allowed?) That would exclude fan-done animations and fan films, and probably machinima, but was AO3 planning to host those under the 'vid' umbrella anyway? I've never even thought about that question, huh.
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To start with the most obvious case, it was a bit tricky to find example fic about fandom OCs that didn't have something that obviously identified what fandom they were in somewhere in the story. But finding art of fannish OCs like that is a dime a dozen. And then there are people who have standard OCs that they use across several fandoms and in original worlds...
I sort of feel like the gray areas would be different with vids, because I suppose if you had to you could make a rule that says vids must have less than X% of original-to-you footage (and at least X% transformativity, which you'd already have to have to keep AO3 from just turning into youtube - but then there are old AMVs that were basically four minutes of uncut footages with a song playing under them; that's part of fanvid tradition, are they allowed?) That would exclude fan-done animations and fan films, and probably machinima, but was AO3 planning to host those under the 'vid' umbrella anyway? I've never even thought about that question, huh.