[originally posted to my Dreamwidth blog in November 2020]
From May 2019 - September 2020 I was in collaboration with another A03 user, where we shared a multiverse together that she decided to stop contributing to, due to my upset over the way her friend had treated me, and that I had asked for a "no contact" boundary with her friend after what happened and she still allowed and encouraged this person to comment on gift fic for me and works set in our shared universe, knowing I had explicitly said this was triggering to me (and I myself avoided commenting on anything in my former collaborator's shared verse with her friend, following what happened). [To clarify, my problem was not with the association itself - I have had friendly acquaintances who are also friendly with this individual - my problem was with the lack of boundaries. I consider that to be forced interaction and that was not OK with me at all.]
In spring 2019 my former collaborator wrote a fic (never published to A03 as of November 2020) that was a crossover between my work, hers, and the other individual's called Through The Looking Glass where she shipped my OC villain Justin Roberts with the barrister defending him, an OC named Anthony Wyatt-Jones. In late October / early November 2019 I began planning a fic where Sören was taking part in a bachelor auction and would have a wild romp that weekend to "get back in the saddle", and he needed an ex, and I didn't want to have Justin be Sören's ex again and thought in a world where Sören was a doctor, his ex should probably be a professional like him. My former collaborator suggested I borrow Anthony.
As these things happen, I began to work on ideas and Anthony evolved past the minor "random dick" he originated as and had been intended to be. I put a large amount of work into fleshing out his character's backstory, personality, character traits, and various other details (including but not limited to being Finarfin reborn, his experience with bullying as a teenager, his motivations for going into law, his dominant tendencies, having "Mark" as a past lover in his younger days and being ghosted, the history with Sören, the history with his barrister-friends group and their names, his relationship with his uncle, the car accident and handicap, his neuroatypicality, the polymuddle, and many other future plots), (as will be obviously evidenced by my word count on A03 of fics involving him compared to the orphan_account word count; screenshot taken in November 2020), as well as coming up with his parents' and grandmother's and other relatives' names (and debuted his parents on-screen and fleshed out Elaine's personality, etc).
(Here is the ongoing count of my stories [and people I still collaborate with] involving Anthony. [And in case the tag gets wrangled and synned to something else, here's screenshots of how many stories there are as of January 8, 2024: 1 ~ 2 ~ 3 ~ 4 ~ 5 - and there will be more.])
So, for all of those reasons, I consider him at least as much my OC if not more and this is a screenshot of a PM she sent me where she acknowledged the collaborative nature of his development. I was also the one to debut him on-screen in After the Rain, which began to be posted to A03 on November 8th, 2019 and Rain Falls which started publication on November 9th, 2019.
In November 2020, this person decided to get grabby (on Faerie, a site I don't use and she knows there was a strong possibility I wouldn't see it [in fact I wouldn't have but a friend told me], which feels very underhanded).
(Also for the record, the "deleted comment thread" that she posted a screenshot of "proving ownership", was in a fic I deleted, called Surrender and Certainty which I deleted because it's a Sören/Claire fic and I'm no longer OK with that**, and didn't even want to orphan it. If anyone is trying to make me out to look shady acting like I deleted the thread, no it was the fic itself, there was no trying to "cover anything up" happening. -fail buzzer noise-)
**I rewrote the fic as a M/M story in 2021.
I'm not going to stop writing someone who I put countless hours and literally hundreds of thousands of words into developing and has become central to my multiverse (with, at one time, her permission), just because she thought of a name and an occupation first. I breathed life into him, and he evolved under my authorship to be different than how this person had intended him (as a villain or much more grey-area character) - furthermore, since it was my idea he was Finarfin reborn and she's admitted that wasn't her idea and won't be revisiting it, I feel like that, too, is another indicator we're writing two completely different characters, because that's a non-trivial detail, it's canon to my multiverse and my interpretation of Finarfin informs his character, you can't really separate him from that and say you're writing the same person.
Quite frankly, her grab at him is like saying "I named the cat and even though you've been looking after him every day for the last twelve months and I only come over once every four months to pet him for five minutes, he's still my cat." (Except this is way oversimplifying because of how much character development and work I put into it.)
However, because this person was someone I considered a friend, and also for my own mental health reasons, I compromised.
She doesn't have a copyright on the name Anthony itself, I'm not changing that. But I changed his surname, so that way we're not sharing the "Anthony Wyatt-Jones (OMC)" character tag, and her name can revert to her and she can do whatever with him, while I continue to write my version of Anthony and go forth with my own stories and worldbuilding and don't have to worry about what she does or allows other people to do.
My version of Anthony is now named Anthony Hewlett-Johnson. My policy going forward as of November 2020 is that Anthony Hewlett-Johnson is my OC and may not be borrowed unless I have explicitly given permission to you to do so; as far as I'm concerned, my former collaborator and I are writing two completely different characters who are coincidentally both tall-dark-and-handsome barristers** named "Anthony" and her version otherwise has nothing to do with mine and vice versa.
**Anthony is not a barrister in every single universe I write - in Northern Lights he works for MI6 and in Two Fires and Corn of Eternity he is an archaeologist. Which, in my way of thinking, also further distances from her conception of him.
If you're wondering why I don't just change his first name the way I did for characters like Claire (Karen) and Theo (Craig), there are a couple of reasons. The first is that Anthony is a critical/core character in my multiverse, I got attached to him much more than Claire or Theo. Changing his first name didn't feel right.
On a more personal note, even though I have not been Catholic in a long time, my confirmation name was Antonia (I'm AFAB, FTM) and when I was a small child I had an imaginary pet mouse named Anthony. (Some context: I have dyslexia so my mom used to drill me in spelling. I had trouble with "anonymous" so she taught me that when Anthony Mouse wants to steal a piece of cheese, he becomes Anonymous. I then decided the mouse in If You Give A Mouse A Cookie was named Anthony. For many years I've made jokes about Anthony Mouse being responsible for missing items like "Anthony stole my sock again," etc.) Anthony was also the name of the first person who saw what was going on with me [re: being transgender]. So there's deeply sentimental reasons for me not changing his first name, as well.
And if after reading all of this you still somehow think I "stole" Anthony or "ripped her off", I don't even know what to say to you.
PS: Since I came up with the first names of his parents (Elaine and Roger) and grandmother (Anthea), I'm not changing them for the sake of severing ties.
EDIT January 2024: In works from late 2023 onward, I have been writing him as not-a-barrister (usually a veterinarian) and in 2024 I also began writing him as Jewish (whether as a convert or as Ashkenazi on his mother's side), so he is even further removed from his origins. (I am not retconning earlier works in the multiverse where he's a barrister and a Gentile, those can stand for the same reason that Nicholas is Romanian sometimes and French sometimes, and works are sometimes set in the UK and sometimes in the US.)
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