The past months have produced a rash of discussions on fanfic ranging from the critical to the deeply personal. The Telegraph kicked this off with a complaint about derivative works. "To take entirely against fan fiction is pointless, not least because it’s clearly here to stay...Nor is being derivative necessarily a sin – after all, the writer who tries to create work from inside an influence-free vacuum would probably never type a single word." However, using someone else's building blocks and using only those blocks are "the difference between writing that pays homage to another’s work, and writing that robs that work wholesale of plot, theme and characters."

The experience of BioWare and EA, developer and publisher of multiplayer online role-playing game Star Wars: The Old Republic suggests that addressing problems of representation should probably not be done after the fact. While many were happy to hear the company would be introducing same-sex romance options to the game, the announcement received both the usual homophobic backlash as well as disappointment from same-sex romance supporters of how slowly and how poorly the gamers were accommodated. "These characters will only be available via Rise of the Hutt Cartel, an expansion pack to be released in Spring 2012 [sic], meaning that players will have to pay to be gay in the game. SGR will also only be limited to Makeb, a planet that has been dubbed as a "gay ghetto" by multiple media outlets."