Great article! I love Greek mythology, and that was developed by hundreds of storytellers over hundreds of years. Dante riffed on Virgil and the Bible, and Shakespeare riffed on Homer. I think fan faction is secretly a universal instinct. What's changed now is the creation of copyright laws, legally deciding which stories are "legitimate" and which are not.

And while copyright definitely has some legitimate purposes, it's become frankly extreme. The people legally telling Batman stories today had no greater hand in the character's creation than any other modern fans did. What stories are we preventing by being so restrictive? Imagine how much heritage we would have lost if Homer had copyrighted the Iliad and Odyssey.