I tried asking
yumekutteikt some questions about how common fan-fiction and fan-works are in Japan because I wanted to know more about the situation regarding fan-works in Japan, and she referred me to this community to ask my questions, so I guess that I am going to ask questions here. I do not know Japanese at all, so I hope that you people do not mind me using English, and I also hope that you people do not mind me asking these questions here.
Very simply, I am wondering about how common fan-fiction and fan-works in general are in Japan: how common is fan-fiction in Japan? How common are fan-works in Japan? I am fairly certain about the answer to the second question, but I am asking just want to make sure.
She was also wondering about how common fan-works are in my country (United States), and I say that maybe a majority (but I am not quite sure) of people know what fan-fiction and fan-art are, but there is also a large number of people who do not know what they are at all. There are, in fact, many fan-fiction writers, and fanfiction.net is a very popular website, but it is not something that people talk about much. Also, fan-comics are commonly associated with Japan, and many just call them "doujinshi." There have been a few fan-games, but it seems like they run into legal troubles because the big companies usually sue using the copyright law. I do not know how common fan-music is - but it seems like it is not common at all, because I have not heard of any. There might be some mash-ups out there, but they are mostly in the form of musical collages rather than any creation of new material. One thing I can assure you all about, however, is that there is nothing close to Comiket in the United States. In fact, I think that there are pretty much no conventions specializing in fan-works in the United States. Perhaps there may be one or two, but if there is, I have never heard of it.
I think that fan-works could have been well-known in the United States if only it did not run into any copyright troubles. In the United States, the legality of fan-works are uncertain, and there has not yet been a court case yet, so if anybody threatens to sue over fan-fiction or anything like that, they just go more underground rather than have a legal fight, because nobody wants to be the test case. However, I have heard that there are some other countries where fan-works are completely legal, like Sweden or Spain, so it might be possible for fan-works to be more well-known in those countries. This leads to my third question:
How many people are there in Japan, who are interested in making fan-works more common and well-known in some country other than Japan?
It would be greatly appreciated if one of you here can answer my questions, so thanks in advance if one of you could answer.