Fan Fiction
I don’t read a lot of modern fanfic, so I don’t really have a stake to claim, but it really bums me out when people say things like “fanfic is just derivative garbage” or otherwise try to subordinate it to “authentic original” writing or insinuate it’s some kind of symptom of the poverty of the modern imagination.
Fan fiction (in the sense of new work set in the imaginative universe of old work or reusing characters, etc.) is almost as old as literature. The Aeneid was Homeric fan fiction, a fair chunk of Shakespeare’s plays were fan fiction, Goethe and Borges both wrote fan fiction. And that doesn’t even count incidents of literary copying, adaptation, or outright theft, which fill the canons of literature to overflowing.
The idea that stories can even be meaningfully “new” is presumptuous (at least with regard to their human elements). Moreover, the notion that all stories need be “new” is the modern development, not fan fiction.