@Tinuviel You're right about copyright law. There is something to be said for that. I think you can get sued if you make "fan fiction" and it pisses off the original creators.

I don't know about "good taste," though. "Good taste" is pretty subjective, though. Like you said, everybody is free to find anybody else's shit to be just gobbledygook, but that doesn't mean we're all not free to make it. Most content is gobbledygook. Most content from established, popular authors is gobbledygook.

Also, I don't think taking ideas and recreating them qualifies as copyright infringement. Onyx Path not only doesn't have a copyright on urban fantasy in general, but I can go a step farther and say that they don't have a copyright on there being five Clans or Paradox on there being five Lineages or whatever else. Anne Rice doesn't own the concept of the Embrace even though she popularized it (and may have even invented it outright).

I think you're trying to legitimize this idea that there's something magical about being a content creator, which is what motivates people to get so uppity on social media in the first place. Anybody can be a content creator. In a way, we're both content creators now by dint of commenting on this on this very forum.

I've been lurking on these forums for a couple of days but I think I'm going to chime in on this one.

What always gets me about "fan entitlement" is how it always seeks to meddle in the affairs of a content creator. They act as though content is some kind of truly finite resource, and so, we need to supplant the existing content with content that we approve of, since like land, God isn't making any more of it.

I think this is seen most dramatically with people who push to recreate characters under their special snowflake demographics, and conversely, the people who vehemently oppose such reimagining. Just look at the Ghostbusters remake to see this in action; on the one hand, Hollywood was trying to sell a movie people weren't buying and throwing a tantrum over them not buying it (which is like content creator entitlement, if such a thing exists), but on the other, "anti-PC" lunatics were throwing their own tantrum about how Ghostbusters is now SJW trash. Another example is making James Bond a black guy by casting Idris Elba. I don't mind it, and look forward to seeing Elba in that role, since I know his performance in The Wire was top notch, but people were freaking out because the figured it some kind of conspiracy to supplant the white man from his rightful place in make-believe spy shit cinema.

I live in a country (the United States) with really rock solid freedom of speech policy. There are very few things you aren't allowed to say. The only things I can think of that you couldn't put into fiction are child pornography and explicit plans to kill the President or overthrow the government, and even then, the former only applies if it involves depictions of actual children. So basically, we're allowed to say whatever we want in our fiction, and we're all allowed to make our own.

I think we would do well as a community if we made an effort to detach ourselves from the perceived legitimacy of certain sources. For example, Onyx Path does not own urban fantasy; World of Darkness is one of many interpretations of a modern world with supernatural horrors. Another example is Hasbro doesn't own high fantasy.

I think fanbase entitlement would be severely undermined if we changed our attitude about "third party" content. I think the concept of "canon" exacerbates the issue, as if the things one person makes-up are somehow more valid than the things some other person makes-up. If we got rid of that, there probably wouldn't be any (or at the very least, not as much) fan entitlement. This isn't the Catholic Church. All fiction (especially in roleplaying) is based at least loosely on past fiction. Nobody's opinion really matters. There is no "canon." Just make something up and hope you've got the raw talent to make it exciting for whoever happens upon it.