Profit in fandom is a little different: measured in popularity and in feedback.
Ozymandus was popular, and by popular I mean MONSTER POPULAR back in the day. If you said you didn't like Ozymandus back in the day, you'd get mobbed up for it. I never much liked his stories, mostly because I don't like PWP (which was the majority of his output) and his non-PWP weren't all that special. Not to mention that Xander and whatever woman his was banging this week was OOC in the extreme.
(I take it back. There was one story of his I did like, and it was a ficlet character study of Xander teaching Dawn how to drive that was kind of sweet and actually in character. I can't tell you if that was plagiarized or not.)
So, needless to say, I kept my mouth shut when he was mobbed with love from all corners of B/X, F/X, and Xander-centric fandom.
He lost a lot of his popularity when he was found out, and then when he started posting under Shawn, he regained some fans but was mostly on the periphery. I think he pretty much retreated to his own Yahoo Group and posted completes stories on the archives.
So, yeah, if he's to be believed, the massive amounts of adulation he got from the Xander-centric, F/X, and B/X crowd was what fueled his desire to keep producing more and more and more stories (especially PWPs) and his inability to produce as much as the "market" demanded is what let him into plagiarizing across fandoms.
Yeah, not a rational reason, but at least it's a reason.
As for why do it in this second go-round? That's the real mystery.
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Ozymandus was popular, and by popular I mean MONSTER POPULAR back in the day. If you said you didn't like Ozymandus back in the day, you'd get mobbed up for it. I never much liked his stories, mostly because I don't like PWP (which was the majority of his output) and his non-PWP weren't all that special. Not to mention that Xander and whatever woman his was banging this week was OOC in the extreme.
(I take it back. There was one story of his I did like, and it was a ficlet character study of Xander teaching Dawn how to drive that was kind of sweet and actually in character. I can't tell you if that was plagiarized or not.)
So, needless to say, I kept my mouth shut when he was mobbed with love from all corners of B/X, F/X, and Xander-centric fandom.
He lost a lot of his popularity when he was found out, and then when he started posting under Shawn, he regained some fans but was mostly on the periphery. I think he pretty much retreated to his own Yahoo Group and posted completes stories on the archives.
So, yeah, if he's to be believed, the massive amounts of adulation he got from the Xander-centric, F/X, and B/X crowd was what fueled his desire to keep producing more and more and more stories (especially PWPs) and his inability to produce as much as the "market" demanded is what let him into plagiarizing across fandoms.
Yeah, not a rational reason, but at least it's a reason.
As for why do it in this second go-round? That's the real mystery.