Someone else's work to me is the actual words. Take those without credit and I peeve. Someone else's ideas OTOH- mh. Not only are ideas a dicey area- who would be ass enough to say 'Hakkai and Gojou on a rainy night is *my* idea, you stole it from me!!!' and youandyouandyouandyou...- but how do I know that my beautifully thought up trope didn't in fact occur to her quite independently?

Even if it's something pretty much provably my own idea (because wrong, ie Hakkai's shouldercloth being part of a monk's robe) if someone mentions Hakkai's monk's shouldercloth I feel flattered. Look, I created fanon! But if they then wrote an AN to say 'I got this idea from mjj's fic Gonou' it'd be a letdown. Oh I'm not fanon. You mean people need to be /told/ that came from Gonou? I go away to weep in chagrin.

I'd rather have a deft in-fandom reference that everyone gets (or is assumed to get) than clumsy footnoting all over the place. "To screw or not to screw" Gojou muses; who would AN that with 'This line is adapted from Shakespeare's Hamlet'? Simply, it's more gratifying to assume an idea is iterated because it's quasi-fanon than because the writer was intent on theft. Too much snarling over source and intellectual rights actually prevents the growth of our oral tradition thing called fanon.