All Eyes on Me

RE need for new art that includes more diversite: OR one can create high-grade fanfiction with alternate lenses and/or gender/race/class/whatever-bending and do it so well that people forget it's fanfiction and see it as new art (see: Wide Sargasso Sea, Ros&Guil are dead, most of Shakespeare). What you do is you say "this is a re-telling of [whatever] where it takes place in India in the year 2080 and these characters are gay." As I see it, whether a piece is drawing heavily upon other stories (serial numbers or no) does not necessarily have much of anything to do with the problem. The problem is that even new 'original' stories are still about the same limited class of people and re-hash the same (often harmful) tropes. (I have a lot of feelings about the cult of originality. Most of them are angry.)