"I won the 2004 Hugo Award for Best Short Story for an H. P. Lovecraft /Arthur Conan Doyle mashup fiction, so fanfiction had better be legitimate, because I'm not giving the Hugo back.
Or the 2005 Locus Award for Best Novelette. I'm not giving that back either."
Or the 2005 Locus Award for Best Novelette. I'm not giving that back either."
Public Domain Canon Welding is when a creator combines their original work with a Public Domain property, or combine two or more Public Domain works to create a new work.
It is similar to regular Canon Welding in that the creator takes two or more unrelated works and combines them, but at least one of them is in fact Public Domain. In other words, the new work can serve as a sequel, a sidestory, a prequel, or interquel to the original work. It is easy to draw parallels to Fanfiction, except that the new work is an officially published property. The only reason the creator can do this is because nobody owns the rights to the work they're using as a basis.
The advantage of this is that as a creator, you get a pre-established setting for your new work, saving you from having to make a certain amount of world-building, and you don't need to worry about things such as copyright, as nobody owns them. In addition, the fact that as Public Domain property, everybody is likely to recognise them, you don't have to fill your work with Exposition, as everyone is already familiar with them. Thus, you can get to moving along the plot or action faster.
However, this familiarity is also the greatest downside, as the audience also knows how the base story is supposed to go. You may be essentially writing fanfiction, but what you're writing MUST be canon compliant, or else your audience will notice, and they WILL complain about you taking too many liberties.
Related to Public Domain Character. Contrast and compare with Canon Welding, Shared Universe, Pseudo-Canonical Fic, and Intercontinuity Crossover.
Examples
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Franchises
- Doctor Who and its spin-offs have sometimes depicted public domain fictional characters.
- The TV story "The Myth Makers" is set during The Trojan War, and takes much of its characterisation from other fictional depictions.
- There is conflicting evidence as to whether Sherlock Holmes is a real person in the Doctor Who universe.
- The Doctor Who New Adventures novel All-Consuming-Fire has the Seventh Doctor team up with Holmes. It also retcons many of the Ancient Evils of the Whoniverse into the beings of the Cthulhu Mythos (Fenric is Hastur, the Great Intelligence is Yog-Sothoth, the Nestene Consciousness is the offspring of Shub-Niggurath, and so on).
- However, the Doctor Who Missing Adventures novel Evolution, from the same era of the franchise and the same publisher, depicts the Fourth Doctor meeting a young Arthur Conan Doyle and implies that many of Holmes's characteristics were based on him.
- The Faction Paradox novel Erasing Sherlocknote features Holmes as a real person who the Celestis attempt to erase from existence. The short story "The Book of the Enemy", in the anthology of the same title, depicts Holmes as being an originally real person who was transformed into fiction by a reality-warping book.
- On the TV show, several stories in the Steven Moffat era implied that the Holmes stories were fictionalisations of the in-universe exploits of Vastra and Jenny, with their gender and relationship, and Vastra's species, changed to be more acceptable in the nineteenth century. The episode "The Crimson Horror" is blatantly indicated to be the in-universe story behind Watson's reference to "The Repulsive Story of the Red Leech", one of the many Noodle Incident adventures in the Conan Doyle series.
- Big Finish has produced some audio dramas featuring Nicholas Briggs as Holmes, which include a crossover with the Big Finish Doctor Who continuity in the anthology The Worlds of Big Finish, and an audio adaptation of the aforementioned All-Consuming Fire.
- The TV episode Robot of Sherwood features many characters from the Robin Hood mythos.
Anime and Manga
- Aria the Scarlet Ammo has a majority of the characters being descendants of famous literary characters such as Sherlock Holmes, Arsène Lupin, and Captain Nemo. (If that wasn't enough, the full name of Lupin's descendant* and their status as Lupin IV implicate a connection to Lupin III, mentioned below.)
- Lupin III:
- The eponymous character of the franchise is explicitly a descendant of Arsène Lupin who's continuing his legacy as a Gentleman Thief. Some of the various series, special features, and films actually provide (at minimum) a glimpse of the rest of Lupin's immediate family, such as Steal Napoleon's Dictionary, The First, Part 6, and Lupin Zero.
- The first half of Lupin III: Part 6 specifically focuses around Lupin being chased around by Sherlock Holmes (or possibly his descendant). Right near the end of this particular arc, viewers are formally introducednote to a young criminal mastermind by the name of James Moriarty, and a later episode establishes he's been acquainted with Lupin for quite some time.
- Moriarty the Patriot is primarily a Sherlock Holmes adaptation. This makes it all the more notable when James Bond makes an appearance as an agent of MI6, especially after becoming the post-transition identity of Irene Adler.
- Princess Principal is heavily implied to take place in the same setting as H. G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon due to the fact that the Steampunk technology in the anime is powered by cavorite, a mineral found on the Moon that was discovered by the book's two protagonists: Cavor and Bedford.
- The protagonist of Ron Kamonohashi: Deranged Detective is a descendant of both Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty. The "M" side of his family are set up to be antagonists.
- Tada Never Falls in Love features a popular shojo manga series by the title Sunflower Express -A Police Blotter in Love-, the heroine of which is the granddaughter of Hercule Poirot (changed here to "Poiron"). She even mentions how the grey cells she inherited from her grandfather have begun to fire while piecing together clues, a nod to one of Poirot's catchphrases.
- Undead Girl Murder Farce has the main protagonists meeting various literary figures such as Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, Arsene Lupin, the Phantom of the Opera among others.
- Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust has the Big Bad revealed to be Carmilla, who attacks Meir Link and then drains and kills his Love Interest, Charolette, to revive herself.
Comic Books
- Kill Shakespeare treats every character and story written by William Shakespeare as existing in the same universe.
- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen does this with characters from classic literature, film, theatre, television and even comics ranging from the Victorian period all the way to the 20th century and beyond. And this is not counting specific Lawyer-Friendly Cameos from characters not yet in the public domain but are recognizable nonetheless.
- One Warlord of Mars miniseries welds the continuity of John Carter of Mars to Gullivar of Mars, an earlier, more obscure science-fiction novel that may have inspired Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels.
- While it was implied for years in previous X-Men books, it was only confirmed in Immortal X-Men that Mystique was Sherlock Holmes and Destiny, real name Irene Adler, was the character of the same name from the Holmes story "A Scandal in Bohemia".
Film — Animated
- The Care Bears: Adventure in Wonderland reveals that one of the Care Bears Cousins, Swift Heart Rabbit, is the niece of the White Rabbit from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
- Tom and Jerry Meet Sherlock Holmes has Tom and Jerry interacting with and solving a crime with Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty.
Film — Live-Action
- Hinted at in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, when Spock states that "An ancestor of mine maintained that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." This is, of course, a Sherlock Holmes quote. Since Holmes is established as fictional in other Star Trek media, fans usually interpret this as Spock declaring himself to be a descendant of Arthur Conan Doyle.
Literature
- ''Almost A Fantasy" is set in a world inhabited by all the literature characters, and features characters such as Doctor S.
, the Mad Hatter, Don Quixote, King Arthur, Merlin, Apollyon, Atlante and Roderick Usher.
- The original Arsène Lupin stories are an odd example, since they featured ties to Sherlock Holmes — except Holmes wasn't in public domain at the time, so the main characters were renamed "Herlock Sholmes" and "Wilson" to dodge copyright. It's become a straight example since both have fallen into the public domain, and works welding themselves to Lupin have the opportunity to use Holmes/"Sholmes" as well.
- Fred Saberhagen has a series about what Dracula was doing after he faked his death in the original novel and a series about untold adventures of Sherlock Holmes. They're set in the same universe and crossed over in two novels.
- Johannes Cabal: In the third book, the title character travels to the Cthulhu Mythos setting of the Dreamlands and encounters several Mythos entities, including the Outer God Nyarlathotep itself. Elements from the Mythos crop up again later in the series to a lesser extent.
- Kim Newman is known for doing this.
- Anno Dracula adds the characters of Dracula to the real-life Jack the Ripper murders, with cameos by numerous other literary characters of the period, including Dr. Jekyll, several different characters from the Sherlock Holmes series, etc. The sequel The Bloody Red Baron does something similar with characters from around the period of World War I. After that point, the series goes more for the Lawyer-Friendly Cameo and Captain Ersatz, although the nature of vampirism means many of the out-of-copyright characters are still around as well.
- Angels of Music features a 19th-century version of Charlie's Angels, with The Phantom of the Opera as Charlie and a rotating cast of public-domain heroines (including the Phantom's own Christine Daae, Trilby O'Ferrall, Irene Adler, and Elizabeth Eynsford Hill) as his Angels, fighting a rogues gallery similarly drawn from period fiction.
- The Hound of the D'Urbervilles is a series of crossovers between the Sherlock Holmes canon and other period works including Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and The Prisoner of Zenda.
- The Mandala Of Sherlock Holmes by Jamyang Norbu is set during the two years Sherlock Holmes spent in Tibet, and has him team up for an adventure with Huree Chunder Mookerjee from Rudyard Kipling's Kim.
- Philip José Farmer developed what is commonly called the Wold-Newton Family, a group of public domain characters such as Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Arsene Lupin and others, who are either descended from or influenced by people who came in contact with the radiation of a meteorite that struck near the titular town in England in the late 1700s. Not all his characters were in public domain at the time (Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life were both licenced works) and many characters who are still in copyright are at least alluded to. (The online continuations by other hands, of course, work on fanfic rules and have no such compunctions.)
- Erast Fandorin got welded to both the Sherlock Holmes and the Arsène Lupin PD canons via the "The Prisoner of the Tower" short story in the Jade Rosary Beads collection.
- There is an entire anthology dedicated to welding the public domain canons of Sherlock Holmes to the Cthulhu Mythos, titled Shadows Over Baker Street. It featured such works as Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald".
- An odd example happens in a Time Warp Trio book, "Summer Reading Is Killing Me!". When a summer reading list is inserted into the magic Book, the titular trio are sent into a weird amalgamation of many different public domain stories, with villains such as the Headless Horseman, Long John Silver, and Dracula hunting down protagonists like Pippi Longstocking, Peter Pan, and all of the Little Women.
- Twig: At the end of the story, the ruler of the Crown States is revealed to be Lord King Adam, who is implied to be the original Frankenstein's Monster, implying that Twig is a distant Alternate Universe sequel of the original story.
- W.G. Grace's Last Case, by Willie Rushton, is set a few years after the Martian invasion from The War of the Worlds, and has the real cricketer Grace investigating a murder with the help of Doctor Watson, who is at a loose end after Sherlock Holmes fell down the Reichenbach Falls. Along the way they meet Doctor Jekyll and a whole host of Mister Hydes.
Live-Action TV
- Dickensian is a mashup comedy drama featuring Charles Dickens characters before their original novels begin.
- Kaitou Sentai Lupinranger VS Keisatsu Sentai Patranger features two rival Super Sentai teams fighting Monsters of the Week and each other to acquire a set of dangerous treasures that Arsène Lupin once collected. One team takes on the legacy of Lupin himself as a group of Phantom Thieves, while the other team is a police squad out to catch the criminals.
- The Librarians 2014 has a the concept of canon welding as its whole second season. Prospero, of William Shakespeare's The Tempest has come to life, and uses his knowledge of magic to summon Professor Moriarty to aid him. Flynn and Baird are able to stop him by using a time machine stored in the Library (which also housed other time machines, including the one by H. G. Wells and (while not public domain) we get a hint of a blue police box.
- Once Upon a Time combines this with Fairy Tale Free-for-All. Most of the characters originate from fairy tales. Characters from other public domain works such as The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, and Frankenstein also make appearances.
- Penny Dreadful weaves together iconic characters and plots from Dracula, Frankenstein, Paradise Lost, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Wolf Man (1941) (to name just the most prominent ones) into a standalone story centered on an original character, the spirit medium Vanessa Ives.
Tabletop Games
- Pathfinder has incorporated features of the Cthulhu Mythos into its game line, including game stats for various Mythos entities and an adventure path where Pathfinder's Golarion setting is infiltrated by the Mythos realm of Carcosa.
Video Games
- American McGee's Alice is a Darker and Edgier follow-up to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, showing Alice's psyche as she grows up after losing her family in a house fire, which rendered her catatonic.
- Castlevania: The original continuity of games happens in the same world as Dracula, with its events treated as canon. The book itself receives two sequels within the series: Castlevania: Bloodlines, starring Quincey Morris's son John, and Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, starring John's son Jonathan. The games also go out of their way to explain that the Dracula seen in the series is not Vlad the Impaler, but a Crusader and Alchemist named Mathias Cronqvist using the name due to his reputation. This was in order to cover any Plot Holes created by the prequel game Castlevania: Lament of Innocence.
- Code Name: S.T.E.A.M features many literary characters such as Henry Fleming from The Red Badge of Courage, John Henry, Tiger Lily from Peter Pan, and Tom Sawyer; who team up with Abraham Lincoln to fight aliens (implied to be from the Cthulhu Mythos, especially since Randolph Carter is among the protagonists). The characters and setting of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in particular, plays a surprisingly large role in the plot.
- Fate/Grand Order:
- The very existence of the Foreigner Class. Foreigners are people who became heroic spirits by making deals or being somehow connected to the entities from the Cthulhu Mythos. Interestingly, the characters In-Universe thought that this was a fictional story and not true events, and the discovery takes them by surprise. In addition, Lovecraft wrote about them the way he understood them, since as a regular human being, he could not grasp their true nature.
- Many of the summonable Servants originate from works of fiction; for example, you meet Frankenstein's Monster, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Jekyll, Captain Nemo, and more. It's acknowledged In-Universe that they're featured in books, and the explanation is that they're based on their actual lives, and don't differ too much from reality — in some cases. Jekyll is established to have known Moriarty while they were alive in short stories and backstory.
- The Great Ace Attorney has Sherlock Holmes as a character and retains the notion that his adventures are written about by his assistant (although in this continuity it is by the daughter of John Watson, Iris). However in the western translation, due to issues over certain elements of the Holmes canon falling under the protection of the Doyle estate (even though Holmes as a character exists in the public domain), Holmes is renamed "Herlock Sholmes" and the Watsons become the "Wilsons".
- The Updated Re-release of Persona 2: Eternal Punishment reveals that it's not just H. P. Lovecraft's Eldritch Abominations that are in fact real (which they are, considering the Big Bad for this game and the previous ones is none other than Nyarlathotep, but the Cthulhu Mythos happened. The extra scenario features mentions of the Dreamlands, a cameo from Randolph Carter (a recurring protagonist in Lovecraft's work), an opportunity to to actually punch Cthulhu, and more. However, later games in the series do not use these elements at all, except for a rare Shout-Out.
- Return to Mysterious Island is something of a distant sequel to The Mysterious Island, as it focuses on a new character discovering Captain Nemo's skeleton and long-abandoned ship. The character, a sailor named Mina, is strongly implied to be descended from him somehow.
- In Scribblenauts, the player can summon multiple beings from the Cthulhu Mythos, including Cthulhu, Shoggoth, and the Shambler.
- Sherlock Holmes (Frogwares) series:
- Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened features Holmes and Watson investigating a mystery involving the Cthulhu Mythos. It was originally released in 2006, with an Updated Re-release arriving in 2008.
- Sherlock Holmes Versus Arsène Lupin has Holmes facing the Gentleman Thief, Arsene Lupin in a cat-and-mouse game throughout London.
- Shikkoku no Sharnoth features a lot of fictional characters from the Victorian Era and made references from H. P. Lovecraft's works including Kadath.
- Smite primarily features various mythological figures, but Cthulhu of the public domain Cthulhu Mythos is also playable.
- In the backstory of the Soul Series, it's revealed that the titular Soul Calibur's name similarity to Excalibur is not a coincidence: Excalibur is Soul Calibur, and King Arthur was one of the earliest wielders of the holy sword (which, naturally, was gifted to him by The Lady of the Lake). While this detail was All There in the Manual for a large portion of the series' run, Soulcalibur VI would be the first installment to explicitly mention this fact in-game while adding that he also founded the Aval Organization, a major driving force behind the game's events (and the group to which newcomer Grøh belongs), later in his life.
- Touhou Project:
- The vampire Remilia Scarlet claims to be the descendant of Dracula, but everyone knows it's pretty much a lie.
- Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night:
- Imperishable Night is effectively a sequel to The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter; the True Final Boss of the main story is Princess Kaguya, as instead of returning to the Moon as in the original story, Eirin killed the other lunar emissaries tasked with taking her back, and they've been hiding within Eientei for centuries. Fujiwara no Mokou, her rival and the game's Superboss, is based on the fifth daughter of Fujiwara no Fuhito, the man who Kuramochi no Miko, one of Kaguya's suitors from the original folk tale, is presumed to based on.
- Tewi Inaba, Stage 5 miniboss, is heavily implied to be one and the same as the legendary White Hare of Inaba from the Kojiki, and is more or less allowing Kaguya and Eirin to hide at Eientei as she's the true master of its earth rabbits.
Web Original
- Jenny Everywhere is a public-domain character who is explicitly allowed to be used in almost any work, as long as she is given proper attribution. Consequently, her appearances have forged connections between webcomics as varied as Tales to Behold, The Bare Pit, and Kaza's Mate Gwenna.
Web Video
- Epic Rap Battles of History features both real people and fictional characters in rap battles, and some of the rappers are from public domain works, including Sherlock Holmes and Dracula.
- Headless: A Sleepy Hollow Story: While the series is mainly based on "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", modern versions of multiple Washington Irving characters (such as Rip Van Winkle and Diedrich Knickerbocker as the All-Knowing Singing Narrator) show up in some way, shape, or form.
- Austin McConnell's Superzeroes project is an attempt to do this with public domain superheroes from The Golden Age of Comic Books.
Western Animation
- Among the many guest-star heroes that appear in Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson team with Batman on one case.
- In the Beetlejuice cartoon, BJ and Lydia share episodes with characters from the works of Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakespeare, in ways which imply that those characters are real people. The creators themselves also both appear; Poe is very fond of Lydia and Shakespeare is actually good friends with Beetlejuice.
- Gargoyles is in a world where All Myths Are True ("but not all myths are accurate"), created by a self-described "Shakespeare nut"; as a result, its version of The Fair Folk includes the likes of Anubis and Odin, but also Oberon, Titania, Puck and the Weird Sisters. King Arthur also shows up, as does the Golem of Prague, while a one-off character is the Reincarnation of Cú Chulainn.
- Cthulhu of the Cthulhu Mythos appears as a minor antagonist in The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy. While still a world-ending threat, he's much less intimidating than in his source material.
- In one episode of Mighty Max, Max teams up with Jules Verne (who spent a long time as a Human Popsicle) against a descendant of Captain Nemo.
- The Real Ghostbusters has a couple of episodes that do this:
- "The Collect Call of Cathulhu" has our heroes investigate the theft of the Necronomicon from the New York Public Library, and then learn that it was stolen by Shoggoth serving a cult of "Cathulhu" to summon the big guy himself. The 'Busters have to go head to head with the Eldritch Abomination. They manage to defeat him using SCIENCE.
- In another episode, the Ghostbusters meet Sherlock Holmes' ghost. They could have had him be the real Sherlock Holmes using Rule of Cool, but opt instead to keep Holmes a fictional character, saying that he was given life as an egrigore by the force of the belief in him that his fans and readers had.
- The Scooby-Doo Show: In the episode "The Headless Horseman of Halloween," the gang meets descendants of Ichabod Crane.
