Alitriona said:
However, this is one of the issues some in the fandom have. I've seen it stated by some that because they reviewed a fanfic, they somehow then have ownership of it and the writer had no right to pull it offline.
That's my only problem with it, on a personal level. I don't share that specific sentiment, but I do think there are some implied social contracts within the fanfic commmunities, themselves, that get violated when you "pull to publish," and I'm not a fan of the practice.
In my opinion, this is basically an original work, inspired, in loose fashion, by the relationship dynamic in Twilight. However, it only garnered widespread success because of and owes its mainstream status to the "grass roots" efforts of its original fanfiction audience.
Other fanfictions have gone the P2P route, but we're only talking about this one because it's doing well commercially. For a lot of bloggers, the crux of the irk seems to come down to how much scrubbing there wasn't. Most people aren't as upset by works that start as fanficions but are extensively rewritten to remove any evidence of the source inspiration. A lot of people appear to be miffed that FSoG was published in, more or less, its fanfic form. But, how much "scrubbing" can you actually do with a story that is so AU to begin with?
The problem doesn't seem to be that the story started as fanfic, and no one is really arguing that it's still recognizable as a version of the Twilight story--it's that the "new" story is still recognizable as the "fanfic," regardless of how AU the fanfic started. That differentiation is a huge gray area that I'm not sure how to sort out. If this story had started closer to the Twilight source, storywise, and had been scrubbed to its current state, I doubt there would have been a perception problem. But it didn't need as much scrubbing to get away from the source, and that's where the problem seems to lie and what makes people wonder whether this was an original fic all along that just had Twilight slapped onto it so people would read it.
I do know that there's very little judgement inside the fanfic community about fics that are wildly AU. And I know that there's not (comparatively) a lot of ire in response to fanfic authors scrubbing a fic to sub to publishers... The two events, taken together, might tell a different story. Whether the author is being disingenuous, I can't say at this point.