RoboChrist 9000 posted:

The insane nonsense that is Riverdale came up in a discussion I was having with a friend recently, and between that show and Penders' Sonic/Knuckles, I feel like there needs to be a name for the specific sort of hack who has some sort of terrible story they want to tell but are unable to gain funding for, and so they hijack some other, existing, IP to try and use it to 'stealthily' tell that story instead. Like how Riverdale is clearly wholly divorced from Archie and just Aguirre-Sacasa playing out his fetishes and inept Twin Peaks fanfiction, while Penders' Knuckles stuff was all just varying degrees of adaptation of that comic he failed to make back when.

Like, yeah, you often get unfaithful adaptations of stuff, but usually it's do to executive meddling and poo poo. Or ineptitude wanting to tell the story better. But it's rare you get 'I don't care about this IP at all and am hijacking it for my own selfish purposes because it is the only way I can get anyone to give me money to make my crap."