Fictional characters, tired of being trapped by extended copyright, escape into the general media.

For many of us, characters in stories can be almost as real as the people we know in life. We enjoy spending time with them. When the story ends we wish for a sequel or ten so we can spend more time with the characters. When we don’t like how the story turned out many of us want to create our own version of the story. If the story is old enough, if it’s in the public domain, we can do that. If a story is still under copyright we are limited by what we can do with that story and the characters within it.

In recent years, media corporations have fought to extend the copyrights of the works they own in order to continue to profit from those works. Fictional people are keeping other fictional people as indentured servants. The creators of the stories that featured the characters are all dead. They can no longer profit from those stories.

What happens when the fictionals get tired of living in their corporate prisons and decide to romp in the greater imagination?

A supersoldier formula is invented. It’s only effective on women. It drives men mad when it doesn’t kill them outright.

Women are the weaker sex. That’s not a moral judgment. That’s if we just compare the average man to the average woman on a physical level. Let’s leave aside any questions of spiritual or emotional strength or the long term ability to endure pain. Or just to endure. The average man is bigger and stronger than the average woman.

Now, what if there were a way to make women faster and stronger than men? What if the process only worked on women? How many women would take advantage of it? What kind of people would they become when a big man is no longer something to be afraid of?

A wendigo is killing people in the Pacific Northwest. A detective teams up with a Sasquatch to hunt it down.

The wendigo is a hunger spirit. It is said to possess a man who eats the flesh of another human being. The wendigo comes from Algonquin mythology so it’s a little out of place in the Pacific Northwest but … Bigfoot vs. Wendigo? It’s a natural.

An offshore oil well opens a hole in a vast empty cavern and the world’s oceans begin to drain away.

I did say that some of these ideas would be kind of (really, really) stupid, didn’t I?

Could be a funny kids’ book. Could be the latest blockbuster from Roland Emmerich.

Jekyll’s formula is reinvented; it quickly becomes the most popular recreational drug on the market.

Not much to elaborate on here. There’s a lot of people in the world who would pay a lot of money to be someone else. Even if (perhaps especially if) that other person were an Edward Hyde.

Another, bigger, zombie apocalypse. ALL dead creatures revive to eat the living. I don’t see any happy endings here.

The zombie apocalypse has, as far as I know, mostly been confined to human corpses reviving. I’ve heard of one novel, and a video game or two, that had zombie dogs. But why should revival occur in just man and pooch? Why not all animals with a central nervous system? Zombie dogs, zombie cats, zombie cows, zombie salmon, zombie sharks, zombie sparrows, zombie hawks, zombie rats, zombie alligators, zombie snakes, zombie bats. Humanity would be so screwed.

God help us if ALL animals came back from the dead. How do you rekill a zombie cockroach?

(Suggested by Daniel Peace)

The zombie apocalypse is over in 3 weeks. The living win. Now what does daily life look like when the dead must be feared?

Even if the dead could come back to life as ravenous flesh eaters it’s hard for me to be worried about it. There just aren’t that many corpses lying around. Even if every bite turns the victim into another zombie it’s still unlikely that the undead would gain enough numbers to take out living society. We humans are ruthless creatures and we’re very good at killing other members of our species. In this case there’d be no need to dehumanize the enemy – the enemy is no longer human and wants to eat us. We’d have them chopped up and tossed into the bonfires in no time.

The question then is, what would society look like when a corpse becomes a threat? How would we treat the old and the sick? That homeless guy passed out on the street – no one is going to ignore that body. How would murder investigations be conducted? What kind of funerals would we have?