The Problem of Unicorn Epicycles

[batzulger]

At that point all you're doing is failing to commit to writing original fiction, by using a few names and maybe a few setting mechanics general enough to count more as tropes, from something popular and putting them on your own setting, tour own characters, and your own story. That's just authorial cowardice, and/or the literary equivalent of click-baiting to get people to look at it under the pretense that it's about something they know they like.

I took the very first episode of Buffy, 'Welcome to the Hellmouth' and transmuted the setting from a 90s High School with Vampires to 1940s pulp in a munitions plant with Nazi Atlanteans while trying to keep the characters as canon as possible. Or 'That Bastard Beggar's Horse' which completely replaces the setting, but also keeps the characters close to the originals.