I just saw a fanart that looked a little too much like a fanfiction I wrote when I was 16 and orphaned recently, and it’s definitely not a fanart for my silly little fanfiction that never got more than ~800 hits, but it was so horribly similar that for a moment I could taste the ink-blood of my creation, my child, choking me to death.
I think on Ao3 you should be able to ‘adopt’ orphaned fics and continue them as your own. I don’t think it’s a good idea, but I think it’d be really funny.