I know I'm almost a year late to this, but it's devastating that the Wattys now exclude fanfiction from submission categories. I've been on Wattpad since 2013 and it's a website that has always been synonymous with ( however unfortunately, mostly bad) fanfiction. Instead of completely getting rid of the category, they could have adapted the competition to include it while respecting intellectual property copyright by simply not including a monetary prize for this category. The argument that fanfiction demands less work and effort than original fiction has never been a valid argument, not for the genre as a whole. Not to mention that publishing original work on Wattpad can actually be detrimental if you decide to publish traditionally, even with a different piece of work.
Wattpad needs to remember what it was built on, or get rid of fanfiction entirely. But dignity and consistency is hard to expect from a company that has been going downhill for a decade.
