The Sincerest Form of Flattery
May. 17th, 2010 03:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thessalianWell, wow. I don't know whether to be angry, flattered, flattered-by-proxy or just a little bemused. I think I'll settle for "all of the above".
So, some of you are aware of my history in the land of Daria fanfic. That's actually how I met some of you. And there were ... bits of meta-fic. Some were straight-forward prose adaptations (so don't really count as meta, I don't think), and some that were more or less original - fanfic of fanfic - and others that were trying to be original but copy-pasted about half my dialogue as well as borrowing characters. It got aggravating, on top of all the other aggravation fandom (and life) was throwing at me. So I backed out. I did a bit more writing on it a couple of years ago but realistically, my time in that fandom is over.
Well. I recently got approached with the information that someone's plagiarising my fic again. Well, by proxy anyway. Essentially, someone's grabbed the prose adaptations wholesale, done a (oddly shoddy) search-and-replace job on the names and plunked it onto Fanfiction.net as their own Kingdom Hearts fanfic series. This individual hasn't even bothered to change the chapter titles much.
It amuses me to consider the reactions I'm having now and comparing them to what reactions I would have had at the time. I think I probably would have been angrier about it. Or at least, it wouldn't have been tempered with this sense of outright pity for the individual in question. I mean, hell, the whole point of fanfic is to create a new story in a world you love. Or at least, that's what I thought it was supposed to be. The idea that you're so invested in being Someone In Fandom that you'd outright steal someone else's work from an entirely unrelated fandom and pass it off as your own instead of ... y'know, writing something yourself? It confuses the hell out of me, and makes me sad.
That doesn't mean I won't be happy when this little twit is outed, mind you. I have this thing about someone getting credit for someone else's work, whether the work is mine or not. And let's face it - it isn't, entirely. Dialogue's mine, sure. Descriptives? Not so much. And if it were Yui Daoren or Kara Wild or CE Foreman or any of the other Daria ficters ... or indeed anyone else ... I'd be just as annoyed, or possibly more so. Because so much of the work is mine, though, I suppose that, along with the anger and the pity and the "WTF?" ... I also feel a bit flattered. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all. I don't like being ripped off, but I guess there's something to someone thinking you're worth ripping off.
But I still want to nail her to a wall. Figuratively.
In other news, job stuff continues apace and now they're digging up my references. Gods, I hope my references hold up. They should. They have through other jobs. I shouldn't be worrying about this but ... well, you know how I get. Fingers still crossed (at least when I don't have to type anything).
So, some of you are aware of my history in the land of Daria fanfic. That's actually how I met some of you. And there were ... bits of meta-fic. Some were straight-forward prose adaptations (so don't really count as meta, I don't think), and some that were more or less original - fanfic of fanfic - and others that were trying to be original but copy-pasted about half my dialogue as well as borrowing characters. It got aggravating, on top of all the other aggravation fandom (and life) was throwing at me. So I backed out. I did a bit more writing on it a couple of years ago but realistically, my time in that fandom is over.
Well. I recently got approached with the information that someone's plagiarising my fic again. Well, by proxy anyway. Essentially, someone's grabbed the prose adaptations wholesale, done a (oddly shoddy) search-and-replace job on the names and plunked it onto Fanfiction.net as their own Kingdom Hearts fanfic series. This individual hasn't even bothered to change the chapter titles much.
It amuses me to consider the reactions I'm having now and comparing them to what reactions I would have had at the time. I think I probably would have been angrier about it. Or at least, it wouldn't have been tempered with this sense of outright pity for the individual in question. I mean, hell, the whole point of fanfic is to create a new story in a world you love. Or at least, that's what I thought it was supposed to be. The idea that you're so invested in being Someone In Fandom that you'd outright steal someone else's work from an entirely unrelated fandom and pass it off as your own instead of ... y'know, writing something yourself? It confuses the hell out of me, and makes me sad.
That doesn't mean I won't be happy when this little twit is outed, mind you. I have this thing about someone getting credit for someone else's work, whether the work is mine or not. And let's face it - it isn't, entirely. Dialogue's mine, sure. Descriptives? Not so much. And if it were Yui Daoren or Kara Wild or CE Foreman or any of the other Daria ficters ... or indeed anyone else ... I'd be just as annoyed, or possibly more so. Because so much of the work is mine, though, I suppose that, along with the anger and the pity and the "WTF?" ... I also feel a bit flattered. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all. I don't like being ripped off, but I guess there's something to someone thinking you're worth ripping off.
But I still want to nail her to a wall. Figuratively.
In other news, job stuff continues apace and now they're digging up my references. Gods, I hope my references hold up. They should. They have through other jobs. I shouldn't be worrying about this but ... well, you know how I get. Fingers still crossed (at least when I don't have to type anything).