#or a different interpretation
And incidentally, the #1 thing that makes me wonder why I keep posting original fiction on Tumblr.
There are people out there - and this has happened on most of the stories I’ve posted at least once, especially the prompt fills - who think ‘this is just the plot of (x)’ or ‘sorry, but this is just (name of other media) or even ‘you stole this from (x) is an appropriate response to a) a story prompt, or b) someone else’s story.
It makes me want to put my fist through the screen. It makes me want to bite through rocks. I hate it so much.
If you are one of those people, here are two things I really, really want you to understand.
1) If you’re responding to the prompt:… yes, and? That’s why people submit them! ‘I really liked this plot idea, where might someone else go with it’ is a perfectly acceptable reason to create a prompt. That’s what the prompts are for, to see how someone else might go with this idea, whether it was original or not. You’re not clever for ‘figuring it out’. The Lion King is basically Hamlet.CluelessisEmmarewritten. This isn’t news. All you’re demonstrating is that you are so ignorant that you don’t knowthat.
2) If you’re responding to the story, well, first off, you’re an asshole. That is a really shitty thing to say to someone, even if it IS the most transparent of duplicates, ieClueless. It’s not useful, it’s not helpful, you’re just trying to make yourself feel clever by tearing someone else down. And secondly, it demonstrates your total failure to understand how tropes, narrative structure, or indeed coincidence work. I’ve been accused of stealing/copying the plots of books or shows I’ve never read, or songs from bands I’ve never heard of, because nobody in the world can consume every single extant piece of media and that means accidental duplication IS GOING TO HAPPEN SOMETIMES. Especially when it comes to popular tropes, or genres with strongly established conventions.
People who do this aren’t showing that they’re clever, they’re showing that they’re the kind of self-absorbed idiot who points at a a ramp and says ‘hurr, that’s so dumb, why don’t they use the stairs’. They’re showing that they’re so fundamentally ignorant of narrative structure, tropes, genre conventions, and the fact that people like to read a good idea more than once that they really think ‘this thing is like that thing’ is some kind of clever put-down. And it makes me incredibly angry because I HATE people who try to put other people down or make other people look bad just to make themselves feel good or clever. HATE.
And I really, really hate when they use me, my work, or the prompts I respond to for their ego-fodder.
For everyone else, I’m sorry about the rant, but this just keeps happening and it makes me so upset. I feel like… well, not to put too fine a point on it, like someone who’s spent more than twenty years working to master their craft, who’s getting heckled by some probably-adolescent twerp who saw a documentary on the Disney channel and thinks it makes them an expert.
