I've been ripped off :D
YOU GUYS I AM LOL'ING SO HARD I'M GOING TO COME OUT OF LJ RETIREMENT AND BREAK THE LOCKED POST RULE JUST FOR THIS EXCITEMENT.
LOOKIT, House of the Rising Sun. So some dumb bunny on Tumblr entered an AO3-based case fic challenge and thought the way to do these things is to rip off my work. In the same fandom even. In the same SPN case fic category. You guys, Dandy In the Underworld has its own fanfiction. This is so meta I cannot even. Two people PM'd me about it this morning - otherwise I wouldn't have seen it. Not only does it rip off the plot of "Dandy", but it then follows it scene by scene, with minor adjustments to entire paragraphs and chunks of dialogue. You know, mangoes become beignets, Uncle Cornelius becomes Grandma, Ivan becomes Oliver.
When I was fourteen and learning to write, I'd plagiarize lines of dialogue that were too awesome to resist. But even at fourteen, I'd stop at one line and keep the thing on my hard drive anyway. Maybe rewriting someone's work scene by scene and flopping around to make your own sentences is how you learn to write. I believe that doing translations of books for fun as a teenager made me a better writer. The whole difference is that YOU KEEP IT ON YOUR HARD DRIVE. You shove that pride where the sun doesn't shine, and you do not post the misbegotten thing anywhere under your name. Not until you write your own misbegotten thing. Mine was tentacle porn. It won a contest. I couldn't even show it to my friends for a year. It was short and full of typos and tentacular, and it was all mine. The pride of winning that contest by popular vote, on some social media site, in some fandom that no one cares about - that pride is all mine.
I'm going to adjust my query letter to agents. DEAR AGENTS! I've been ripped off twice (that I know of) in my fandom years, and one of those by an actual show writer (see the questionable episode of the WWII submarine). Clearly I'm awesome. Take Nobody and Wormwood for publication! It's the cat's pajamas and will make loads of money. OODLES. SO MUCH MONEY. It'll be a movie, and David Kross will be in it with his sexy German, and Russia will probably blacklist me for offending their patriotic feelings.
Love, Tiger, who learned through plagiarism like everyone else but had the good grace to keep it in the drawer.
UPDATE: The whole AO3 account was now taken down. The person actually responded to my WTF? on Tumblr, owned up to plagiarism, apologized and didn't try to make any excuses. This is just some silly kid who got carried away and unfortunately had to pay for that stupidity with the loss of all her AO3 posted work. I respect admitting to your shit and learning from it. We should all be so smart.
LOOKIT, House of the Rising Sun. So some dumb bunny on Tumblr entered an AO3-based case fic challenge and thought the way to do these things is to rip off my work. In the same fandom even. In the same SPN case fic category. You guys, Dandy In the Underworld has its own fanfiction. This is so meta I cannot even. Two people PM'd me about it this morning - otherwise I wouldn't have seen it. Not only does it rip off the plot of "Dandy", but it then follows it scene by scene, with minor adjustments to entire paragraphs and chunks of dialogue. You know, mangoes become beignets, Uncle Cornelius becomes Grandma, Ivan becomes Oliver.
When I was fourteen and learning to write, I'd plagiarize lines of dialogue that were too awesome to resist. But even at fourteen, I'd stop at one line and keep the thing on my hard drive anyway. Maybe rewriting someone's work scene by scene and flopping around to make your own sentences is how you learn to write. I believe that doing translations of books for fun as a teenager made me a better writer. The whole difference is that YOU KEEP IT ON YOUR HARD DRIVE. You shove that pride where the sun doesn't shine, and you do not post the misbegotten thing anywhere under your name. Not until you write your own misbegotten thing. Mine was tentacle porn. It won a contest. I couldn't even show it to my friends for a year. It was short and full of typos and tentacular, and it was all mine. The pride of winning that contest by popular vote, on some social media site, in some fandom that no one cares about - that pride is all mine.
I'm going to adjust my query letter to agents. DEAR AGENTS! I've been ripped off twice (that I know of) in my fandom years, and one of those by an actual show writer (see the questionable episode of the WWII submarine). Clearly I'm awesome. Take Nobody and Wormwood for publication! It's the cat's pajamas and will make loads of money. OODLES. SO MUCH MONEY. It'll be a movie, and David Kross will be in it with his sexy German, and Russia will probably blacklist me for offending their patriotic feelings.
Love, Tiger, who learned through plagiarism like everyone else but had the good grace to keep it in the drawer.
UPDATE: The whole AO3 account was now taken down. The person actually responded to my WTF? on Tumblr, owned up to plagiarism, apologized and didn't try to make any excuses. This is just some silly kid who got carried away and unfortunately had to pay for that stupidity with the loss of all her AO3 posted work. I respect admitting to your shit and learning from it. We should all be so smart.