Let's Talk About Plagiarism

[nicefinalbeam]

Hello arashirabu members! Apologies for two mod posts back to back, but I wanted to highlight an important issue with the community.

Every now and then we get a request on our master request post for fics written by tsunderellasays, who was active in fandom for some time before deleting their journal and disappearing. What most people do not seem to know is

Comments

[dekkawai]

oh wow...
I actually already speculating about this matter with my friend when the mod in Sakumoto community said something about banning some member because of plagiarism, since tsunderellasays suddenly deleting all of her LJ entries.
But, then again it was a speculation, and to have it confirmed is still shocking.
I actually love her' fic, but now that I know for sure that a lot of her work wasn't actually her own work, is kind of disappointing and make me sad :(

Anyway thank you for telling us about this :)

[nicefinalbeam]

I'm sorry you're disappointed. I know it's a real bummer :(

What I wanted to point out to everyone is that it is hurtful to plagiarize, to the point where people are still asking about where this person went over a year later, and many good stories have been deleted because they weren't really Arashi stories in the first place.

But hopefully now that we've talked about it, people will learn from mistakes and we won't have to face this kind of problem in the future! ♥

[dekkawai]

Yeah, I know that feeling. Except feeling betrayed, it make us feel unsatisfied. There are a lot of unfinished work. I mean, if they never made the 'fake' fic, we will never read the story, and we won't be curious about it. But since they steal the fic, make us read it but it never finish it (usually because someone point out that they are stealing someone's work and then they disappear), we will never know what happen with those stories. And because we don't even know from where they stole the stories, we can't even find the original work.

Hhh.. yeah, I hope it won't happen again >< .

[astrangerenters]

THANK YOU!!

I've had work of my own plagiarized, so I'm really happy that you're speaking out about this.

Fanfic writing may be just a hobby, but it's still time we're freely giving and investing as writers.

[nicefinalbeam]

You bet! We've had this conversation on more than one occasion. I had finally decided it was the time to make things clear. :)

[hanarashi]

Although I haven't posted my own fics in this community (I'm still doubtful with my writing skills) ,I'm so glad that you posted something like this

[nicefinalbeam]

It's so important to make sure people know that it's not tolerated here, and it's not moral behavior. While I do understand that sometimes it can feel like there's a great pressure overhead with writer's block, or in some cases people struggle with English but they want to share in a fandom that writes predominantly in English - those things aren't good enough reasons to make stealing works okay. In fact, in those cases I'd rather remind the community that fanfiction comes in a lot of forms, and you don't have to be perfect to find joy in it - and we should be encouraging of people who do write their own fics and take the time to share

[hanarashi]

I like how you explained the parallelism between us humans.. *giggles

[arasukishi]

Hello~ Thank you for posting about this incident here. I'd heard about if from a friend in RL, but I never really understood what happened. I used to read some of their work, and it always seemed to me that their style was consistent, even engaging. Does it mean then that they took stories from other writers, and rehashed them in their own words, added more flair, etc? I'm trying to make sense of how their work seemed consistent to me when I was still reading them~

[nicefinalbeam]

There could be many reasons why it seemed that way to you at the time. Maybe they only picked stories with a certain tone to them, so even though they were written by different people, they had a similar feeling. Maybe they were careful about changing words here and there to give the same vibe. Whatever the case, it was proven that at least some of her stories were stolen.

One of our own arashirabu members had a fic stolen by this person and posted to another fandom. Arashi wasn't the only fandom affected by this person in this instance.

But really this post is to address the issue as a whole. I don't want people fooled anymore, because it's really sad when the truth comes out and the stories disappear!

[arasukishi]

I follow them on Twitter, and they seem like a very nice person. I'm rather sad this happened. But thank you very much for taking the time to post this and to answer my question! I hope this prompts us to be more honest somehow.

shocked

[hatori_sachiyo]

wow, talk about attention seeker..