Here we go again...

[owl]

After disposing of msscribe, bad_penny now is doing Cassandra Claire and the plagiarism thing. This fandom was founded on teh crazy.

Comments

[owl]

There's the bit starting 'Harry was not handsome', whihc people are claiming was plagiarised from Gone With the Wind, but I think that's reaching, rather.

RJ Anderson is synaesthete7. I'm not sure if she's published anything yet.

Maybe if someone mentions it then a 'by coughingbear disclaimer will magically have been there all along?

Stranger things have happened :-P

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

Several things have got me really wound up about this, one of the principal ones being that pandarus was having an inordinately civilised discussion about intertextuality provoked by the kerfuffle and it got invaded by screaming anonymous lunatics who couldn't bear even for the purposes of argument that pandarus could consider any aspect of the issue other than Plagiarism Is Evil and CC needs to be driven out of fandom and her publishers told all about it(I find the constant statements that people are going to her publishers and the level of gloating about tat really unsavoury, too).

Whereas all pandarus was doing was accepting for the purpose of the argument the "literary game" explanation - at least as regards Buffy and Red Dwarf - I don't think anyone thinks it would wash in the case of Dean - and then saying if that's still considered plagiarism, how is there a moral difference between that and what happens in The Waste Land? Clearly Eliot is a Great Writer and CC isn't, but how does that differ morally?It's a bit like the old chestnut about the bloke asking the girl if she'd sleep with him for a million dollars, which she agrees to: he offers her $20, and when she retorts "What do you think I am?" he comments "We've already established what you are: all we're doing is haggling over the price."

But another of my real peeves is that synaesthete7 has contributed - and allowed to be published in bad-penny - her half of an email correspondence with CC, on the basis that it's OK to reveal emails without the other party to the correspondence's permission if you don't reveal what they said to you, but only what you said. I think publishing a private correspondence really stinks, and it doesn't matter that you think the other party to it has behaved unethically; unless you need to clear your own name or there's a criminal investigation going on that's low behaviour in my book.

[owl]

I think that people were annoyed to start with by the fact that she's using her fandom reputation to promote her own novels, and now that they've had the plagiarism pointed out to them, they've sort of exploded.

I agreed that the Buffy/Blackadder quotations etc are trivial, although you do come across people thinking that she's all that and a bag of crisps on the basis of her witty one-liners, many of which weren't original.

Personally, I think you knock her into a cocked hat both in terms of canon compliance (your characters are English) and writing.

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

I still fail to see why people are being torn to shreds online simply for not caring about it as much as the people doing the tearing the shreds, and having seen just how nasty this fandom gets I'm extremely sorry I ever made the mistake of writing anything in it.

[owl]

People are crazy?

[owl]

Oh, thanks for pointing out pandarus's post. As for shezan's personal stalker brigade—I've come to expect that if one makes f_w, a hoarde of anons will descend on one's journal, but bitching all over one's flist as well is the outside of enough (Can you tell I've been re-reading Heyer this month? Now there's an example of unconsciously plagiarising—and natch and f'rinstance are now an integral part of my vocabulary).

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I think it's probably a case of entrenched David-and-Goliath mentality - they've got it into their heads that no one will listen to this (after all, it's been kicking around since 2001 or so, apparently, though I for one had absolutely no idea there was anything to it beyond the odd, attributed Buffy quote until all of this blew up, never having managed to read through the DT far enough to get to the Zelazny bit) and that CC has hordes of irrational minions, and so all the 'I'll tell your publisher' threats are because they think they need to shout to be heard at all, and anyone who has issues with them gets viewed as the vanguard of an approaching, pro-CC army.

I certainly don't think this perception is true at present; I can't speak for how true it was five years ago, since I wasn't in fandom then.

Not that this gives anyone on either side a free pass to make random personal attacks, and particularly not to do so anonymously. Ugh.

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

nd anyone who has issues with them gets viewed as the vanguard of an approaching, pro-CC army.

It's not even having issues with them; it's not having exactly the approved quantity of horror about the events described that acts as the signal for a pile-on. this exchange here about why the commentator is has severe reservations about the tone of the expose and its ability to convince the unconvinced or wavering (http://titti.livejournal.com/402422.html?thread=3333110#t3333110) would be funny if it weren't so depressing.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

If one side is saying 'it's like arguing with the Moonies' and the other saying 'there are no shades of grey' within the first few exchanges, I don't get the feeling that it's going to lead to any kind of constructive debate, no.

I'm still trying to get my head round whether there's any qualitative difference between 'Hey, Eliot did something very similar, but then Eliot writes better than she does' and 'Hey, Charlotte Lennox did something very similar, but then Charlotte Lennox writes better than she does'.

Actually, I'm still trying to craft some kind of sensible response to your Eliot point in general, rather hampered by the way that my response to The Waste Land when I first encountered it was an indignant 'This isn't a poem, it's a bloody crossword-puzzle'. ;)

I think it's something to do with Eliot writing out of the tail-end of a culture where it was halfway reasonable to assume that one's readers knew who Phlebas was (though that doesn't entirely wash, because a lot of his references are quite defiantly obscure) and CC writing out of an entirely different, very much more fast-moving set of cultural currents, but there's certainly more to it than that.

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

Well, as far as Charlotte Lennox goes I had my own reservations (primarily about the forum in which she chose to publish, and the fact that her identity remains a mystery) but lexin and shezan put up a cogent argument that the social utility of 1) preventing msscribe resuming her activities; and 2) rehabilitating the reputations of those damaged by her activities outweighed the countervailing concerns about rehashing old fandom grudges. But I think with the question of writing "better" most people who have taken that point regarding white_serpent aren't talking about style, per se (though it has suited those attacking their arguments to reduce it to issues of style) but about credibility (or the reverse) as demonstrated by the manner chosen to present the material. Put bluntly, anyone reading either account is dependent upon the presenter of it to have selected accurately from the primary sources, to have reproduced them accurately on the page, not to have selectively edited to give a misleading impression and not, in the commentatory, to have overstated what conclusions can legitimately be drawn from the evidence presented. I think the points being raised by icarusancalion and shezan go to whether the material is presented in a credible or a sensationalist way. It's like the way the Sun uses coded language to guide how the reader is supposed to respond to a story - compare and contrast, for example, the language the Sun uses to describe a female celeb's night of drunken excess to how it dealt with practically the whole of George Best's career.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I hadn't realised that was their point at all, so thank you for the clarification.

I do understand your reservations about Charlotte Lennox's anonymity; I have them myself, but I can quite see why she did it. One of the silliest things about this whole business, for me, is seeing authors and consumers of fanfic berating white_serpent for being a romance novelist.

[owl]

I eventually worked it out, but it took me a couple of events.

I can quite see why she did it.

No, I wouldn't have fancied msscribe's aupporters out in force either.

This is really testing the threading capabilities of my new layout...

[owl]

Thinking about it, I can't really see where else CL could have published, if she wanted to attract any attention whatsoever. At least on bad penny, she forestalled all the 'ZOMG ancient grudgewank!' by...posting it in the ancient grudgewank community.

If whiteserpent had been posting anonymously, at least we would have been spared the 'I was so furious\disgusted\gutted' that was so wearisome to read. Personally I'd have liked a table 'CC wrote' against 'other people wrote'—spot the similarities?

My reaction was along the lines of 'oh, this again. Surely the world and its mother knows that CC plagiarised Pamela Dean?'
Evidently, I was wrong.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I honestly didn't - I thought the fuss was because of the 'cold blooded piece of toast' business. Apparently the Pamela Dean stuff had already been hashed out at f_w_greatesthits, but it's not as if I go hanging around there on a particularly regular basis - I don't think I had any reason to look at journalfen at all before Charlotte.

I was much more interested in the comparisons - though, as I said above, I think some of them were a bit of a reach - than in the dull to and fro of 'Well, you should have warned her before deleting her fic' and so on and so forth. Or, for that matter, in very much of the to and fro that's been going on on LJ since. I keep looking over my shoulder and wondering whether the next time I look at this entry there will be a hundred and twenty responses from people I've never heard of. :p

Apologies for causing your new layout to squish into even tinier columns. I do like it - I think I might redo mine again at some point, as I'm rather missing the sidebar.

[owl]

Oh, don't worry about the layout. Do it good to have some exercise. I'm still not sure about the colours—the blue one is nice too. (This layout's called 3 column, btw, with a few modifications to the sidebar contents).

I was much more interested in the comparisons - though, as I said above, I think some of them were a bit of a reach - than in the dull to and fro of 'Well, you should have warned her before deleting her fic' and so on and so forth.

Yes, me too. Have you seen the latest? (Short version: She plagiarised her plagiarism from heidi8.)

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I swear this fandom could not be more batshit even if it went swimming in stately Wayne Manor's septic tank.