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

[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.