Recently, I read a book that I really enjoyed and planned to review. It was a romantasy, that I thought had wonderful world-building and a great plot. Normally, I don’t read other people’s reviews of a book until after I’ve both finished the book and reviewed it myself, if it’s a book I’m going to review. But in this case, I went to add the book to my Goodreads and noticed it had shockingly few stars and a ton of negative reviews for a book of this quality. So I investigated.
Turns out this book, according to a great many reviews, was a scene-for-scene copy of a popular anime.
I won’t be naming this book or its author because it’s not my job to police these things and potentially help ruin someone’s career. I also have not studied the anime in question, so this is all hearsay. Being an author is hard. I am not here to make it harder. It’s why I don’t review books I don’t like.
Tearing this author to shreds is not my purpose here, but it raised an interesting conversation in my mind. So many romance novels, in particular, play on existing tropes. I’ll read hundreds if not thousands of enemies-to-lovers plots before I die. Lots of other romance novels are retellings of classic stories, whether it’s Arthurian legends or Disney movies. I love this and will devour these retellings with joy.
Many of the most popular books in the romantasy space are inspired by other books that came before them. A Court of Thorns and Roses particularly seems to have inspired a great many similar books. That series itself takes from ancient Greek and Celtic myths liberally, which is part of why I love it so much.
So where do we draw the line as a community? Where does inspiration become plagiarism? In truly egregious cases, with books that become popular and make a lot of money, or are published with a major publisher, this is likely a question for some kind of copyright court.
But at a time when self-publishing is more prominent than ever before in the modern era, smaller books might be able to get away with blurring the line into plagiarism without the involvement of legalities, leaving it largely up to the readers to decide in these cases.
It’s a matter of pieces. If an author takes a Disney story but gender-bends the characters, and writes them in whole new places doing entirely different things, then that’s their own story. If an author takes a familiar trope and builds an entire new universe around it, then that’s an entirely different thing they’ve built. If an author has a new vision for a story we’ve all read time and time again, with a new journey and new characters, that’s perfectly fine. We all love it when the human girl who doesn’t know her own power falls for the hundreds-of-years old Fae villain. As long as the world is a little different, the characters have their own spin, and the rest of the plot isn’t a scene-for-scene remake, it’s just giving the people what they want.
But if an author rewrites a plot, scene-for-scene, with characters that have similar traits, even if the names and details are changed, this feels like crossing a line. It’s not taking inspiration, it’s using the legwork another writer has done and switching up details. It’s profiting off of another’s work in a way that feels icky at best.
There are a lot of grey areas in this conversation. There is nuance. I am not the end-all-be-all decider of what is and isn’t plagiarism. But I did not finish the rest of that series, despite how much I enjoyed the first one. An author’s work is valuable. Writers, regardless of medium, pour their entire selves into their work. Copying that, scene-for-scene, without credit, is an insult to whoever did the original work, and everyone who spends hours staring at a laptop screen, desperately trying to figure out what their characters should do next.
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