Fanfic Poser

[bigsciencybrain]

A fanfic called Out of the Black was posted at Fanfiction.net in November 2006. It contains the following dialoge:

“Peas in a pod we are, come out pea. Serenity swallowed me up now she’s hungry for more. Take you in and make you free." Spoken by River Tam to Riddick.

My little fanfic called Some Kind of Crazy was posted at Fanfiction.net in

Comments

[spiralleds]

How odd. Not only the similarity of the lines, but that they are between River and Riddick. I mean, how many Serenity/Riddick cross over writers can there possibly be?

It strikes me as quite likely that someone who was inspired to write Serenity/Riddick would likely read the few Serenity/Riddick crossovers out there. It is right on the edge of random chance and plagiarism. It's probably subconscious, which doesn't mean it can't be plagiarism, even if unintentional. For what it is worth, it would be unusual for someone to intentionally lift and massage such a small section, but write the rest herself.

And more power to you if you continue to read it. The tense changes and missing capitalization kept me from going to page two.

[bigsciencybrain]

Being so very familiar with my own fic, I found more similarities than just that one passage. But I'm of the mind that it's a "brainshare/inspiration" issue. And since there a whole three(?) Firefly/Riddick crossovers and this post deals with two of them (the other is a one-shot by kurukami), I'm pretty sure there's at least some correlation.

[spiralleds]

Well, given that she's a new (and likely young) writer, it might work to contact her in a friendly way to see if she's read your fic (very likely) and ask if she might have been subconsciously influenced by it, etc. She may have no idea about the gray space she's in.

And particularly if there is a growing number of too similar for chance pieces, and she's not responsive to your inquiries, you are more than welcome to report it to "us" at "stop_plagiarism". I can't guarantee what the result would be, but we'd be willing to review it.

[bigsciencybrain]

I'll probably take the wait and see approach. The latest chapter bears no resemblance to mine at all so I'm hopeful that she just needed a springboard to get her started. :) My first fanfic used gratuitous amounts of dialogue from the show itself while I grappled to get a handle on character voices. Of course, that fic needs to disappear for more salient reasons anyway (i.e. it sucks).