on being plagiarised
Saturday, 30 August 2025 01:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwariumI had two of my fics plagiarised last year, which I found out through a kind reader who DM’d me. Reading the stories, it was clear that they had re-written my fic scene for scene. In the comments, I can see them claim credit for the idea and the story. I submitted the report to ao3 in November 2024 with this gdoc side-by-side, and ao3 got back to me this month saying that there was nothing they can do because text was not copied. It appears that the current AO3 policy allows fanfiction to be re-written and paraphrased, and that counts as “transformative” (try repeating this to any university marker).
...
Since AO3 wouldn't take the fics down, I wanted to comment on the plagirised fics and ask for my work to credited.
Only to realise I have been blocked.
...
A moment of silence please while we all think up nasty adjectives. Thank you, I’m obliged by your sympathy, thank you deeply.
If you’re reading this, it’s very likely that you’re also a writer and a creator. I’m very lucky to be friends with many of you, and I know you can imagine how I am feeling. I'm not going to air that laundry, but I want to talk about my philosophy on the integrity of the process. This is not my public stance on plagiarism or AI, or any kind of moral, political, or value judgment what what people can or can't, should or should not do. This is a personal reflection on how I want to live this life.
I noticed that one of the plagiarised fics was marked as incomplete. It's because my original fic was marked as the first of a series and I just never wrote more of it. I had the thought, if I ever continued this story, will they immediately plagiarise it too?
It scared me. But as with most heavy emotions, I thought it through. I thought about the logical extremes. I thought about my reaction, because my reaction is what matters, because that is how I will live this life.
I ran this thought experiment:
If every work that I write from now on, will be immediately stolen and claimed by someone else as theirs, will I continue writing?
And my answer is, I must.
It's terrifying, to know you have been exploited for cheap clout, to know that it may happen again, and with the rise of AI in every-day hands, to know it may happen more often.
But I don't want to stop writing because of a possible negative outcome, no matter how likely it may be. I don't write for the comments or the kudos, no matter how much dopamine that exposure creates.
I write because of the process. That process where I go through my own memories of this life, my unique feelings on a particular story I read, my reaction to a piece of news that touched or broke me. It’s the journey of reflection where I wring myself dry while being both the straining muscle and the wet towel. I alone know the five discarded sentences that lived before the one that survived on the page. The parallel worlds that the characters walked and the infinite forks in their forest is something only I can see.
The act of writing is an act of meditation with the soul. I alone, will reap the true value of the story, because I have sat down with my mind and my memories and worked for it. I have the power to turn a series of facts into a story, and then transform that story, into a narrative. A person who steals a story does not understand how or why it works. In the plagiarised work, that user paraphrases sentences and swaps words for their synonyms, but in doing so destroys the rhythm of the phrase that was designed to ebb with the emotions of the characters. One word swapped for another loses the precious intangible connotations that aligned with the atmosphere of a moment, chosen for a sound that must be whispered rather than talked.
On the level of the narrative, I wonder if they understood how each character embodied the faces of predestination and free will. How their choices and dialogue piece together a portrait of contrasts, of cause-and-effort, of callbacks to motifs and theses. When they rewrote each interaction, did they think about how it served the theme?
Understanding how a sentence becomes a brick in the cornerstone in the house of a story, is a skill that requires a lifetime to learn. And then learning to build that house is an entirely different mountain a writer can only learn by climbing. To write is to climb up that mountain.
Someone who steals a story, a piece of art, or even just a turn of phrase, will never improve as a thinker, and will only cripple themselves because they are unwilling to even try. Eventually, they cannot think at all.
In ten years we will both read the same words, but the story in my mind will be far richer than anything they can imagine because they have not learnt to think. Not just for the plagiarised story, but for any story. When I discuss a common novel between friends, we each have different opinions because of our different lives and reading diets. A story is never quite the words on the page, each reader brings their soul to meet the author halfway, and the union births a new story, existing only in the mind of the reader. Learning to think as a writer has transformed the way I read, and this is but one reason I must keep writing.
But even if my story was stolen and improved. Even if the stories I want to write have already been written and nothing that I can even try to do will ever be original.
And even if there was a parallel world where a better version of myself exists, a healthier hwa, a better (and faster) writer, a wider reader, a kinder daughter, more successful in all the ways of the world and of the heart, even if that hwa exists, will I continue writing?
Should I continue living?
And my answer is, I must.
Because it's not about the outcome. For me, it's about living a good life that I look back and think, I made the most of it. To look at my hands and experience the pride that comes with knowing the hours and days that I have worked.
It’s not just about putting a story out into the world to be read. If I had a clone who could clean my house and reply my emails and listen to my mum yap for 2 hours every Sunday, I would not use the clone. Why watch a volleyball match, instead of googling the score? Why climb Kilimanjaro, if you can find a picture of the summit? Why read when one can ask ChatGPT to summarise 100 books?
A person who relies on the effort of others to simplify their life, does not end up living at all.
This is my personal philosophy. When I revere the process, my soul is nourished and my experience of the world deepens. Even if there a shortcut that will take me to the same outcome, cherishing the slow route can grow me in a way I might not fully apprehend for decades. This is not just about writing, or the modern anxieties around AI, late-stage capitalism and the dopamine apocalypse. For me, it extends to small choices about cooking a meal or buying a hard copy of a book that I’ve already read electronically. I reflect on my own choices when I observe friends hiring house cleaners, ask ChatGPT to write a birthday message or scroll Tik Tok while walking between destinations. The easiest way to reach a destination is to catch a taxi, but if I use public transport, I can enjoy the architecture of the new station, notice the new bakery at the entrance, and learn about the new exhibition at the art gallery. If I cycle, I’ll see the seasons change in the colour of the trees, and maybe I’ll stop at a cafe on a whim and chat to another customer about her perfume.
Life is hard and sometimes we must all make choices for convenience, but I want to be aware of what I am losing by choosing the easy path. Sometimes life is thankless and grim and your hard work gets exploited, but even in times like this I reflect about the choices I’ve made, the memories of a quiet evening, writing at 4am in Berlin in the winter of 2020, and I can feel tenderly proud of that past labour, which no one can ever take away from me.
Note 1: thank you to jess who reached out after ao3's determination and to all moots voiced their support. This started in jess' DMs about my philosophy about the integrity of the process, and got migrated to the notes app.
Note 2: I didn't lock my fics after ao3 got scraped in April 2025 to train generative AI. There's a potluck of reasons, partly because I've already had my work plagirised in 2024 and had the chance to reflect philosophically on why I write. I also read a lot of sci fi and I've reflected on ideas of this kind after reading Peter F Hamilton's A Second Chance at Eden — perhaps to be scraped is a form of immortality, there's a romantic victory in minutely influencing the order of words in the distant future, to be another data point in favour of the em dash. Again, personal philosophy is separate to my opinion about the morality of AI, and I've always been a little nihilistic. I live knowing that I can lose everything I have and I am prepared to be forgotten. I've thought about a post-human world, the heat death of the universe, and I know that the meaning of my life is mine to decide. If the future is an inevitable wave, I am choosing how I want to swim even if I drown.
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Date: 29 August 2025 06:05 pm (UTC)anyway, you've given me so much to chew on here! thank you for baring your thoughts a bit here, i always love what you share about how you process things (especially in the realm of art and writing). and i hate that you've been plagiarized at all but i love that you used it as a springboard for this wonderful self-affirming thesis on putting in the work.
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Date: 30 August 2025 02:26 pm (UTC)why suffer! indeed, a word I was thinking throughout drafting but swerved away from planting because I felt a personal guilt towards the glorification of martyrdom (but clearly I am amongst peers). I believe there's a certain dignity there, to write 100 words in half an hour, to be bleary-eyed and empty-brained, waiting for the words to come. I also think that process builds patience because we are trusting that our unconscious needs time, and builds humility, because we accept that what we write may not very good (but yet we persist).
I would love to read your post about your experience with medication, you say the the world may not need it, but I love reading the thoughts of friends over the thoughts of the world! As I said, maybe the exact same post already exists out there (or even in a parallel universe by a parallel twig), but the journey of sitting through your unformed thoughts and shaping them into a narrative is precious all the same. Who knows who will reap ;) maybe a twig in 10 years will reflect on it as a snapshot in a process of growth
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Date: 1 September 2025 01:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 6 September 2025 02:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 7 September 2025 08:44 am (UTC)Something that brought me back to center after discovery and subsequent spiraling (a lot, a lot, a lot of spiraling) was that I had tried. I had put myself, my words, my feelings out there onto the page. But there are parts kept close that will never be seen by anyone else but me, and are understood by people who are in community with me in one way or another.
I think that I've talked to so many people this year about the value of effort, and how instances like this reveal that people live lonelier lives than we can imagine. Not to make excuses (because God knows I've had my 'can I be mean and nasty about this' moments privately!) but to say that talking myself down from the ledge required me to ask myself what about the process I love the most, and it is always that fic is a conversation. Writing is a conversation.
Beautifully said. Thank you, friend!
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Date: 28 October 2025 01:57 am (UTC)I wanted to talk to your comment about people living lonely lives and the idea that writing is a conversation, because I've thought about it since you've left this comment, and I've been thinking about it recently in light of the enshittification of the social media behemoths and the replacement of socialisation by consumption.
What I love most about being online is the sense of community with fellow creators (not just fic/art, but also meta, headcanons, graphics, playlists, comments, anything with an output -- gosh even just playing a game yourself instead of watching someone else play it). But community is something that must be created. I think the majority of those within that community have to be creators because that is how community is built, through dialogue with each other rather than at each other, and the latter is unfortunately how the current SNS shepherds us to behave.
Creators receive works differently to (pure) consumers because they understand the value of effort that goes into the work. As you said, we put ourselves on the page, and this gives us skin in the game and blood in the water. We react differently because we see the people behind the work and understand personal process to transform something from canon into a new work.
The problem arises when the world becomes consumers, and everything becomes a product rather than a conversation. I think SNS shafts people into becoming content creators and consumers, rather than equal participants in a community. I'm still thinking about how I can create that community now.
Side note haha, I hope you don't mind if I reminisce, I know you're only a few years older than me and were probably on the internet in the 2000s too. Maybe it's the privilege of being a teenager, or maybe it /is/ the magic of pre-commodification internet, but I feel like I'm always seeking that joy of community that peaked between 2008 - 2012 where it felt like everyone was creating and all the circles were small and niche but also nurturing and excitable.
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Date: 8 September 2025 05:30 pm (UTC)It’s the journey of reflection where I wring myself dry while being both the straining muscle and the wet towel. this sentence is so pretty and profound. It’s proof that we reap what we sow. A plagiarizer will never be able to conceptualize writing this way, let alone see this image in their mind or bring it to life as succinctly as you have.
A person who relies on the effort of others to simplify their life, does not end up living at all. ♡ ah this made me tear up. I have been wrestling with this sentiment so much recently, trying to express it from the bottom of my heart. I've had discussions that bordered on arguments with friends and family about it (mostly re: chatgpt, overconsumption, doomscrolling, building community, walking or taking public transport > driving, divesting or boycotting, the list goes on). I've brainstormed how to instill this philosophy in my students, who use AI as a crutch, who so often look at the world and think, why bother? why bother working hard when I will not be rewarded? why not save my energy for something I can monetize? and it's hard to tell them they're wrong. their country, my country, is especially broken. you reminded me here that the work is not only meaningful but essential. vital. they will be rewarded. the work is worth it. please excuse my language but it's such a fucking relief to hear you say this. it gives me a lot of hope.
there’s a lot more here that I see, and am turning over in my head and in my heart. your brain ♡ thank you for sharing this, friend!!
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Date: 28 October 2025 06:59 am (UTC)HAHA thank you for your condolences and kind words. I could guess at how you felt at my situation knowing you hold the trinity of writer + academic + teacher and therefore feel the same ire in 3 different directions all at once. I'm glad my words give you hope, and I'm glad you're in this boat with me comrade!
The topics you mentioned are all ones I've either (1) discussed with friends and family or (2) considered deeply myself hearing a company communication or news headline. When distilled, I think it comes down to examining what people value, and pushing people up against that uncomfortable wall where they don't consciously think a certain way, but their actions reveals they value destination over journey, results over process. Which sounds fine when phrased academically, but in truth it's things like - they don't care about their personal education and they are only at university for the paper (to get a job, why do they want a job? for money? why do they want money? for status? Why do they want status --) and when you interrogate it, the only reason they are alive is to feel better than other people. Which is just awful. How do you have that conversation without raising defences??!! Like when sure, you get kudos and views, but you don't get the conversation with the one person who connected with your story (and therefore your soul), on that impossibly personal level. How do you defend the value of that intangible joy against someone who has only known the dopamine of likes?
Maybe we are both too similar, because I think anyone who prioritises roads over public infrastructure is selfish, and overconsumption is the death of the soul. Everything now is bread and circuses and everyone who doomscrolls forgets that shortform media cannibalises the very ability to think.
Our work is meaningful, and that ability to create a story, to sit uncomfortably for one hour without progress, to write persistently despite all cells declaring your own incompetence, and to conquer all that and create a finished work? That feeling is priceless, and the fruit of that struggle is something that cannot be seen, yet compounds exponentially throughout our human life. I can already see the difference with some friends, who, as soon as they have to wait for a traffic light, has to open their phone, and who, when you talk to them in a conversation, cannot remember the last sentence that was said. It's horrifying, but it's also a reminder that attention is linked to cognitive ability is linked to your human experience of the world, and everything being commodified right now (ChatGPT, shorts and reels, clickbait articles) is designed to destroy the quality of our life.
And I haven't even started on the economy and wealth inequality because the rising cost of living means that some people are pushed into these conveniences in order to survive and they have no choice but to live a life that is entirely commodified and has no spiritual value.
Apologies for the spiral, it is good to see you around online, and just know that I'm very grateful for your empathy on this matter <3
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Date: 1 January 2026 12:28 am (UTC)creating is so HARD, and for me it's full of so many ugly feelings all the time: self hatred, jealousy, despair, frustration, such that i frequently feel like i'm battling my own brain just to get to the first step of putting pen to paper. but also, those ugly feelings are how i know i have to keep creating, because they remind me of how much i care about what i want to make, how much it matters to me that i try and perhaps get incrementally closer to the image or story i have in my head, even if i fail completely, even if the final product has an audience of only myself. towards the end of last year i read a lot of manga about being an artist (blue period, still sick, look back) and was reminded that we create because it brings us closer to other people, so we can leave traces in this world when we're gone, so we can distill a piece of our interiority to hold up to the light... you've articulated this so well already but like damn! the person who plagiarized you will never be able to experience how special and rewarding it is when someone knows and understands the creative choices you made, the tools of the trade you selected for precise effect.
i also am thinking extra about your observations because i have to teach undergraduate writing in the new year, and am struggling with how to impart this process-based philosophy to younger students/convince them of the importance of doing it the hard or roundabout way, even when the benefits are not immediately obvious. i loved this essay i read earlier this year, by jonathan malesic, which like you observed that the matter of thinking and writing is fundamentally about our mortality: