on being plagiarised

[hwarium]

I 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.

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_{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.}

Comments

[infrequencies]

Thank you for writing this and putting into words what I couldn't.

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.

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.

Beautifully said. Thank you, friend!

[hwarium]

hello friend and thank you for dropping by two months ago (time is cruelly fast as an adult)

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.