Like how fifty shades of grey kind of copied twilight, (with a hot billionaire instead of a vampire)or how Percy Jackson shares many similarities with Harry Potter (pls don’t come for me PJO fans). What popular books in your opinion can be considered rip offs, or share very clear roots in an earlier book?
The more I read, the more obvious the inspiration of certain authors becomes to me. For example, I was watching Coraline yesterday, which contains a scene where Coraline throws a cat at the beldam, the cat scratches her eyes out, allowing her to escape. A similar scene occurs in Harry Potter and the chamber of secrets: Harry is fighting the basilisk, the phoenix arrives, rips out its eyes, helping Harry win.
Of course, I am by no means calling Coraline a rip off of Harry Potter, just pointing out that both books share a plot point.
But in some instances, like fifty shades of grey and Twilight, the former appears to be a very blatant rip off. In fairness, I think the author admitted to this. Putting that aside, which popular books have you read that immediately made you think, “oh, this was taken from xyz”?
by Historical_Scene4901
8 Comments
Charlie Bone (Potter).
You’re giving too much credence to your own pattern recognition, eg: throwing a cat at a villain in one book is not actually similar to a magic bird arriving and attacking a completely different monster in another. That’s just two fight scenes.
Secondly, 50SoG is *admittedly* and already known to be twilight fan fiction that was tweaked and then published traditionally. So there’s no “surprise it’s a copy” there. It is admittedly a copy.
Potter itself already contains and has been addressed ad nauseum in academic circles for containing elements of earlier “public school tales” and “student of magic stories”. There’s the earlier The Books of Magic, for one. Look up “influences on Potter” if you want to learn more.
Well, Fifty Shades started as Twilight fanfic, so there’s that…
Both of your examples come back to Harry Potter, but did you know that Rowling claims to have never read the Earthsea series?
Inspiration, direct or indirect, is hardly “ripping off” something, you can plot the development of most popular tales back to oral tradition. But not acknowledging your sources is pure scummy behaviour (yeah JKR).
*The Sword of Shannara* was not very subtle about lifting stuff from LotR. I still enjoyed it, and the rest of the series moved in its own direction.
Most popular Fantasy novels copied Lord of the Rings
Alchemist copies, almost exactly, though definitely elongated a Borges piece of flash fiction. Borges gave credit to arabian nights. Hunger games and battle royale are too close to be coincidental
Well, I’m not saying it was “copied” (because it wasn’t), but the plot of the *Hunger Games* series by Suzanne Colins, is similar to that of a Japanese novel called *Battle Royale*, by Koushun Takami. The latter was published in 1999, almost a decade before the first HG book was out.
In Takami’s book, a group of students are abducted by the government of an alternative, fascist Japan, and left on an isolated island. They are forced to kill each other as part of a secret military program. The whole setting is kind of reminiscent of the arenas and methods described in HG.