can a book be truly original?
Feb. 19th, 2010 05:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thelakeToday's question is: can a book be truly, 100% original?
I was reading The Hunger Games (HG) yesterday and my brother came up to me, asked me what it was about and immediately after I told him the premise he said it was "a total rip off" from Battle Royale (BR) which is a thriller book written by Koushun Takami in 1999. It even has a movie.
When it comes to comparing book plots to their earlier "friends" I've been in both of the groups and I almost always stand corrected. Take Twilight. The fandom and blind love for the books and characters put me off most of the times, but I can't deny the fact that I couldn't stop reading the books and immensely enjoyed every page. I used to be a hater. I told each and every person I know that it was done in Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Buffy and Angel, starcrossed human/vampire couple bla. bla. bla. But come the fucking on, myself, you can't just judge a book by its cover. Literally.
So one day I sat down, I managed to obtain the first book of Twilight saga and I enjoyed so much that I hated myself for it. I'm a writer, too, I write so many stuff that is similiar to all kinds of different, very well known works and I was completely wrong about Twilight.
Same thing happened with BR and HG today as well. I found Battle Royale and opened up the book and after a couple of pages I realized how those people who blindly called HG "a cheap rip off" were wrong.
It started from that moment and after reading countless reviews for HG where people were insisting on that BR was a lot better than this "rip off", I lost it! I wanted to find a single person who read both of the books and made a comparison; I somewhat found someone who says the main idea of "teenagers killing one another to survive" is same in both books, but HG is a lot richer in terms of background whereas BR is more adult focused and bloody.
You can imagine the rest. It's a blood bath right from the beginning. I'm not going to go into details but it's 100% gore. Maybe I'm too lazy, but it was so hard to read with almost 50 people in a single room so I "skipped-read" most of the first chapter trying to understand the reason behind The Program, to justify the killing at some point. Of course there's no way of justifying teenagers being forced to kill one another to survive, but I tried to find another way, a better, convincing reason that simply "discipline the next generations".
So the premise is clear, like porn without plot, this is gore without justification in any form. Don't get me wrong, I like reading violence (not in a sadistic way), but after feeling so strongly about a few characters in The Hunger Games it was completely impossible for me to feel the same attachment to 42 Japanese students with names I can't even properly pronounce at first let alone keep their relationships in mind for the future. It was almost like "Yeah yeah there are a bunch of kids, let's get to the killing part." It's perfectly okay if this is what you're going for, but what I'm trying to understand is HOW THE HELL IS HG A RIP OF THIS BOOK!? Yeah sure teenagers killing each other for some govermental reason, but please, guys, give me a break. If it comes down to this, then we have to judge every superhero story the same way! Batman has a cape, so does Superman, OMG ONE OF THEM IS A RIP OFF FROM THE OTHER! HOW! WHY--OH GOD THE WORLD IS ENDING.
Please.
I bet BR also gets extremely interesting once you get used to the crowded way of storytelling (which I've done once or twice in my own novels, but not with 42 people), but comparing these books and telling HG's story is completely ripped off from BR is childish. HG has a more humanitarian approach to the killing and has a solid history, takes places in the future and the only similiar thing is teenagers killing teenagers in order to survive. Survive for what? Killing why? Killing where? Who are those people? Can you just assume the earlier is the original by the simplest sentence that summarizes the whole thing?
I don't know what I would do if people would say the same thing about my work. I've written about space invaders, vampires, gods, time travel, etc. and there was always something similiar to Star Wars, Twilight or Back to the Future and I never tried to hide it, but I can't stand when people so blindly rant about similarities and always favor the earlier one because it is "the original". There's no such thing.
A few months ago I sent a picture with Star Wars's general plot points striked over and names and places were replaced with the ones in Harry Potter's. It's so easy to say something was ripped off from another thing if you squeeze the big picture into the smallest frame and consider the general points. Please don't do that, be open minded and look for differences in books instead of trashing it for its similiarties to an earlier work.
I have to go home now, I don't know where this sudden rant came from, but I had to write it down :))
I was reading The Hunger Games (HG) yesterday and my brother came up to me, asked me what it was about and immediately after I told him the premise he said it was "a total rip off" from Battle Royale (BR) which is a thriller book written by Koushun Takami in 1999. It even has a movie.
When it comes to comparing book plots to their earlier "friends" I've been in both of the groups and I almost always stand corrected. Take Twilight. The fandom and blind love for the books and characters put me off most of the times, but I can't deny the fact that I couldn't stop reading the books and immensely enjoyed every page. I used to be a hater. I told each and every person I know that it was done in Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Buffy and Angel, starcrossed human/vampire couple bla. bla. bla. But come the fucking on, myself, you can't just judge a book by its cover. Literally.
So one day I sat down, I managed to obtain the first book of Twilight saga and I enjoyed so much that I hated myself for it. I'm a writer, too, I write so many stuff that is similiar to all kinds of different, very well known works and I was completely wrong about Twilight.
Same thing happened with BR and HG today as well. I found Battle Royale and opened up the book and after a couple of pages I realized how those people who blindly called HG "a cheap rip off" were wrong.
It started from that moment and after reading countless reviews for HG where people were insisting on that BR was a lot better than this "rip off", I lost it! I wanted to find a single person who read both of the books and made a comparison; I somewhat found someone who says the main idea of "teenagers killing one another to survive" is same in both books, but HG is a lot richer in terms of background whereas BR is more adult focused and bloody.
Battle Royale takes place in an alternate timeline—Japan is a national socialist state, known as the Republic of Greater East Asia. Under the guise of a "study trip," a group of students from Shiroiwa Junior High School in the fictional town of Shiroiwa are sleep-gassed on a bus. They awaken in the Okishima Island School on Okishima, an isolated, evacuated island southwest of Shodoshima, also in Kagawa Prefecture. They learn that they have been placed in an event called The Program. The Program is a means of terrorizing the population, of creating such paranoia as to make organized insurgency impossible. In the manga, the economy had collapsed and the government created The Program to revitalize the economy. According to the rules, every year since 1947, fifty 3rd year junior high school (14-15 years old) classes are isolated, and each class is required to fight to the death until one student remains.
You can imagine the rest. It's a blood bath right from the beginning. I'm not going to go into details but it's 100% gore. Maybe I'm too lazy, but it was so hard to read with almost 50 people in a single room so I "skipped-read" most of the first chapter trying to understand the reason behind The Program, to justify the killing at some point. Of course there's no way of justifying teenagers being forced to kill one another to survive, but I tried to find another way, a better, convincing reason that simply "discipline the next generations".
So the premise is clear, like porn without plot, this is gore without justification in any form. Don't get me wrong, I like reading violence (not in a sadistic way), but after feeling so strongly about a few characters in The Hunger Games it was completely impossible for me to feel the same attachment to 42 Japanese students with names I can't even properly pronounce at first let alone keep their relationships in mind for the future. It was almost like "Yeah yeah there are a bunch of kids, let's get to the killing part." It's perfectly okay if this is what you're going for, but what I'm trying to understand is HOW THE HELL IS HG A RIP OF THIS BOOK!? Yeah sure teenagers killing each other for some govermental reason, but please, guys, give me a break. If it comes down to this, then we have to judge every superhero story the same way! Batman has a cape, so does Superman, OMG ONE OF THEM IS A RIP OFF FROM THE OTHER! HOW! WHY--OH GOD THE WORLD IS ENDING.
Please.
I bet BR also gets extremely interesting once you get used to the crowded way of storytelling (which I've done once or twice in my own novels, but not with 42 people), but comparing these books and telling HG's story is completely ripped off from BR is childish. HG has a more humanitarian approach to the killing and has a solid history, takes places in the future and the only similiar thing is teenagers killing teenagers in order to survive. Survive for what? Killing why? Killing where? Who are those people? Can you just assume the earlier is the original by the simplest sentence that summarizes the whole thing?
I don't know what I would do if people would say the same thing about my work. I've written about space invaders, vampires, gods, time travel, etc. and there was always something similiar to Star Wars, Twilight or Back to the Future and I never tried to hide it, but I can't stand when people so blindly rant about similarities and always favor the earlier one because it is "the original". There's no such thing.
A few months ago I sent a picture with Star Wars's general plot points striked over and names and places were replaced with the ones in Harry Potter's. It's so easy to say something was ripped off from another thing if you squeeze the big picture into the smallest frame and consider the general points. Please don't do that, be open minded and look for differences in books instead of trashing it for its similiarties to an earlier work.
I have to go home now, I don't know where this sudden rant came from, but I had to write it down :))
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-02-19 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-19 05:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-19 04:55 pm (UTC)though, i get you.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-19 05:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-19 05:04 pm (UTC)AND i get you. heh! :)))
no subject
Date: 2010-02-19 05:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-19 07:34 pm (UTC)For example, you know I've been thinking a lot about epic fantasy. It quite often follows the hero plot of Harry Potter and Star Wars: a young man (sometimes it's a young woman, but a man is more common), grows up in obscurity, discovers he has an incredible background he never knew about (quite often involving magic, though in fantasy he's often also or instead heir to a throne) and saves the world. You often have a wise old man, a sarcastic sidekick, a love interest, etc.
Is that a bad thing? I don't think so. Every genre has its tropes. Heck, you can take every story down to its most basic points of rising action, climax, conclusion, etc. These are part of our collective consciousness of how stories are supposed to work. Can you break these patterns? Of course! But (1) that's not what I want to do as a writer and (2) even those have a certain pattern to them.
If you haven't read it, I suggest Story by Robert McKee. It's about screenwriting, but covers the basic elements of storytelling and sort of clarified a lot of my thoughts on writing in general and specifically on these issues.
(BTW, I haven't commented on your Hunger Game entries yet, but I"m lazy, but EEE so glad you read!)
no subject
Date: 2010-02-20 11:55 am (UTC)But did that stop me from reading HG? No, it actually intrigued me because lots of people said HG's awesome. And I had to prove it to myself. And it turned out BR didn't stop me from loving HG either. As far as I'm concerned HG's much better, has way more character depths and so what if it looked like a rip-off? Is it so impossible for two people to have the same idea for a premise despite never knowing each other's works? I read that Suzanne Collins got the idea from watching some news on war and then a teenage competition right afterward and I'm pretty sure she wasn't even familiar with BR. It's just unfair if we condemn her to be a copycat when she simply had the same brilliant idea.
And no book can be 100% original. Maybe years ago, but now? It's all been done before. Just got to work on making an original execution on it.