#i think a lot of really strident NO COPYING YOU NEED MY CREDIT type culture comes from naked insecurity

[armoricaroyalty]

hi! i've been a lurker on your story for quite some time now and i really love how you have "a note on sources" and include a little logo banner at the bottom of your news posts- would it be okay if i did the same? obviously, i'd make up my own news companies/magazine names, but there's bound to be some overlap*, so i just wanted to check with you before i post something that might be considered copying/borrowing. if you'd like me to refrain from doing so, that's totally fine! have a great day 😊

*("objective public news," "supermarket tabloid," and "inane, highly-critical conservative blog" seem to be the main royal news sources both IRL and on tumblr blogs, haha)

Of course!

I have different, established sources because I made the same observation you did about where royal news comes from -- it's a weird mix of celebrity culture, actual news reporting, and nationalistic culture war stuff, which was fascinating to me. You don't need my permission to draw inspiration from the same IRL sources as me!

I'm responding to this publicly to say that I don't really care if people borrow/copy themes and broad ideas from my story. I consider anything short of word-for-word copying and blatantly recreating very specific things I made to be 100% free game and fair use. Artistic communities thrive when people feel free to enjoy and be inspired by one another's work.

I hope you don't mind me soap-boxing a little, but I think simblr has overcorrected a little in this regard. Obviously, we want to make sure that the work we produce is our own, and obviously, it's nice to give credit to people you're directly inspired by, but it's not necessary. Nobody had to ask Suzanne Collins' permission to write teen dystopias after The Hunger Games was published, and I don't think anybody needs my permission to write a royal story that involves interplay between different sources of information.

Genres and mediums only move forward when creative communities begin borrowing and iterating on one another's ideas. Individual people holding back out of fear that 'established' people in a genre space will be possessive over broad ideas holds everyone back.

Maybe you take an idea I introduced, you iterate on it, make changes that are interesting and fresh and different to anything I would have done, and then I read your story, incorporate a few of your ideas into mine, and then a third person who reads both our stories is inspired to do something similar and writes a new story that iterates on both our ideas, inspiring yet another round of cheerful copying and borrowing....that's how creative communities are meant to work!

tl;dr Nobody needs my permission to iterate on my ideas. Copying and plagiarism are reproducing someone's specific work or their specific style without credit or permission. Using someone else's ideas to make something new and original does not require credit or permission.