#if seal: originality

[if-seal]

Hi Seal, so a couple days ago I finished up plotting the whole storyline for my IF (horay!), but today as I was looking for some IFs to play I came across a moderately popular one i've played before. I decided to replay it and realized that it has a couple of similarities (roadtrip backdrop, some members of the cast having the same/similar roles/personalities, a plot piece or two, etc) to mine. Now I'm worried that what I've written was me unconsciously taking inspiration from this IF and even more worried of people pointing it out and asking about it, so any and all advice would be appreciated!

Dear Inspired Friend,

This is a fraught question and I understand how worried you feel: it can be really tricky when imagining what people will think, being accused of copying someone else's work and so on, so please accept my sympathy in this situation.

A couple of things are true:

Creative people can draw from similar or the same wells of themes, tropes, settings, and so on, and the results are wildly different and original. There are so very many ways of exploring similar themes or character types.

If a piece of work feels derivative or unimaginative, that can put a real dampener on people's enjoyment, and on the quality of the work in question.

People can be very overzealous in pointing out what they see as derivative elements.

I cannot make any judgement about where your writing is placed on the spectrum of "inspiration" or "copying" but it up to you to decide whether you want to change any aspects of your story. Perhaps there are elements in which you'd like to go in a different direction. Perhaps you will feel that your story has its own identity and you're happy with where it is now.

Either way it's worth examining and figuring out where you're making your own personal creative mark on it. You are at an ideal time to be doing this, because you're at the planning stages.

What I would advise not doing is tangling yourself in theoretical worries about what people might or might not say about your story's relationship with another one. I have seen people say that one game is ripping off another when it was made before it. I have seen people claiming that an overlapping element like, for instance, being set in a castle means that one story is copying another. People will say these kinds of things whatever you're writing. So: be true to yourself, do not sell yourself short in cleaving too close to someone else's work that's inspired you, and get in touch with what you love about what you bring to your work.

Good luck!

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Hi, just a thought that's crossed my mind...

So in the fantastic apocalyptic ponyo au, ratchet is a huge seal, and we all know how seals travel on land... I mean they don't walk they go blob↗↘ blob↗↘ blob↗↘...

So when drift is sitting at the back of ratchet, won't he go bounce↗↘ bounce↗↘ bounce↗↘ as well?

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