on penelope in specific

I'm splitting this between my diary and LJ, since some of it isn't relevant to one at all. Recs, other things are there, where I am bouncing happily over the story Isilya posted last night for the Two Paths series. I split my personality as thoroughly as my online and RL.

And this isn't metaing, it's personalizing. And run along if you're tired of the subject. God knows, I am, and I wouldn't read it if I hadn't written it.



Hmm. This is difficult. I'm used to reading about people I don't know and have no emotional investment in whatsoever, or people who are in my time zone or close to it, so everything happens, well, very FAST. The delay between the first query on the status of the story and Penelope waking up halfway across the world to find out her story has been called into question over its model--that gave the approximation of several independent LJ entries, God alone knows how many comments, a fandom wank commentary, and probably dozens of emails and about eight hours or so, though the LJ times confuse me, so it could have been slightly less or much more.

Objectively, I see the reason for this entire thing. It was an uncomfortable similiarity and those who read the story and the poem in question obvously were uncomfortable enough to want clarification, and Corinna obviously did the logical thing and brought it to attention.

Subjectively, I like Penelope. I was just getting to know her. She's funny and fun to talk to and I liked her SV fic and was looking forward to what she'd bring to the fandom. She's really close to Isilya and other people I admire and respect immensely. And I hate that we lost her before we even got a chance to get to know her. And I'm not sure we even lost her over the fact that the story was called into question, because critique in fandom is normal enough--very recently someone publicly questioned the origin of one of my manips. *shrugs*

It shouldn't have turned into a debate between HP and SV fen on the relative merit of plagarism, because it was ABOUT Penelope and THIS particular story in specific, not about the generalized state of plagarism and fiction in HP and SV fandom and whether or not it's accepted there and not here.

I wish the entire thing hadn't become a meta point of debate on plagarism, but that it had stuck to the base that corinna_5 set up, which was an honest and reasonable query on whether Penelope just forgot to toss a disclaimer in while posting, considering a similarity between poem and story. Instead, within twenty or less comments--and look at my shock--the entire discussion shifted to Cassie Claire in HP and whether HP had a history of plagarism and blah blah interfandomcakes. I don't care about the HP history all that much. I really don't care about the SV history all that much, since I was here for most of it.

I REALLY wish Penelope wasn't in a different time zone, so she could have caught her mistake immediately and corrected it before the discussion became what it became.

SV the fandom isn't snobby and out to kick any new authors who wander in among us. HP the fandom isn't chock full of plagarizers all looking for a story to copy. And the generalizations are just--frustrating. And while I don't agree that Penelope should have left fandom behind--I'm hoping that it's just shock and olympia_m and isilya and anatsuno and the others will talk her back in after she's calmed down--I can see why she would react like this.