So, a few weeks ago there was this kerfuffle on Twitter that started when a particular YouTube personality stated that Disney’s latest animated feature was basically a ripoff of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Now, I’m not touching that clusterfuck with a 10-foot pole, but it has caused something to percolate in the back of my brain.

I think people are too quick to call things ripoffs of other things.

Now don’t get me wrong: the term isn’t completely useless. We all know 50 Shades of Grey is Twilight AU fanfiction with the names changed, and there are entire studios dedicated to making “mockbusters.” There are plenty of works that are borderline plagiarism.

The problem comes when people start calling things ripoffs because they have surface-level similarities to other works. That’s not great, because all works of fiction owe something to the works that came before. The Lord of the Rings has influenced basically all Western fantasy that came after, and wouldn’t exist itself if it weren’t for previous works, myths, and folk tales.

For another example, let’s look at another two works that often get this treatment: Suzanne Collin’s The Hunger Games and Koshun Takami’s Battle Royale. Both novels have the same basic premise: a group of kids get thrown into a situation where they have to kill each other until there’s only one left. The two books, however, are still very different. Battle Royale is about how the characters react to their situation, while The Hunger Games is more interested in setting up the kind of society that would force kids to kill each other. Collins’s novels also have a very limited first-person perspective, while Takumi’s is third-person and, while it focuses on two characters, still shows the perspectives of others.

I guess I’m saying that just because you recognize similar tropes in stories, it doesn’t make them a ripoff of an earlier work that uses those same tropes. It’s highly unlikely that the older work didn’t even originate the tropes in question.

Hell, The Lord of the Rings is basically the hero’s journey, and Tolkein certainly didn’t invent that.

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