#this is something important to me. the game and its music. the composer and plagiarism in the music industry.

[irisu-syndromemes]

plagiarizing an obscure indie game for lazy hip hop and rap

youtube is currently going up in flames over plagiarism found in many people's channels, particularly documentary-ish videos that have commentary from the uploader. this seems to be mostly because of that hbomberguy and his recent video about plagiarism on the website, as well as a specific person who's drowning in controversy lately.

i admit that i don't want to watch the video, because i've watched other videos already, and i've heard about the other channels' plagiarism through the grapevine. plagiarism IS awful, and it's a disgrace to find it's way more commonplace than i thought.

all this made me remember something... a few weeks ago i remembered that i once found a few songs on youtube, and 1 on spotify, that straight up steal music from an old indie horror game that's stayed pretty obscure throughout the years. so i spent the next few days trying to find every youtube upload with stolen music from it, as well as the respective channels, and even uploads on other websites (which i did find; one of them was even "for sale" on a beat-selling website).

it made me angry. it made me sick. to see so many idiotic hip hop "artists" steal someone else's work, sometimes even selling it, because they're hacks who can't be bothered to put in the work for their craft. i accumulated quite a number of tabs of people who did this - WAY too many links to videos and uploaders - and then...

i closed them all. i was furious and it was making me go crazy. my mental health was taking a hit and i knew there was nothing i could do...

the game they're all stealing from is called Irisu Syndrome, and it's a short freeware horror game from japan first released in 2008 that has garnered a bit of a cult following. the music is by MusMus, who is credited as Watson in the game. it's still very obscure, but well-known enough that siivagunner has made a "high quality rip" of one of its tracks. in fact, it even inspired Dan Salvato to make Doki Doki Literature Club partially! suffice to say, i adore this game. it may be short, but it left a lasting impression on me (it's a pretty shocking game! those under 16 and easily-disturbed folks should avoid it), so i've never forgotten about it as the years passed.

the game was made entirely by japanese people... this makes any sort of communication between western fans and the dev or MusMus pretty difficult. for the record, the english patch was supposed to be given an official release, but the dev himself couldn't find a way to contact the english translators, so only spanish and mandarin got official versions.

communication is difficult... i can't just email some japanese person who made this game's music all those years ago, with all these links and all this worry in my heart, and expect a response. i don't want to be intrusive.

...but i also care. maybe i care too much. it's incredibly unfair that some bozos are out there stealing the guy's music and getting comments like "this is fire!!! 🔥🔥🔥🔥" when all they did was add a beat to the tracks. meanwhile the game stays in obscurity. none of them are popular "musicians" but it's sickening all the same. it's stealing. all i want is for the game's music composer to know, so maybe he can report those uploads himself.

for the record i know about sampling, and this isn't it. using the entire track and then not crediting, that's not innocent "sampling". just wanted to make that clear.

i get cold feet easily. i don't know if i can just email him, if he would read it, if i can make my point clear, if anything could actually be done. i don't want to be intrusive. i don't want to be a nuisance.

but all this recent talk of plagiarism, it got me thinking again. it's incredibly unfair, because even if he was okay with it, the plagiarists didn't ask or credit him. i can't just forget about this, so i'm making this post.

i'm making this post haphazardly, in the hopes someone knows what to do. maybe someone knows of a solution, maybe someone could help. maybe even spreading the word, to someone who knows the right thing to do about this. i've thought of making my own youtube video about this issue, but i have no subscribers, and i get cold feet easily. it would get nowhere.

"it's just music from just some game" but it's a game i love anyway. i have all this worry in my heart, and i don't know what to do.

[bobdylanrevisited]

The Times They Are A-Changin’

Released: 13 January 1974

Rating: 10/10

Cards on the table, this is my favourite folk album of all time. ‘The King of Folk’, ‘The Spokesperson of his Generation’, ‘The Protest Singer’. These are all labels Bob hates, however this album confirms that he is all these things and much more. Whilst there a few love songs thrown in, this album is defined by it’s more radical tracks, as Dylan takes society to task. 

1) The Times They Are A-Changin’ - This is another song that is as true today as it was in ‘64. The themes of youthful anger, and much needed change, pour out of this album and can still be applied to the issues we march for today. Like ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, this will go down in history as a cultural turning point in both popular and protest music. Bob has continued to perform this live over the last 57 years, which shows just how timeless the lyrics are, and you should check out the melancholic, ballad version he played for President Obama at the White House in 2010. 

2) Ballad Of Hollis Brown: A devastatingly sad song, which tells the story of a farmer, who is forced to kill his starving family. As well as civil rights, another theme of this album is the treatment of working class families, left behind by the government. It’s a grim but important tale, and the snarled singing really helps the message hit home. 

3) With God On Our Side - This is a satirically political ballad, based on the notion that ‘god’ was behind all victories for America, regardless of if the opposing sides also believed in him. Dylan sings of those who won’t forgive the Germans, and being told to hate the Russians, and takes the persona of a naive patriot who puts faith ahead of reason and free thought. This must have been somewhat shocking in the early 1960s, in a deeply religious country like America, and is even more shocking that just 15 years later, Dylan would be putting out albums as a born-again Christian. 

 4) One Too Many Mornings - An unbelievably understated, romantic ballad, about regret, potentially aimed at Suze again, a theme carried over from ‘Freewheelin’. However, this is also one of Dylan’s most reworked songs, and each time it sounds like a completely new song by a completely different artist. The electrifying 1966 version, the country version with Johnny Cash or at the Isle of Wight festival in 1969, the Rolling Thunder version from 1975/6. Whilst Bob is a chameleon, shapeshifting across different genres, this song is so perfect that it remains a classic, no matter how much he changes the sound. 

5) North Country Blues - Another song about the failings of the American Dream, and the disregard of the working class. This time the story is told by a young woman in a failing mining town (possibly Dylan’s home town of Duluth/Hibbing, Minnesota), where the oil companies have moved overseas to save costs. This is a heartbreakingly beautiful song, and is a scathing attack on capitalism and the consequences of big corporations chasing a few extra dollars, that again wouldn’t feel out of place if it was released today.

6) Only A Pawn In Their Game - Bob played this song all around the country at protests and civil rights rallies, culminating with him performing it at The March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr gave his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. It tells the tale of Medgar Evers, a black rights activist in Mississippi, who was murdered by a white man. Yet it also talks of how the poor white man is also a victim, and is spurred on by elites who want to keep the rich whites in power and are threatened by the Civil Rights Movement. It’s a radical song, and is a brilliant dissection of both race and class relations in America. It’s a very sad state of affairs that, like much of his work from this period, the song is still as relevant now as it was back then. 

7) Boots Of Spanish Leather - Almost identical to ‘Girl From The North Country’ in tune and theme, this is yet another bittersweet song for Suze, after her time in Italy and Bob travelling to see her, yet she’d already returned to America. What sets it apart are the beautiful lyrics that are both achingly sad, yet full of warmth. In other words, I love it. 

8) When The Ship Comes In - Hell hath no fury like a Dylan scorned. Following him almost being denied a room at a hotel due to his scruffy appearance, his touring companion Joan Baez had to vouch for him. Once he was finally in his room, he composed this shanty that sounds almost too cheerful, until you realise the lyrics are full of wishes that his enemies be taken by the sea and drowned. It’s a brilliant song, the reels you in with the happy music, and knocks you off your feet with its enraged fantasies. 

9) The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll - It pains me that Hattie Carroll’s name could easily be replaced with Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, and far too many countless others. Whilst some say that certain elements of the story are exaggerated, this is possibly Dylan’s most powerful song. The depressingly familiar theme of murder, civil rights, injustice, and wealth have never hit harder. Particularly in modern times, the line ‘the ladder of law has no top and no bottom’ is all the more relevant, as is the story of a white man barely getting a slap on the wrist for murdering a black woman. It’s a perfect song, almost prophetic, and is still ideal for causes like Black Lives Matter, just as it was for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

10) Restless Farewell - On any other album, this song would be a highlight. It’s only due to the other tracks being so brilliant, that this almost feels like a let down. However, upon closer listening, this is an incredibly angry song masquerading as a ballad, that lashes out at rumours of Dylan’s plagiarism, upbringing, and blossoming career. It’s almost the first of many beautifully constructed ‘fuck you’ songs to his detractors, something that Bob would become all too familiar with over the next few years.

Verdict: Perfection. In my mind, no folk album will ever come close to living up to this. Even the outtakes from these recording sessions are better than most people’s careers, particularly the perfection that is ‘Percy’s Song’. If his career ended here, he would still be remembered as history’s best songwriter, but Bob was only getting started. Whilst the Newport Folk Festival was crowning him as their new king and the political voice of the counter culture, Bob was getting ready to go through his first metamorphosis and follow his own path, no matter who he pissed off in the process. 

[dedicatedfollower467]

there’s a youtuber whose work i otherwise really love who criticized toby fox for releasing megalovania again as part of undertale, claiming that this kind of self-plagiarizing hurts composers by reselling something that already exists (i.e. tricking people into paying for something less than what they bought). at least, if i understood his video correctly. either that or he thought it was just straight-up lazy (possibly a combo of both)

i have two rebuttals to this.

1. megalovania is part of the Undertale OST, which contains over 75 individual tracks and more than 2 hours of music. even with reprises/remixes/repeated themes, that’s a TON of original music, and i don’t think the slightly-over-two-minutes of megalovania actually detracts from the amount of music you purchase when you buy the undertale OST. the previous version of megalovania is part of Homestuck Vol. 6: Heir Transparent, which is over 20 tracks spanning more than an hour’s worth of music, which is part of the Homestuck Music cannon which is a STAGGERINGLY HUGE amount of music and megalovania doesn’t even make a goddamn DENT in it.

2. megalovania is present in the actual game FOR AN IMPORTANT THEMATIC REASON.

let me clarify; i have not played the original ROM hack in which megalovania first appeared. but i know enough about the context and the other two places in which megalovania is used to infer that Megalovania is a theme which is used to underscore a situation in which a hero goes to fight an unstoppable, nigh-impossible to beat villain. THAT’S WHAT MEGALOVANIA MEANS!!! that’s why the first four notes of megalovania are such an OH SHIT moment for anyone who has heard it before in one of its proper contexts - it’s a signal that things are about to get REALLY, REALLY DIRE. megalovania is present in undertale, both as a nod to toby’s fans, and because it’s a theme that spans multiple projects toby has worked on, which has developed over time to mean something significant to the viewer/player.

what’s funny is that it’s doing the same thing this youtuber praises movie music for doing when it replays themes from previous parts of the movie changed in a new context.... which is exactly what toby fox is doing with megalovania, it’s just in an entirely new project instead of the same one.

3. (i know i said two, it’s not a real rebuttal) YOU’VE NEVER PLAYED UNDERTALE *OR* READ HOMESTUCK YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!!!!!! YOU DON’T KNOW THE CONTEXT *AT ALL* YOU DUMMY!!!!!!!!! YOU JUST PICKED TWO PIECES OF MUSIC THAT SOUND THE SAME AS AN ILLUSTRATION FOR YOUR RANT BUT THEY SOUND THE SAME BECAUSE THEY’RE THE SAME GODDAMN PIECE OF MUSIC RE-RELEASED AS A COVER/REMIX AND THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT UNLESS YOU’RE A BORING ASSHOLE!!!!!

anyways that’s my takedown of a youtuber who posted a video ages ago that still frustrates me

[vintage1der]

What separates these works from the Harry Potter fanfiction you find online may come down to snobbery. There is an undercurrent of misogyny in mainstream criticism of fanfiction, which is widely accepted to be dominated by women; one census of 10,500 AO3 users found that 80% of the users identified as female, with more users identified as genderqueer (6%) than male (4%). Novik has spent a good deal of time fighting against fanfiction’s stigma because she feels it is “an attack on women’s writing, specifically an attack on young women’s writing and the kind of stories that young women like to tell”. Which is not to say that young women only want to write about romance: “I think,” Novik says, “that [the popularity of fanfiction amongst women is] not unconnected to the lack of young women protagonists who are not romantic interests.” Devotees of fanfiction will sometimes tell you that it’s one of the oldest writing forms in the world. Seen with this generous eye, the art of writing stories using other people’s creations hails from long before our awareness of Twilight-fanfic-turned-BDSM romance Fifty Shades of Grey: perhaps Virgil, when he picked up where Homer left off with the story of Aeneas, or Shakespeare’s retelling of Arthur Brookes’s 1562 The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet. What most of us would recognise as fanfiction began in the 1960s, when Star Trek fans started creating zines about Spock and Captain Kirk’s adventures. Thirty years later, the internet arrived, which made sharing stories set in other people’s worlds – be they Harry Potter, Spider-Man, or anything and everything in between – easier. Fanfiction has always been out there, if you knew where to look. Now, it’s almost impossible to miss.

In the last few years, fanfiction has enjoyed something of a rebrand. Big-name authors such as EL James, author of the Fifty Shades books, and Cassandra Clare, who has always been open about writing Harry Potter fanfiction before her bestselling Mortal Instruments series, have helped bring it into the mainstream. These days, it’s fairly common knowledge that some people just really like writing about Captain America and Bucky Barnes falling in love, or Doctor Who fighting demons with Buffy. The general image of fanfiction has brightened somewhat: less creepy, more sweetly nerdy.

But the divide between fanfiction and original writing holds strong. It’s assumed that if people write fanfiction, it’s because they can’t produce their own. At best, it functions as training wheels, preparing a writer to commit to a real book. When they don’t – as in the famous case of Fifty Shades, which one plagiarism checker found had an 89% similarity rate with James’s original Twilight fanfiction – they are ridiculed. A real author, the logic goes, having moved on to writing their own books, doesn’t look back.

“Here’s the thing,” Naomi Novik explains over the phone from New York. She is the bestselling author of the Temeraire books, a fantasy series that adds dragons to the Napoleonic Wars, and Spinning Silver, which riffs on Rumpelstiltskin. “I don’t actually draw any line between my fanfiction work and my professional work – except that I only write the fanfiction stuff for love.”

In between writing her novels – or indeed during, as she admits that fanfiction is one of her favourite procrastination techniques – Novik is an active member of the fanfiction community. She is a co-founder of the Archive of Our Own (AO3), one of the most popular hosting websites, and a prolific writer in the universes of Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Merlin and many more.

And she’s not the only professional at work. Rainbow Rowell, the bestselling author of Eleanor and Park and other novels, once told the Bookseller that between two novels, she wrote a 30,000-word Harry Potter fanfiction. “It’s Harry and Draco as a couple who have been married for many years, and they’re raising Harry’s kids,” she said. “It’s them dealing with attachment parenting and step-parents and all these middle-aged issues.”

The divide between a fanfiction writer and an original fiction writer can look very arbitrary when looking at authors such as Michael Chabon, who once described his own novel Moonglow as “a Gravity’s Rainbow fanfic”. Or Madeline Miller, whose Orange-prize winning The Song of Achilles detailed the romantic relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, and whose latest novel Circe picks up on the witch who seduces Odysseus in the Odyssey. Miller said she was initially worried when one ex-boyfriend described her work as “Homeric fanfiction” but has since embraced her love of adapting and playing with Greek mythology. The tag could also be applied to classics such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, reworkings of Shakespeare by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Edward St Aubyn in the Hogarth series, and a spate of parodies: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or Android Karenina.

What separates these works from the Harry Potter fanfiction you find online may come down to snobbery. There is an undercurrent of misogyny in mainstream criticism of fanfiction, which is widely accepted to be dominated by women; one census of 10,500 AO3 users found that 80% of the users identified as female, with more users identified as genderqueer (6%) than male (4%). Novik has spent a good deal of time fighting against fanfiction’s stigma because she feels it is “an attack on women’s writing, specifically an attack on young women’s writing and the kind of stories that young women like to tell”. Which is not to say that young women only want to write about romance: “I think,” Novik says, “that [the popularity of fanfiction amongst women is] not unconnected to the lack of young women protagonists who are not romantic interests.”

Others may find it odd that published authors would bother writing fanfiction alongside or between their professional work. But it’s all too simple to draw lines between two forms of writing that, in their separate ways, can be both productive and joyful. Neil Gaiman once wrote that the most important question an author can ask is: “What if?” Fanfiction takes this to the next level. What if King Arthur was gay? What if Voldemort won? What if Ned Stark escaped?

“I believe that all art, if it’s any good, is in dialogue with other art,” Novik says. “Fanfiction feels to me like a more intimate conversation. It’s a conversation where you need the reader to really have a lot of detail at their fingertips.”

For writers still wobbling on training wheels, fanfiction offers benefits: the immediate gratification of sharing writing without navigating publishers; passionate readers who are already interested in the characters, and a collegial stream of feedback from fellow writers.

“There was an audience of people who wanted to read my writing,” says young adult author Sarah Rees Brennan, who wrote Harry Potter fanfiction in her teens and twenties before she published her own novels, the latest of which, In Other Lands, was a Hugo award finalist. “Here were all these people online who wanted stories about familiar characters. Audiences were pre-invested and waiting.”

For writers, whether already published or on the path to being published, this instantaneous readership functions as a writer’s workshop: Novik calls it a “community of your peers”. Spending hours thrashing out the details of Draco Malfoy’s inner life can’t help but function as a crash course in character motivation. And the limits and constraints of working within a pre-existing world, with its own characters and settings, is a unique challenge.

“Fanfiction is a great incubator for writers,” Novik says. “The more constraints you have on you at the beginning, the better. It’s why people do writing exercises, or play scales. That kind of constraint forces you to practice certain skills, and then at a certain point you have the control to bring out the whole toolbox.”

Once some writers get those tools, they never look back. Rees Brennan no longer writes fanfiction. “I had a friend say it’s like the difference between babysitting kids and having children of your own,” she says. “With a world you built yourself, and characters you built, there’s this sense of deep, overwhelming love.”

But Rees Brennan is still a fan of collaborative writing and shared universes, as in the short stories she writes with Cassandra Clare about characters from Clare’s Mortal Instruments universe. “It’s amazing to gather around a kitchen table and yell at each other excitedly about what’s going to happen to mutually beloved characters,” she says. “I want that for every creative person – a chance to find their imaginative family, wherever it may be.”

Novik scorns the idea that published authors should turn their back on fanfiction. She recalls being on a panel where one member said he couldn’t understand why someone would waste their time writing it over an original work: “I said, ‘Have you ever played an instrument?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, I play piano’. I said, ‘So, do you compose all your own music?’”

“When I was first published, I deliberately went to my editors and said, ‘Yes, I’ve been writing fanfiction for 10 years. I love it.’ It was non-negotiable for me. As soon as you do that, by the way, it turns out that like half of the publishing industry has read or been involved in fanfiction,” she laughs. “Shockingly! It’s amazing how all these women who like storytelling have some connection to the community.”

For Novik and many other writers, fanfiction is a fundamental a way of expressing oneself, of teasing out new ideas and finding a joyous way to engage with writing again after the hard slog of editing a novel. The journey to become a published writer isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral, as we grow older and continue to explore the characters and tropes we love. There’s so many stories waiting to be told – perhaps one or two of them could involve getting Captain America laid. God knows he needs it.