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Characters like yours


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I have a confession to make. When somebody makes a character that is basically one of my characters it gets on my nerves. Prefer to keep things civil tho so I just don’t say anything.
 

How do you deal with it? It’s happened a handful of times. Normally. I just be quietly annoyed for a while and then get over it. 

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Quietly flattered if they seem to be trying out something I've done from genuine interest; quietly annoyed if they're just copycatting what works.

 

I just keep on keeping on. If someone's got the same kinks? Sweet.

By Wit & Whitby

[Plot] | [Rules] | [Wanted] | [Discord]

18+ | Victorian Era | No App | No Word Count |

PoC & LGBT-friendly | Newbie-friendly
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Sorry to say that Character tropes are super common and while you think yours is unique... its unlikely.

 

Batman isn't the only orphan turned super hero. Just like the abused child turned jack ass adult....

 

supernatural dean winchester GIF

Just be flattered that they are interested in the same character tropes you are.

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Profile set made by myself and original Artwork by Fae Merriman, my daughter.

 

 

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Yeah, I think the best you can do is recognize that it bugs you, try to realign it as flattery and move on. As mentioned before, even our most unique ideas have been done before. I think it's easy for character profiles to be similar, but rare that actual posts come out close to the same!

 

At the end of the day, it's the RP that matters to me more than the profiles, so that's where I focus my feels.

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Characters can be similar to one another just like people can be similar to one another. I think the important thing is definitely how they are played. Everyone has a different perspective, and so even if a two characters are even almost copies of one another in their profiles, there is still a strong chance that they will be written extremely differently. Its valid to feel frustrated if you see a character thats been clearly molded after yours, but as long as the person doing it is doing it with intentions of having fun, then its something worth looking past. 

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  • 2 weeks later...
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I’ve never had anything like this happen to me personally since my characters are so strange and most have some sort of international aspect that means one would have to do research on (Mongolian culture for example). I have however seen it in action.

 

A (now ex) friend of mine, who was staff on a site, became in conflict with one of staff whom he called his friend, and left. She was advertising, came across a member who ghosted’s site she knew was friends with him, found him on staff (the reason he left was the claim he was exhausted mentally and needed a break from rp), with caricatures of not only some of her characters, but other staff members who thought they were on good terms with him and two general members. In the case of the two general members, to this day, they don’t know and were on friendly terms with him. In the case of one of the general members, I know he thought the member in question didn’t like him.

 

I was a friend with both staff and the person in question so I had no idea of the conflict until it pretty much blew up on me. It’s been a good three or four years now so I can’t remember the details. My staff member friend told me about the conflict (after ex friend blew up at me), showed screenshots that showed both of them in unflattering lights (which she stated she screwed up on), and a link to the site in question. We’re talking about ten characters with the same playbys, heights, personality attributes, history details, and even names as the originals. How it looked like was something like: same playby, original character’s middle name as the caricature’s first, same personality attributes, exact same height, different history. I pulled up both character profiles to compare how bad it was and it was frankly obvious.

 

I went through the site with my staff member friend as the shock and anger made it hard for her to look through the full extent of the damage. All of these stolen concepts were obvious except for one. This caricature had a similar military playby, the name was just ethnically similar (like Irish surname instead of Scottish), but had the exact same detailed history as one my friend suspected was stolen from (this was one of the general members, she asked me to look since I had more experience rping with the person and character in question).

 

The majority of the time I’ve found the situations of stolen characters to be like everyone else’s opinions where the issues of “copying” are just generic concepts, a first name or current popular face the accuser loves, or a loose lift of a character from a trendy piece of media. That being said, I suspect what I outlined happened to my friends happens more often than we realize. This particular case was so blatant because you had the person being friends with the site owner who straight up knew he was taking these characters out of spite (while he was staff on that other site – all of those characters pre-dated before he quit). Most of the time, it’s going to be more subtle like that one hiding in plain sight.

 

I know in the case of one of the two regular members who had their characters taken, the reason was because the person forgot to @ him in a group thread. He got paranoid that the reason was because he didn’t like him. If I recall correctly, he apologized to him, but he obviously didn’t believe him. When the resource site Shine closed, the reason given was doxing and targeted harassment against staff. There has been at least one doxing on another resource site’s discord. Someone told me, that when someone unpopular and presumable caused a lot of drama left a site, multiple staff members took to her boyfriend’s facebook to try and get him to dump her. The accused site is still active. The idea that someone just might be write an offensive caricature of one of your characters because you were too slow to respond to that thread or had to drop it because of personal matters suddenly seems more likely.

 

If you know someone swiped one of your character concepts if not flat out character out of malice (or that of a friend), it’s not flattering or annoying. It’s creepy.

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On 8/14/2020 at 9:19 PM, Mistress Of The Obvious said:

If you know someone swiped one of your character concepts if not flat out character out of malice (or that of a friend), it’s not flattering or annoying. It’s creepy.

Saw two different people do something like this, and that was definitely in the uncanny valley department.

 

One was mad that I'd discontinued the roleplay and went on to lift various plots (paraphrased them, but it wasn't hard to trace them back to me), redraw public sketches of mine, drew a strange interpretation of my real life partner and I but gigantic, genderbent, and naked (which, thanks I guess ???), and recreated the character I'd used with them but with no actual sense or rhythm for what I'd been aiming for.

 

I was way more skeeved out by the 200+ checks on my site a day and ban evasions, for something like 2 years straight.

 

Alright. And maybe by the vaguely erotic horror fiction featuring their interpretation of player-me, too.

 

 

The other one was far, far less unhinged but also way better at turning people against each other for it. It wasn't so much absurd as depressing. Standard bullying. Copycatting plots I was setting up, resorted to catfishing an entire server with a years-old side-persona to creepily roleplay with/at me some more and got caught by a couple of friends she was trying to enmesh in the process. She'd copycat both people that she liked and that she hated; the line seemed to be thin there. Stumbled across her in the wild once, playing a character that seemed to be a boiled down amalgam of the tropes and aesthetics of a couple of characters I'd played with her.

 

It did not look like I was the only one she'd do that kind of thing toward, so at least I had some confidence that she'd bore of the things she thought I owed her eventually.

 

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By Wit & Whitby

[Plot] | [Rules] | [Wanted] | [Discord]

18+ | Victorian Era | No App | No Word Count |

PoC & LGBT-friendly | Newbie-friendly
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It can sometimes feel discouraging to run across characters that are similar or even more so, realize that your character leans heavily into a certain trope. Honestly with cannons characters from various fandoms I run into my favorite character played in a variety of ways, so I sort of focus on how I bring flare to my character that might be different from others. I use this same thing when it comes to OCs as well. While people might copy aspects of a character or play characters that are similar, I try to focus on the fact that you are going to have different play styles etc.

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  • 3 months later...
On 8/23/2020 at 3:48 PM, Toastie said:

It can sometimes feel discouraging to run across characters that are similar or even more so, realize that your character leans heavily into a certain trope. Honestly with cannons characters from various fandoms I run into my favorite character played in a variety of ways, so I sort of focus on how I bring flare to my character that might be different from others. I use this same thing when it comes to OCs as well. While people might copy aspects of a character or play characters that are similar, I try to focus on the fact that you are going to have different play styles etc.

I’m definitely more of this mind. I’ve had people blatantly copy a character idea of mine and I’ve had people try similar concepts just because they felt inspired. Once someone even messaged me and explained what they thought and asked if I’d be okay with them making someone similar which I found both considerate and extremely flattering. That said, I think it’s important for us as role players to remember that there will always be ideas like ours, ideas we’ve been inspired by, or other versions of the same canon, but regardless of where a character comes from we can make that character unique by bringing our own elements to the table.

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  • 8 months later...

I honestly just bite my tongue and let it go. I've seen people with the exact same name as one of my characters on another site, but I doubted they were building that character off of mine (completely different genre, and they poofed shortly after creating the character.)

 

I've also had people accuse my site of stealing the idea of a club (a gentleman's club where the dancers are goddess themed), simply because we used the same photos. It kind of backfired on them because ours had been written up years before theirs. They just assumed theirs was written first because of an information page I posted. I explained that to them and said that I didn't assume their member stole from us, as its entirely possible two people can have the same idea independently. Never messaged me back after that. 

...

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