I wasn't aware of this until very recently, but apparently City of Bones is being made into a movie and is coming out very soon, in August of this year.

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc4CiTvQ-YE

Mortal Instruments: City of Bones is an adaptation of the same name by Cassandra Clare. Cassandra Clare, to refresh everyone's memory, is the author of the infamous Draco Trilogy and various controversies under the name "Cassandra Claire."

It was interesting that Clare has become fairly successful as an author and has received, for better or worse, praise and endorsement from Stephanie Meyer. Now, her Mortal Instruments series are now being adapted into movies. I have some mixed feelings about this: what little I read of the Draco Trilogy I found not at all interesting and I can't say I've read her Mortal Instruments series as her themes in general don't appeal to me, but it is nice to see a former fanfiction author succeed to the degree that Clare has done.

Now, if only we could get a movie adaptation of SwimDraconian's or Joe's stuff as well...!

 

Read Distant Star. Joe took a lot of Wastelands of time into that fic.

Haven't read the books, but the trailer of the movie looks terrible.

 

The books are so bad that at least the film adaptation will break the mold in some way. Money really does make the world go 'round.

 

I'm pretty easy to please and I give YA novels a lot of leeway. I realize YA novels are YA novels and don't criticize them for that.

But the first book in mortal instruments was god fucking awful.

 

Never heard of the books or the author, but I saw the trailer when I went to go see World War Z the other day. It looked like a castrated Dresden Files wrapped in Twilight. It being an old repurposed shitty Harry Potter fanfic seems appropriate.

 

I didn't realise the author used to write fanfic, but I'm not surprised to learn it was Malfoy centric. I've read like 2-3 of the Mortal Instruments books (I had a lot of free time back then) and they were pretty terrible. I am very amused though with the idea of millions of people going into cinemas to watch the borderline (it's very complicated) incest going on between the main characters.

 

It's kinda funny. There were cardboard adverts for it at the cinema Lungs, Luckylee and I went to, and I thought they looked fairly shitty even before I knew what they were.

 

Any chance you could give us a TLDR summary?

 

From what I remember, she made a game of taking "quotes" (more like entire sentences) from other media (mostly TV shows like Buffy and such) and reviewers got a shout out or something when discovering them. Of course then some dude discovered that she copied/pasted entire paragraphs from a fantasy series, which resulted in delicious drama.

Also the quotes thing made reading her stuff quite schizophrenic; she'd be setting the tone for a confrontation (somber mood etc) and someone would throw around buffy-like dialogue. Very lulzy.

 

My only exposure to anything Mortal Instruments is my older sister (who loves the books) and a trailer before Pacific Rim.

My impression is that it shamelessly panders to 14 year old girls à la Twilight.

Am I wrong? I can't get an unbiased answer from my sister as she loved the Twilight series, too.

 

Active acts of plagiarism like that annoy me because honestly, I take from a bunch of source materials to write, and I work so hard to create my own work through my own style of writing in my own way, and someone comes along and jacks entire passages from people.

And then they tool it into an original series and get published. Hey, fuck that.

 

So, I also saw in some blogs, specially from a girl that said this happened to her and her friend, that she used to merciless bully her critics, and sometimes threaten then with legal action. Wow, if it's true, what a cunt. About the books, saw the summary in TVTropes, and well, utter shit with slash crap on it.

 

I just finished reading the whole thing Cheddar posted. It's disgusting. I'll try to give you an accurate yet summarized version, but it's still gonna be hefty and contain none of the sources.

The whole thing began in 2001 when the author of this report was reading Clare's Draco fic. She states she was enjoying the story quite a bit but as the sequel came out, there were starting to appear a few too many quotes from TV shows and books for her taste. Clare frequently put in her disclaimers that there were lines taken from Buffy, Black Adder, Red Dwarf, etc., so the writer of the report, who I'll call OP for simplicity, didn't think much of it.

But then about 10 chapters into the second fic in the trilogy, OP noticed an idea taken from Pamela Dean's The Secret Country Trilogy. Malfoy dies and goes to the afterlife, and the whole sequence and idea for it is taken from Pamela Dean's work. Clare posted this in the disclaimer: "Credit for the inspiration for this conception of the wizarding afterlife goes to a book called The Secret Country, alas, I no longer recall who wrote it."

This was red flag #1 for OP. Not only had Clare neglected to put the name of the author (that's already unforgivable to me), OP also noticed that Clare got the name of the book wrong, because that afterlife scene takes place in the second book of the trilogy, which is called The Hidden Land.

Concerned, the OP left a review correcting Clare's disclaimer and left it at that. Later in the week, she began re-reading passages of Clare's fic and kept finding more and more ideas that weren't credited in the disclaimer. Even worse, since OP owned Pamela Dean's books, she began finding whole copied paragraphs, sentences and dialogue when she compared them side by side. That was the last straw for OP and she reported the whole thing, stolen passages included, to ff.net's staff.

There's a very neat comparison of the original texts and Clare's use of them in her fic with the copied parts in bold. It's unmistakable.

About a week later, Clare's account was deleted and blacklisted from ff.net. Cue the shitstorm as her fans screamed about the injustice. OP's report includes quoted posts from several sites and e-mail lists she was a member of, and the amount of retarded shit puts DLP's Hall of Shame to shame.

The whole story pretty much descends into capslock 'arguments'. The notable participants are Clare herself, Heidi (I'll get to her in a moment), ff.net admins, Pamela Dean herself and her agent, and a Rebecca woman (gimme a sec).

Heidi is Clare's Ron Weasley; no smarts, no real use, but stupidly loyal. In real life she works (or worked?) in a law firm and during the course of the argument makes retarded points about copyright infringement and plagiarism. Most notably she says that Clare never stated the fic was her own work and thus can't be accused of plagiarism, so everybody who accuses her of stealing work is committing libel. She even threatens to sue a user over it. I need not explain why having to say which chapter of a novel belongs to you is, at best, a bad argument.

Clare is much more passive than her extra-chromosome sidekick. She begins arguing that she intentionally quoted popular fiction in her works for her readers to find, and indeed her fans loved finding the "hidden" lines. Then when confronted with the whole stolen paragraphs and lines of dialogue, she says that she should've at least been notified by e-mail that she was being deleted. The admins, two of them, state an e-mail was sent (plus OP reminds us that she left a review correcting her disclaimer), and at the end of the report we learn of a friend of Pamela Dean, the Rebecca woman, who had stumbled across the fic and warned Clare of the blatant plagiarism.

Pamela Dean's involvement is brief but very clear: she was fine with an idea or concept being used so long as she was credited, but she was very much against the use of her narrative and dialogue. Clare sought out her permission and Dean passed on the clusterfuck to her agent. While waiting for the permission to be given, Clare (or Heidi, can't remember) stated that she was working on the details of the permission with the original author of the work she'd been "inspired" by.

Well, you can pretty much guess how it goes. Clare begins backpedalling like the average internet user when caught on their bullshit. Fiction Alley is released at this time, using Clare's move to that site to draw in readership, a moment which happened to coincide with ff.net's downtime due to insufficient server capacity.

The interesting stuff comes at the end in my opinion. Apparently Clare and her roommate suffered a break-in and their laptops were stolen, this some time after the fiasco. Heidi, the expert copyright lawyer (and Clare's actual lawyer), sends an email to all of Clare's readers who had subscribed to some sort of mailing list. There she says that they're taking donations to get Clare a new laptop so that she can go back to writing asap. Huzzah, in comes some money.

Later, the Mortal Instruments is sold and Clare advertises the upcoming novel in Sugar Quill and mailing lists, etc.

So in the end, it's not only the fact that she clearly plagiarized several works (at the end there's extensive comparison between her fic and the original works, Pamela Dean's being only one among many) -- but there's also the fact that she made a profit twice from her readership.



Like I said, it's a rather lengthy story. I did a half-hearted summary. Several important - and sometimes hillarious - details are missing, so if you really want to know what happened, take a look at OP's report. It's beautifully detailed and there's sources everywhere.

 

Severus paced around the room, feeling frustrated. "I should have cursed that conniving twat Cassie Claire when I had the chance. Just hearing her name brings a bitter taste to my mouth."

Albus peered at him stonily from across the large, cluttered desk. When the wizened man finally spoke, his voice was naught but a whisper; naught but a tired breath laced in melancholy and memory. "Still you hate her? After all this time?"

"Always," said Severus.



I read the first book in her series out of morbid curiosity several years ago. To be sure, I did not read the rest. Nor will I see this movie in theaters.

Perhaps I'll Tivo it in a year or two...

Maybe...

Probably not.

 

Saw the trailer while in the theater and had to be in a car for twelve hours the next day. Having no knowledge of the series whatsoever prior to going in, I picked it up. It has a lot of the usual tween crap--girl meets magical bad boy, bad boy has a bank vault full of issues, parents keeping horrible secrets, blah blah blah.

Surprisingly, though? I didn't mind it for a simple reason: The entire book basically revolves around a stupid teenage girl making an idiotic decision to fall in love with some magical asshole and...suffering constantly for her own idiocy. Like, the whole book she suffers for being such a stupid bitch.

I picked up the next book to see if it would suddenly go the usual Teen Novel route of love making all their problems go away--but nope, the stupid girls suffers and suffers and suffers for falling for the magical dick. He hurts her emotionally in every book, leaves her when she needs him, has a boat full of issues she pays for personally, etc.

I don't know why, but my usual rage towards a teenage girl falling for a magical dickwad when she's surrounded by better options and more understanding people is dimmed greatly by the opportunity to watch her suffer for being such a dumb twat.

If it's based on a HP fic, I assume the magical bad boy is Draco, so the girl is probably Ginny? I'm...not sure who the other characters are, but I guess I don't mind watching Draco and Ginny suffer for being stupid.

Can't say I knew anything about the plagiarism claims and such, but sense it all happened...what, twelve years ago, I don't really think it matters--it doesn't seem to have carried over, so I guess she learned her lesson on that front. I can't really say I care about ff.net drama that old--so I judge it as it stands on its own.

Which is, as a (probably unintentionally) hilarious story about a really stupid teenager suffering constantly for being so dumb--and with an admittedly fairly interesting setting that it kind of wastes. It definitely lives up to the reputation I heard it had of being 'The Dresden Files meets Twilight', but I enjoyed it based entirely on the teenage suffering.

It'll be interesting to see how many of the controversial elements carry over and how many shit storms they cause, too.