I'm not talking about mentioning that the show exists. I'm talking about lifting lines of dialogue.

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Oh, OK, more than a reference, then.

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She had, for example:

Character A: And if he gets hurt before we get there, I'm pulling out your ribcage and wearing it as a hat.

Character B: He'll be fine. And, nice imagery!

which is, of course, directly pulled from

Buffy: I have had a *really* bad day, okay? If you have information

worth hearing, then I am grateful for it. If you're gonna crack jokes, then I'm gonna pull out your ribcage and wear it as a hat. (lets go)

Whistler: Hello to the imagery! Very nice.

in a way that really can't be read as a homage but as, really theft; and even if she had acknowledged the use of the specific lines, it would have still been overwhelming authorial laziness on CC's part.

People in HP fandom who had no familiarity with the BtVS canon would have almost certainly read that quip, and any others, and ascribed the wit to CC instead of to ME where it came from.

I mean, I don't get the CC thing. I think she's a fairly boring writer. But.

t edit bit of an xpost there

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Jintian was the one who put together the list of plagiarized passages in one chapter of Cassandra Claire's Draco Veritas here; I helped by identifying various obscure fantasy novels (that is, works by Pamela Dean and Elizabeth Marie Pope) as sources, as well as some of the Buffy quotes Jintian didn't recognize. Jintian doesn't cite it, but there's a two-page section in another chapter of the novel lifted directly from Pamela Dean's The Hidden Land.

For what it's worth--and here we are passing from the realm of concrete evidence--there were several other passages that seemed extremely familiar to me, but whose source I could not identify.

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I should warn you, prolonged discussion of this topic in public almost always results in CC's fans popping up to defend her (and occasionally abuse her critics). Jintian's blog got a lot of anonymous comments, not all of them positive, after she went through that exercise.

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So, rapidly changing the subject...

Err...

Serious question here...

How do you all define "plotty"?

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Plotty? As in having the emphasis on plot events rather than character reaction to happenings, emotional epiphanies, PWPs and all that?

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Well, I didn't mean to derail the conversation, just thought that a warning might be appropriate. We're a lot more public than we used to be, here.

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To me, "plotty" means the point of the story is the unfolding events, not character interactions or character development (or The Sex.)

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How do you all define "plotty"?

Something happens above and beyond "and then they got together." Also, I'd say it usually has to be fairly long - it'd be tough to write a plotty vignette.

Huh - poking at my reaction a little more I think it has to do most of all with how embedded in an outside world a story is. A story which was written to get them together can still be plotty if it feels like it's happening in a real world, where other things have an impact on the characters and vice versa.

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