Why I Detest Cassandra Cla(i)re
Aug. 21st, 2013 08:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mark_asphodelI was going to write a nice celebratory "fanfics that changed my life" post for my birthday week but I got bogged down in this. And since there's a new film based on the works of the creature formerly known as She Who Must Not Be Named hitting the theaters, consider this a PSA.
I got into Harry Potter in between the release of Order of the Phoenix (HP5) and The Half-Blood Prince (HP6). The wait between books seemed interminable at the time, but there was fanfic. My god, was there fanfic. And after I'd read a bunch of it, I turned to two of the writers cited as "must reads," BNFs whose work I'd avoided because they were Draco-centric and my opinions on Draco were mostly "LOLferret." One went by the name of Maya, and her works included "Underwater Light" and "In The Shadow of His Wings" and honestly they were well-written but I didn't really get into them. I mean, "In the Shadow..." was Harry/Draco in an alternate future Hogwarts where a strangely Snape was headmaster because Dumbledore had run off in disgrace. Typical Slytherfen ass-pull, you know? But she was really sweet and her LJ was a good read. She took it all down when she went pro a short time later and I haven't read her works but I wish her well, even if she did think Revenge of the Sith was a good movie.
And then there was the Draco Trilogy, already known as the source of Draco In Leather Pants (TM) but still widely hailed. So off I went to Schnoogle where long-form 'fics were archived on an HP 'fic site and I started in with "Draco Dormiens," the story of how Draco and Harry become friends after an accidental body-swap that sees Harry-as-Draco sent home to live with the Malfoys.
It was pretty good. Like many of the 'fics written in the gap between the fourth and fifth HP book, it was now against canon (Sirius interested in Narcissa Malfoy? LOL!) but hell, so much HP 'fic got jossed by HP5 that I didn't much care. I will say that I somehow missed the last couple of chapters and when I started to read the sequel, "Draco Sinister," plot details set up by the first installment really threw me but "Draco Dormiens" had gotten long enough that I didn't feel the need to go back and read the stuff I'd missed. But during Draco Sinister the flaws in the works started to really show.
1) CC's brand of fantasy didn't feel all that much like Harry Potter. It was too "American" and more generic sword-and-sorcery.
2) Too much shiptease. The Draco Trilogy played at being Harry/Draco (whatever), Harry/Hermione (yay), Draco/Hermione (boo), and Draco/Ginny (wtf) AND Harry/Ginny (sucks) and quite deliberately took its sweet time resolving things. It got dull, especially for a Harry/Hermione shipper who didn't want Draco every which way.
3) Ass-pulls like Draco being the OTHER lost heir of Slytherin. I mean, yeah, it's fanfic, roll with it, but...
4) Parts of it didn't hang together tonally. I'd be reading something and then go, "Whoa, where was I?" because it felt like drastically different stories stitched together.
But it was fun and it's not like I was paying money for it, and the parts that were good were very good. Some of her ideas were gripping, the characterization was a stretch but it usually worked, and some of her writing was exceptionally beautiful.
One line, from Hermione to Draco, just hit me. Hard.
"I'll be sorry when you start shaving," she said dreamily (she was quite lightheaded now), "I love that translucent quality your skin has, I always have. And when you rip that first razor through your stubble, that'll go with it forever."
As someone whose original-fic thing at the time was whip-smart girls and angsty teenaged bishounen types, that line struck me as perfect-- not for Draco necessarily, but for one of my characters. I wished I'd written that line. I envied the writer of that line.
But Cassie Claire didn't write that. No, she lifted it from Tanith Lee.
"The skin of his face had the sort of marvellous pale texture most men shave off when they rip the first razor blade through their stubble and the second upper dermis goes with it forever."
And if you think that manner of re-writing is OK, you haven't seen the rest of her lifts and re-writes and "homages" and such. As one incident, it maybe doesn't seem so bad. In context of everything else she swiped, it's soul-killing. Now, IIRC right around the same time Cassie was releasing the final chapters of "Draco Veritas" one snippet at a time, the plagiarism debacle really came to a head. Allegations had been going around since '01, and she'd been banned from FFNet for ripping off Pamela Dean, but I seem to recall the Draco Trilogy winding down, fandom heating up, and then Cassie going pro and deleting all her 'fics all happening right around the same time. Anyway, by the time I actually finished reading "Draco Veritas" the cat was well out of the bag and it was all pretty laughable. I knew she was a fraud and now that I knew her secret, the tonal flaws and stitched-together quality of the Trilogy seemed nakedly apparent.
Except she turned that fraud into a book contract and now a movie deal and guess who's laughing now.
Cassandra Cla(i)re is proof that crime pays, that fandom and publishers alike have woefully deficient morals when it comes to upholding the standards they claim to believe in, and I urge everyone who doesn't appreciate wholesale theft not to have anything to do with that "Mortal Instruments: City of Bones" movie.
I loathe her for profiting from plagiarism. But I hate her for making me deeply, deeply envy her for crafting words that she actually stole.
I got into Harry Potter in between the release of Order of the Phoenix (HP5) and The Half-Blood Prince (HP6). The wait between books seemed interminable at the time, but there was fanfic. My god, was there fanfic. And after I'd read a bunch of it, I turned to two of the writers cited as "must reads," BNFs whose work I'd avoided because they were Draco-centric and my opinions on Draco were mostly "LOLferret." One went by the name of Maya, and her works included "Underwater Light" and "In The Shadow of His Wings" and honestly they were well-written but I didn't really get into them. I mean, "In the Shadow..." was Harry/Draco in an alternate future Hogwarts where a strangely Snape was headmaster because Dumbledore had run off in disgrace. Typical Slytherfen ass-pull, you know? But she was really sweet and her LJ was a good read. She took it all down when she went pro a short time later and I haven't read her works but I wish her well, even if she did think Revenge of the Sith was a good movie.
And then there was the Draco Trilogy, already known as the source of Draco In Leather Pants (TM) but still widely hailed. So off I went to Schnoogle where long-form 'fics were archived on an HP 'fic site and I started in with "Draco Dormiens," the story of how Draco and Harry become friends after an accidental body-swap that sees Harry-as-Draco sent home to live with the Malfoys.
It was pretty good. Like many of the 'fics written in the gap between the fourth and fifth HP book, it was now against canon (Sirius interested in Narcissa Malfoy? LOL!) but hell, so much HP 'fic got jossed by HP5 that I didn't much care. I will say that I somehow missed the last couple of chapters and when I started to read the sequel, "Draco Sinister," plot details set up by the first installment really threw me but "Draco Dormiens" had gotten long enough that I didn't feel the need to go back and read the stuff I'd missed. But during Draco Sinister the flaws in the works started to really show.
1) CC's brand of fantasy didn't feel all that much like Harry Potter. It was too "American" and more generic sword-and-sorcery.
2) Too much shiptease. The Draco Trilogy played at being Harry/Draco (whatever), Harry/Hermione (yay), Draco/Hermione (boo), and Draco/Ginny (wtf) AND Harry/Ginny (sucks) and quite deliberately took its sweet time resolving things. It got dull, especially for a Harry/Hermione shipper who didn't want Draco every which way.
3) Ass-pulls like Draco being the OTHER lost heir of Slytherin. I mean, yeah, it's fanfic, roll with it, but...
4) Parts of it didn't hang together tonally. I'd be reading something and then go, "Whoa, where was I?" because it felt like drastically different stories stitched together.
But it was fun and it's not like I was paying money for it, and the parts that were good were very good. Some of her ideas were gripping, the characterization was a stretch but it usually worked, and some of her writing was exceptionally beautiful.
One line, from Hermione to Draco, just hit me. Hard.
"I'll be sorry when you start shaving," she said dreamily (she was quite lightheaded now), "I love that translucent quality your skin has, I always have. And when you rip that first razor through your stubble, that'll go with it forever."
As someone whose original-fic thing at the time was whip-smart girls and angsty teenaged bishounen types, that line struck me as perfect-- not for Draco necessarily, but for one of my characters. I wished I'd written that line. I envied the writer of that line.
But Cassie Claire didn't write that. No, she lifted it from Tanith Lee.
"The skin of his face had the sort of marvellous pale texture most men shave off when they rip the first razor blade through their stubble and the second upper dermis goes with it forever."
And if you think that manner of re-writing is OK, you haven't seen the rest of her lifts and re-writes and "homages" and such. As one incident, it maybe doesn't seem so bad. In context of everything else she swiped, it's soul-killing. Now, IIRC right around the same time Cassie was releasing the final chapters of "Draco Veritas" one snippet at a time, the plagiarism debacle really came to a head. Allegations had been going around since '01, and she'd been banned from FFNet for ripping off Pamela Dean, but I seem to recall the Draco Trilogy winding down, fandom heating up, and then Cassie going pro and deleting all her 'fics all happening right around the same time. Anyway, by the time I actually finished reading "Draco Veritas" the cat was well out of the bag and it was all pretty laughable. I knew she was a fraud and now that I knew her secret, the tonal flaws and stitched-together quality of the Trilogy seemed nakedly apparent.
Except she turned that fraud into a book contract and now a movie deal and guess who's laughing now.
Cassandra Cla(i)re is proof that crime pays, that fandom and publishers alike have woefully deficient morals when it comes to upholding the standards they claim to believe in, and I urge everyone who doesn't appreciate wholesale theft not to have anything to do with that "Mortal Instruments: City of Bones" movie.
I loathe her for profiting from plagiarism. But I hate her for making me deeply, deeply envy her for crafting words that she actually stole.
no subject
Date: 2013-08-22 10:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-22 11:14 am (UTC)(That sounds so catty. I don't have a stake in this emotionally, but it seems unfair that she built success on a false foundation while other potentially good writers struggle to be "marketable" on their own merits. :/)
no subject
Date: 2013-08-22 09:54 pm (UTC)The (other) unfortunate thing is that there are still people who wouldn't see a difference between plagiarism and fanfiction anyway, so on those grounds even if they know what she did, they'd probably still justify throwing money her way. :/
no subject
Date: 2013-08-22 11:04 pm (UTC)I mean, everyone borrows small things from other things they've seen/heard/etc. But there comes a point where you have to write your own words and she had entire chunks of "fanfic" that weren't her own words. (And there's a huge fucking difference between borrowing ideas/themes/concepts and outright fucking stealing them. She stole them. In an academic paper what she wrote unsourced would be plagiarism.) She was still popular.
The human brain is wired to hate cheaters and liars by default. I mean, even if we do lie and cheat, we're wired to hate other people that do. And she reached her career as a writer by cheating and lying and it makes me SICK.
no subject
Date: 2013-08-23 03:49 am (UTC)And then she went pro and ugh.
no subject
Date: 2013-08-23 02:20 pm (UTC)Nothing hurts more than believing in people and being inspired by them, only to realize they cheated and led you astray. Luckily I was only beginning to get into various fandoms at the time and was generally left out of the whole debacle. But goodness, that movie deal and book series burns the way a cigarette to the arm would. I can't say that I'd wish bad happenings upon her, but to say I'm disappointed would be an understatement.
no subject
Date: 2013-08-23 11:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-23 11:16 pm (UTC)In this case I think cattiness is too kind. The evidence she cheated and lied is overwhelming and yet it doesn't matter.
no subject
Date: 2013-08-23 11:19 pm (UTC)Reviews of the film indicates it still feels like Potter + Buffy in a blender. :/
no subject
Date: 2013-08-23 11:21 pm (UTC)She should make decent people sick.
no subject
Date: 2013-08-23 11:23 pm (UTC)And the Holly Black angle is sad and weird. How can she NOT know better?
no subject
Date: 2013-08-23 11:25 pm (UTC)I hope she slips up and gets nailed. Plagiarism often does end in one brazen theft too many.
no subject
Date: 2013-08-24 03:52 am (UTC)