If you've read Mortal Instruments you'll find this interesting...

[Paige]

i would rather people stop comparing between one series and another. true, Clare written harry potter fanfiction before, and she might incidentally taken some characters and put it in her book, the thing here is: Harry is the hero in the Harry Potter series, not Draco, and neither the Malfoys are true villains. As comparison, there isn't much comparison between them, the storyline went different way, now left with the only thing is to see if Clare can really kill Jace off in the series (cause like I feel for Harry Potter, Jace's death is inevitable).

[Andre]

Caitlan wrote: "Can you really name any significant similarities that you could not also liken to another book? I've read the Harry Potter series and Mortal Instruments series multiple times each and I'm completely lost on what exactly people are throwing this fit about. "

Yes, but I am not gonna repeat them again. If all the examples in this and other threads (which you can easily look up) did not convince you or at least made you suspicious than I don't see what I can do.

[Mizuki]

Andre wrote: "Yes, but I am not gonna repeat them again. If all the examples in this and other threads (which you can easily look up) did not convince you or at least made you suspicious than I don't see what I can do. "

You said it all.

[Meg]

Okay, there are some similarities but they are coincidental. I'm writing a fan fiction for The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Mortal Instruments, and writing s novel at the same time. That doesn't mean I plagiarized. And since when is it WRONG for an author to have an inspiration for his/her writing? There are no word for word copies, therefore not plagiarism, not inspiration. All authors get their inspiration from somewhere, mine are Kami Garcia, Cassie, Margaret Stohl, and Stephenie Meyer, but that doesn't mean I'm plagiarizing them. And btw, in fantasy, there are SEVERAL myths from freaking Greek mythology with poxes like dragon and demon pox. Things may be similar, but aren't all books similar? TMI is 100% original, no damn wizards were killing demons and creating runes, so STOP ACCUSING THIS WOMAN OF PLAGIARISM IN THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS GOD!

[Meg]

God people, are you seriously bashing this woman for her name choices? They are names. There's not that many of them. No offense, but quit being so bias and hypocritical.

[Meg]

And damn, comparing TMI to Twilight? It IS NOT A RIPOFF! Talking about how its "unorignial" and a "ripoff" because all vampires have pale skin, wow, just wow. ALL VAMPIRES IN ALMOST EVERY SINGLE KNOWN TO MAN HAVE DAMN PALE SKIN ITS NORMAL FOR IT TO BE THERE!!!!!!! HP is not the only story whos allowed to have white haired people, or arrogant sarcastic hot blondes or annoying a stubborn redheads. So stop saying all these things belong to HP. If that is the case, and those characteristics "belong" to someone, then every single author since the damn beginning of humanity is a plagiarizer i guess, what? Gonna go arrest Shakespeare from the grave? Or is that too soulless for even YOU? More characters are allowed to have daddy problems, and for those of you who say Valentine wasn't "scary" enough and all that other crap, that is how. she. wanted. him. to. be. HP is not the only story allowed to have an antagonist like just saying. And all the Lucian controversy, Lucian is a name. A name is a name. Anyone can have any name they want. (No hate intended in any of my comments im just really mad about this)

[Andre]

Ah, the old "nothing is original" rant again. Because quite frankly this is what you seem to be doing, or otherwise you could have written all that in one post and not several. And if there is no hate intended why do you yourself say that you got mad? Doesn't that imply hate on your part?

Like in the above post of mine, we provided plenty of examples that show that the elements of the books are too similar to be mere coincidence or inspiriation.
But to tackle what you said about vampires:
The pale skin being a defining feature is wrong, both for fiction and especially for folklore.
In fiction there are alot of vampires who are not pale when the author choses them not to be and they also do not get paler once they transform but rather stay the shade that they had in live. In other cases their skin changes to totally inhuman colors.
And this is were folklore jumps in. There vampires were rarely described as pale, quite the contrary, people thought certain corpses were vampires because the corpses looked so fresh and lively in their eyes and in some legends the vampires were even said to be bright red due to all the blood they ingested. In some other tales the vampires had brown leathery skin, like old corpses.
And just because everyone does it, doesn't make something not a ripoff or not unoriginal, as you claimed. When the majority of authors do it exactly alike with a being like a vampire that can easily be varied in appearance and powers and still be recognizable as a vampire (unlike zombies) than they are unoriginal. When the majority prefer to use some sort of blood bond to have their characters "fall in love" instead of developing their relationship than these authors clearly chose to do it like all the others and as such they are unoriginal.

[Zack]

Well yeah Meg, but Cassandra Clare wrote fanfiction (that had plagiarism in it) for Harry Potter that she never got paid for. Of course she's going to be under more scrutiny than other authors, especially when she keeps on using her plagiarist series in her new books.

And please don't call us 'soulless' because we disagree with you.

Oh and also, "TMI is 100% original" you say, and then you go on to say about how a lot of characters have daddy issues, and how demon pox was in Greek Mythology before it was in TMi. But whatever, this last bit is just me being petty

[Andre]

Well 100 % original it isn't, which would be ok, if it would be consistent within itself and work, but quite frankly it doesn't. The series is full of plotholes and retcons, especially since the Shadowhunter Codex came out.

[Meg]

Sorry, I didn't mean to offend anyone at all. I'm just stating my opinion. And when I say "100% original" I mean that it wasn't a ripoff or plagiarized from anything.

[Meg]

When I say I got mad, it's not at you guys at all. It's just the fact that she's getting hate.

[Meg]

Btw I did it in multiple comments because I went back and read different comments.

[Andre]

Ok, well in that case you should better use the reply function or people will not know what you are referring to in such a case.

[Meg]

Sorry, my mistake.

[Jacquelyn]

No... I don't think so... nice connection! But Jace feels better than his father for a reason. Jace fights to protect people whereas Valentine is fighting for a "superior" race (like Lucius) but honestly more like Hitler 0.0
Draco, on the other hand did not fight for any cause. He was told what to do, what to believe, where his loyalties lie. And if he ever contradicted what he was told, or tried to argue, he would be beaten, killed, god only knows.

[Andre]

One piece of advice:
Don't bring Hitler into a conversation when it's clear you do not grasp the gravity of that and there is no actual connection.
Valentine was not about fighting for a superior race, actually based on what Clary (and thereby Clare) stated time and again in the books, the Shadowhunters are supposed to be superior to mundanes (their strength, their "unity", their mission, their "love", their commitments etc.), even if they act like morons, so Valentine is nothing unusual. Valentine, at least in City of Glass (I think he, like other characters, was made up as the story went along), was rather about purifying the world of demonic influence and being frustrated as to why the Shadowhunters were given so little to fight them. And to be frank the more Clare revealed about this world the more of an asshole/idiot Raziel seems to be. Quite frankly, Valentine was in the right to question all this and try to get an answer since the Shadowhunters were doing a pretty poor job. Heck according to the Codex Raziel didn't even give them the seraph blades and rune-enhanced weapons don't even injure a demon significantly more than causing it to retreat. Idris was never meant to be a safe haven for demons (they even had Greater Demon infestions there) only against mundanes and the angels did nothing to prevent the demonic invasion in the first place. As a matter of fact Raziel acts more like a bully than anything else, especially in CoLS.

[Mizuki]

Raizel now does sound like a jerk.=_=

[Mizuki]

Sorry I mean 'Raziel'.

[Meg]

Andre wrote: "One piece of advice:
Don't bring Hitler into a conversation when it's clear you do not grasp the gravity of that and there is no actual connection.
Valentine was not about fighting for a superior r..."
Haha yeah, Raziel was a jerk, but for a good reason. He's an angel, he doesn't give a crap, he's a superior to them! Lol!

[Andre]

But then you have to ask yourself why he did all this stuff in the first place? I mean is that his perverted sense of torture?
Granted that would make more sense then what we are given now.

[Matilda]

There are more than a few similarities between The Mortal Instruments and Harry Potter, true. But really, whenever there's a big phenomena like Harry Potter, it's influence is evident in a huge amounts of books. Sometimes something scary happens, like the post-Twilight vampire flood. Let's face it, that was beyond obvious. At least most of the stuff is subtle. I don't really mind the couple of minute Potter references in TMI, in fact it sort of makes me smile.

But while we're talking about it, there is one character who does seem pretty much identical.

Luke and Lupin.

Seriously.

I wasn't even thinking about the whole werewolf thing at first, but then when I did was like OH.
- Not the character's Dad but massive father figure.
- Close friend of a parent.
- Big player in negotiations/war etc. Not only in the biggest battles, but Lupin tries to get werewolves on Dumbledore's side, Luke leads in the Accords and leads them into Alicante...)
- Both were originally wizard/shadowhunter. Bitten and turned.
- Both are the shabby, daggy characters... There personalities are pretty much the same.
- They give the same sort of advice.
- Both get the girl they want, eventually.
- Lucian, Lupin...

I could go on.

GUYS, THEY ARE THE SAME PERSON.

(This also kinda makes me worry about Luke and Jocelyn's fate, to be honest. Or else some of the characters unexpectedly being announced godparents...)

[Matilda]

Andre wrote: "One piece of advice:
Don't bring Hitler into a conversation when it's clear you do not grasp the gravity of that and there is no actual connection.
Valentine was not about fighting for a superior r..."

Oi. Rude.

[Matilda]

^
Yeah just a bit of good old hearty speculation :) I wouldn't be surprised if one of them did, to be honest though. From the way Clare's talking about TDA, with the whole we shall only see the ones that 'survive' the last TMI book, I'd say there's definitely going to be some casualties. But if she chickens out in her ending (Clockwork Princess was a bit, dodgy, wasn't it?) I wouldn't be surprised if she picks a character who'll give us some tears but not a tsunami, if you get what I mean. Kinda like Max in the original end to the series.

Apologies. That was so very, very off topic.

[Andre]

Well kind off, but I personally think there will be some cop-outs and the like for the end of TMI as well. In the Bane Chronicles deaths and all were also never shown, sure we were told Magnus experienced this and that but apart from some hate from the Shadowhunters and a slightly homophobic comment from Raphael we get nothing, not even names. But I better stop about that or this will turn into a Magnus rant.

Back to similarities:
Luke also is called Lucian Greymark and that sounds suspicially like Fenrir Greyback from HP and Lucien from Underworld, actually the whole vampire-werewolf thing is similar to that (by the way in the Codex there is no mentioning that these two species descent from enemy demons) and even the Codex has a slight flair I can only call "British", because if its a Codex for young Shadowhunters and they are global, why is the Consul likened to a Prime Minister and the Accords to the Bill of Rights? How many countries even have a prime minister and how many people would even know what the Bill of Rights is? Globally speaking.

[Lola]

Andre wrote: "Well kind off, but I personally think there will be some cop-outs and the like for the end of TMI as well. In the Bane Chronicles deaths and all were also never shown, sure we were told Magnus expe..."

I am a huge fan of both the Hp and MI books and have read them many times.I have just recently found out about the whole plagiarizing mess going on with Cassandra Clare and I think that it's unfair that she is getting so much hate over it when nobody is really sure what has happened. If she had copied some of J.K Rowling's work in the MI series then they never would have been published and even though she did write a HP fanfiction that doesn't mean that she copied any of Rowling's work in the MI series.

I don't think that any of Clare's characters are similar to any of the Hp characters not even Valentine and Voldemort. Both of those villains are different in many ways. Voldemort is incapable of loving, he can't really be called human, his biggest fear is dying and his evil goal is to pretty much take over the world and get the muggles to work for him. Valentine, I believe, is capable of loving and does or at least used to love Jocelyn and his sons, he has no over the top fear of dying and his evil goal is to purify the Clave and to stop downworlders from becoming to powerful not take over the world.

Another thing that really annoys me is that people think that Clare got mundane from muggle. However mundane actually means that the person is ordinary and not some spiritual god or person that can kill demons with a sword so Clare had all rights to use it to describe people that weren't shadowhunters.

Anyway aren't all authors meant to have gotten their inspiration from somewhere or someone, in reality we could blame every single author for copying but changing someone else's work. Don't all villains have some sort of evil plan to take over the world, country, or group of people? Nothing is truly original anymore and maybe it never was you can blame almost anyone in the history of literature of copying someone else's work.

[Andre]

Mundane doesn't just mean ordinary, it means of lower value.
Also inspiration is not the same thing as blatant copying. And yes Clare did copy, massively. And there is always some fan with the excuse that there "is nothing original". Yes there is. Even if it doesn't, it doesn't mean that you have to mess it up like this. Clare simply ripps off from others and puts it together without knowing what she did there. She messes up ages, characterization, powers, fighting styles, history, backstories and family constellations. Her LGBT and "non-white" characters are basically a bunch of offensive stereotypes and her male heroes either whiny douchebags or assholes with daddy issues. Her heroines and leaders are dumber than dumb and her plots predictable. And when she has "characters" that actually could be progressive and likeable she messes that up as well by either portraying them as the "bad ones" or having them act completely unfitting to their backstories (like with Ragnor, Jem and Jessamine).

And as for this "they would have never published it" stuff: Have you ever read more than one of these generic post-Meyer books? They are so similar that its a wonder the author's have not been sued yet.

[[deleted user]]

Actually, any similarities aren't going to be coincidence; she wrote the original draft as a fan-fiction of Harry Potter. I haven't read City of Bones, so I don't know what all of the similarities are. But there ya go. The rough draft was a fan-fiction. She altered it when she liked the story so she could publish it. pretty interesting.

[Andre]

I know some stuff from her HP fanfiction and several passages are directly copied into City of Bones. So it is not technically plagiarism in the case of the book but it is definitely unoriginal. And that is one of the most common critique points of her books. They totally lack original thought, the best stuff she has is usally ripped off of other sources, she tries to cram in whatever she thinks makes her cool (like her LGBT characters [aka the biggest stereotypes in the book]) and trendy and all. When I read City of Bones I was reminded of so many popular titles of the last 20 years that I could no longer belief that is a coincidence. And that is only one part of the problem, another is that she seems to be incapable of handling what she herself created. The chracterization is all over the place and seems to follow no pattern whatsoever apart from "characters has to be here and there and say this and that" and the books are giant consistency fail. There are numerous plotholes in every book, she forgets supernatural powers, decisions, backgrounds, story elements and has a crappier world building in my eyes than Stephenie Meyer. In addition she is totally in love with ridiculous and unnecessary purple prose, weird similes (e.g. eyes as blue as a night sky in hell), kills suspense more efficiently than sleeping pills, has no idea about narrative structure and keeping focused on the plot and quite frankly seems to forget what she herself wrote in the plot. What is starting to annoy even fans is her inability to let go of the world she started in City of Bones. She has brought out 5 books for her first series, a second trilogy, a bunch of short stories and a companion guide (which makes the holes in her world building even bigger) and plans two other new series already. Even fans tell her to stop already.

[Andre]

We are not rude, we are stating our opinion.
How can you enjoy the story when it has so many plotholes, ignores its own plotpoints so often and makes next to no sense?
How can anyone believe even half the stuff of what is literally claimed about the characters? How the characters act is usually the direct opposite of what is claimed about them. No idea how much of TMI you actually read but in her books Clare basically just fills the pages with purple prose that is non-sensical and totally useless and she forgets half the stuff she herself introduced.
Her characters are badly written stereotypes, if not complete copies of each other and her world building is even worse than Meyer's. And speaking of that: What where you even trying to say with has Meyer actually ever said "I'm so sick and tired of people copying my stories"?
What relevance does that have to people copying her? You are talking about the woman who threw a hissy fit because her draft was leaked on the internet, do you honestly think she would keep track on who copies her?
In addition I would tell it to Clare's and to Meyer's face what I said here. And if a friend of mine wrote such a story I would also tell them what I think is wrong with them. Because no one seemed to have done it to Clare.

[Mizuki]

Wallawalladingdong wrote: "So what if it's unoriginal? If she enjoyed writing it and there are people who enjoy reading it, who are we to judge? Additionally, this whole 'post-Meyer' syndrome that the world has is a ridiculo..."

I can only say, Clare can write whatever she wants, her readers can enjoy whatever they like, and we can also criticize her books, pointing out how unoriginal and badly written they are without being told we're rude just because we expressed our dislike.

[Andre]

Mizuki wrote: "I can only say, Clare can write whatever she wants, her readers can enjoy whatever they like, and we can also criticize her books, pointing out how unoriginal and badly written they are without being told we're rude just because we expressed our dislike."
Exactly, if fans have the right to praise and squeel about the books so we have the right to say why we do not like it.

[L Jay]

I believe most of this comes from her history of plagiarism while writing the Draco Trilogy. She was caught taking portions of her fan fiction directly from published works and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Those haters were individuals who noticed this theft. Their are similarities between Harry Potter and TMI, however the daemon components and fighting could have come from her other love of Buffy. Writers get inspiration from many places and a good editor will pick out any blatant plagiarism, so I'm sure there isn't any in TMI. However, I have found that those who borrow other people's work without proper citations have a tendency to continue to do so. I have also found similarities between Fifty Shades and Twilight, however, that was another fan fiction turned original work. When your work is inspired by another's, it may be difficult to hide the traces.