by Atwood » Sat Dec 05, 2009 1:23 pm
I really don't know where you guys are getting this 'almost exactly the same' thing. I read through both carefully, and the similarities are very superficial; the characters' personalities, which are after all the important part, are completely different. There are only two ways to have a plague hound as a usable character that I can think of, and those are either making it a distinct species (like a hellhound) or by giving a canine plague that it survives through either being immune but contagious (Typhoid Mary) or being immortal. In both cases, it's more interesting to frame it as a double-edged sword style of curse than just happening for no reason, and if you look back you'll see a lot of forms using the mysterious malevolent spirit trope as the giver of that curse. Really, the two forms for Blight had far less in common with each other than they did with other forms for different characters. To prove this, I ran both through a document similarity scan. The results: 16.8%, well below levels indicating plagiarization in things written on the same subject (and remarkably low considering they were written for the same design, let alone one that has a limited range of options - it could only be a plague hound).
Most common significant words between the two: blight, plague, fear, humans, never, wolf
Number of words in common: 93. Number of unique words: Jinx = 188 of 790, wibeke = 273 of 1148, so each of you had a 24.8% unique word rating.
In short, there is nothing suggesting that Jinx copied the form in any way, and all the similarities are well within the realm of coincidence. Don't accuse people of copying unless you have real solid reason for it, m'kay? It's something I take extremely seriously.