Hello.
As the Centralized Writing Authority is currently looking for me, I unfortunately cannot disclose who I am at this moment1. However, this doesn't mean that I will leave you empty-handed. I will show you how you can get away with plagiarism, and even show you how an SCP concept I am working on is the result of complete and utter plagiarism. Of course, methods and results may vary, but this is how I do it. Hopefully some insight into my process will unlock some secrets for you in the future.
STEP 1: Required Skills Needed to Plagiarize
Yeah, I'm sorry. Unfortunately getting away with plagiarism is a skill, and it's a skill that you need other previous skills to know — like the final skill in a skill tree. One skill you have to know is just identifying a vibe™ that you want to hit. All the things you like sorta kinda have a certain vibe™ to them, that makes them feel like how they feel. Usually this vibe is pretty subjective but has some sort of combination of factors that makes it somewhat ubiquitous or common — generally a mix of visual, story, and other styles that meld together into the vibe. If you have a specific media in mind you want to rip off build off of, hitting the same vibe it does is the easiest way to go about this.
For example, imagine if Blade Runner (1982) was set in the daytime and had tons of lush green forests all around everywhere. Not really melding into the vibe, right? Well, that's how the international theatrical cut of Blade Runner ended. And believe me, it's a very contentious ending. Anyways, if you're trying to achieve a vibe in your story/idea, then you definitely want to make sure it's at least internally cohesive.
I'm going to go ahead and say, for the purposes of this essay, that the "big three" in vibe are visuals, story, and audio. Since we're on the SCP wiki and including audio is liable to get you shot in most cases, you're going to have to do the next-best thing and focus on your visuals and story. As this is a web format, an author is able to achieve a lot of stuff that they'd otherwise wouldn't be able to do — CSS is your friend here. Since we're talking about Blade Runner, I'll bring up a cyberpunk-esque CSS theme inspired by it: Neon Dystopia. Using (or making, in my case) themes that are visually based off of the vibe or media is a great way to instantly make a connection without being 110% overt about it. This is a writing essay, not a design one, so I can't talk about this in depth here; but we'll circle back around to this later.
The next skill you'll have to learn, doubly unfortunately, is how to plagiarize from a LOT of media. For some reason, this den of geeks and nerds has read or watched everything popular under the sun. So if you wanna get away with plagiarism, you're gonna have to read or watch much more than they have. After all, if you're doing this, you don't want to come up with original ideas — so you're really gonna have to know a lot of other people's ideas instead. The best authors plagiarize from that one 1980s anime OVA nobody in their immediate circle has heard about and is so obscure that it has a sub-100 word Wikipedia article and they'll have to pay $130 for the only artbook of it in the entirety of the internet because quite literally not a single fucking person in the USA or Japan has a copy of the original manga or talks about it2.
Anyways. This is a strat that all your favorite on- and off-site authors do, so follow in the footsteps of the best if you're going to do it. The ideal way to do this if you're trying to emulate something, you want to immerse yourself in it; let's take, uh, Gundam for example. Gundam F91 (1991) is my favorite Gundam media ever3 — and Gundam, at its core, is really just humans fighting for rights and other things in space using giant robots (a war drama). This is great but I also kinda don't give a shit — not to downplay the themes of the work, but I work on a "I like stealing things I find cool" methodology and often never, if rarely, think about the themes of what I write (but I digress). To immerse yourself into the Gundam mecha scp, you want to just consume a swath of media — watch UC-era Gundam shows, read the Gundam Sentinel photo-novel. But you shouldn't just stop at Gundam, either. Even though a lot of other Real Robot are semi-fundamentally incompatible by virtue of it being humans vs. other space aliens, you want to watch them anyways because you'll get good ideas of other things you can steal. For example, Heavy Metal L-Gaim (another Tomino show with mecha designs by one of the real OGs, Mamoru Nagano) has this one character I'm particularly fond of, Gaw Ha Leccee, who is a kickass redhead and the best character of that show; I like putting versions or 'flavors' of her in my stories as other characters (she even gets her own shoutout in a fake anime wikipedia piece). Consume media from the same genre or same visual style (e.g. for a movie inspired by 80s Italian horror, watch a lot of giallo and try replicating it in your work). If you've been perceptive, you'll have noticed I'm starting to slip into the next step, which I'll continue there.
STEP 2: Actually Plagiarizing
OK, so you've figured out your vibe (or picked a media you want to emulate) and you've done your 'research' and consumed a lot of media. What now? The answer is a bit vague and just depends on you, because this sort of plagiarizing only works if you plagiarize shit you like or find cool. If you plagiarize stuff you hate, why not just make something up on your own, y'know? As an example of my process, I'll take you through some articles I'm working on:
- 「機械兵士戦記 ベガ００９１」( MS Wars: Vega 0091 )
- 「アークシード」( Arkseed )
which are both sci-fi mecha articles with different premises, but both inspired by various anime. You don't have to be inspired by just anime: SCP-5420 is based on one of my favorite sci-fi shows of all time, Space: 1999, while SCP-5050 is partially based on the Fifth Doctor era era of my other favorite sci-fi show, Doctor Who. Vega 0091 is based largely on Gundam F91 as previously mentioned, while Arkseed is more 'original' and a mish-mash of more media. There's levels to your plagiarism; you can be quick and dirty and really only take from one or two primary things. Alternatively, you can be a little bit more disciplined and pull from a lot more stuff.
Vega 0091's "universe" is largely transplanted from Gundam, particularly the UC stories (0079, 0080, 0083, Sentinel, Zeta) with snippets from the later UC media, and so are its visuals. If you've ever watched old fandubbed anime, you may be familiar with the ubiquitous yellow-sans-serif-with-black-outline subtitles that usually show up. I combine this look with some similar graphic design from the trailer of F91 to setup the universe like if it were an anime:
But ██████, you say, can you really open an SCP like this? Yes. As long as your vibes are immaculate you can absolutely just fucking balls to the wall do it. Sometimes, studying the graphic design of your vibe show/movie and transplanting just a little bit of that flavor can go a long way in your draft.
Vega 0091's characters are also mostly transplanted from Gundam. If you're familiar with Gundam, you'll know of a character named Char Aznable and the series trope to include a 'Char clone' in all of its media. The hallmarks of said 'Char clone' is usually some sort of face mask, blonde hair, a red mobile suit (mech), and a position as an honorable villain or a main 'rival' to the main character. Vega 0091 has Gelene Galvers, who I've described as follows —
Gelene Galvers - An ace pilot directly under Azil's [the main villain] command and also a pilot with similar abilities to Perrin [the protagonist]. While outwardly pleasant in general, she is ruthless in combat and often has no regard to stray shots she takes while fighting inside a colony. Comes to view Perrin as a "real fight" compared to the Vega IV resistance pilots. Flies a special-made 'light' MS to accentuate her speed in battle. Wears a mask over the upper part of her face as part of augmentation done to her eyes.
She was primarily cooked up as a thought of "what if Char was like really dishonorable, and a woman4?". Sometimes you get really great 'original' characters by stealing characters you like and modifying them in your story.
Another example, this time from Arkseed. Arkseed is a mix of several mecha anime, one of which is the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross / Macross: Do You Remember Love?. In Macross, humanity is fighting against a humanoid alien race that are 5x as tall as humans. However, their women and their men are actively hostile to each other and don't interact outside of killing each other in war — additionally, due to lore reasons (it'd take a while to explain) they see human culture as unthinkable and insane. One of my favorite characters is the Meltrandi (all-women giant alien) species's ace pilot, Milia Fallyna. Seriously, she's kickass. During the course of the series/movie, she fights human ace pilot Max Jenius several times. Eventually, they end up respecting each other so much they go from enemies to lovers and are the first human/alien couple in history (she gets downsized from 10 meters down to regular human size). Despite this, Milia is just as hotheaded, stubborn, and confident in herself and her skill. Unfortunately due to her lack of knowledge of human culture and social norms, we get her doing some pretty crazy things like the famous baby tossing scene (immediately after telling a friend to "make one [baby] of your own"). Of course, as one of my favorites, I wanted to transplant that extremely-confident-and-skilled-but-also-socially-misplaced alien women into Arkseed. The result was Kaja Gephardt, pictured below.
She ended up with a similar character design too, but probably because I have a soft spot for weird anime hair colors like greens and blues. Her backstory and personality are pretty similar to Milia, but have some differences that end up differentiating the character — she's not as socially inept, yet has some difficulty in keeping human friends. She also has a pretty human name, which she picked by choice in order to assimilate better with her military peers.
If you had never seen Macross previously, you may have thought that I just came up with a decent-ish character up on my own, but no. I STOLE a character and "didn't make it look obvious"!
Conceptually, Arkseed isn't just from anime either — some of it is inspired by videogames (specifically Shogo: Mobile Armor Division as well as Oni (the Bungie game)). In fact, here's a handy list of concepts I took and from which media they're from:
- SDF Macross/Macross DYRL — humanoid alien race larger than humans by a significant degree
- Shogo MAD — three-way conflict between three organizations (one terrorist, one corporate, one military)
- Oni — large-scale setting: the Earth, which is mostly uninhabitable and controlled by a single government
- Silent Moebius — one of the primary conflicts: attacks from a new, extradimensional entity that threatens civilians in the city setting
- Appleseed — semi-post-apocalypse, cyberpunkia setting with 80s flair/trappings. The primary visual inspiration for the overall idea/draft, and the name inspiration
- Patlabor — ideas about how mecha would operate from a police capacity in a metropolitan setting
- Orguss — the idea of a dimensional 'accident'/incident that affects the entire Earth
- Ideon — the concept of an uncovered giant machine really being an eldritch god/living ancient artifact
This list is not comprehensive. Characters in Arkseed were also taken from other shows like Southern Cross and SPT Layzner. Of course, these are all mecha or mecha-adjacent; the point is, the more you know/read/watch, the more ideas you can keep in your mind sphere to STEAL and mold together into something "original" (at least, original enough to your new audience!).
Logo for Arkseed (アークシード, aakushiido), stylistically inspired by that of Silent Moebius's.
Plagiarizing doesn't just extend to concepts — you can even do this for scenes you find cool as well! For example, this hyper cool scene from the first Patlabor movie where a manmade floating megacity base structure, the Ark, is being scuttled in order to prevent a computer virus from triggering across all of Tokyo. The imagery of the Ark's outer form being shedded off and seeing the center of the tower rise from the sea like that, to me, is incredibly badass. So much so that I combined it with another scene from Gundam F91 where protagonists Seabook Arno and Cecily Fairchild fight a massive floating "mobile armor" in space (and persevere due to love). In the climax of Vega 0091, a formerly-benign large starship is "shedded" and the center is revealed to be a transforming armored station with heavy weaponry that our protagonists-and-lovers must fight to destroy before it kills millions aboard a floating space colony. See how that works?
In Arkseed, there's a scene with a beam of light extending into the sky that's inspired by a snippet from the Genesis Climber Mospeada opening that never gets used in the show itself, but I thought was pretty cool. This scene from Appleseed also gets a shoutout, as it's inspired many a Tom Clancy-esque sequence in my own stuff — but particularly a similar scene in Arkseed. Once you've seen enough media, you can isolate and come up with a chunk of scenes that you want to include in your piece and simply figure out a way to "link" them together in the story. If you've seen even MORE media, "linking" will become second nature to you because you'll automatically start filling in narratives with quasi-scenes stolen from various different sources that lines up with what you want almost perfectly (downside is that all your narratives are movie or tv episode "length" if that's what you watch the most). Nobody can tell it's plagiarism if you're stealing from like, twenty different things at once. It's even harder for people to tell if you're stealing scenes AND visuals from stuff too!
STEP 3: Be Honest
Here's the cincher: if you're gonna steal from shit, the trick to not getting caught is being honest about your influences. Legit. Ideally you are stealing shit because you actually LIKE what you are stealing, and you should be proud about liking cool shit from things you like. If you're super clear that you're plagiarizing stuff, you can be SO into it that you unintentionally gaslight people via pure vibe energy that you're doing absolutely nothing wrong! But seriously, as long as you're honest about it nobody can tell. You want to get away with plagiarism? Be honest. That's the secret.
Eventually, if you do all of this for long enough, you can also end up doing all of it subconsciously and pretty much forget that this is a conscious process for most people. When you're in this Zen state, it may be a bit hard to write in other ways that are more technically attuned instead of vibing your way through everything. But if you want to Plagiarize and Vibe your way through writing, that's pretty much how you do it!
Anyways, I hope this essay helped you understand a working example of plagiarizing and not being caught. This writing style isn't for everyone, but it works out for those it is for!
Good luck. I'm gonna go watch some Dragonar. ↑ ← ↑ !!