Thread by @AlexandraErin

So to be serious on Bad Art Friend/Kidney Person discourse for a bit... as a satirist I'm not super comfortable with the consensus that Sonya Larson is a plagiarist.

My understanding is that she had the actual text of Dawn's note in an early draft as a placeholder, which...

...is how I wrote this post, and also my Hallelujah/Smash post earlier. And many of my non-Twitter, long-form satirical posts have passages that began their creative life as unaltered text copied and pasted from the satirized source.

https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1445500115666358286

It took me five or six tries to get through the New York Times Magazine article so it's entirely possible I've missed something else that I would agree is plagiarism, but if it's "earlier versions of the story contained unaltered text", or "she copied the general idea", I can't.

Because while Larson's story is not ~*about*~ Dawn (the Dawn-satirizing character is not the main character, nor is she the point of the story), a point of that character is to satirize Dawn, albeit in a way that I think she did not intend for a general audience to know about.

Okay.

Parody is still fair use, though, and unless we think she meant "This prose is too good, I can't possibly exceed its beauty." and not "HA, this is comedy gold." I still don't see it as plagiarism.

https://twitter.com/AnnieBahde/status/1445564187682369546

Okay, as more people point out this line, I feel like people fixing on the "too good" part as what makes it plagiarism is an example of no-tone-on-the-internet.

If you believe Larson acknowledged Dawn as the better writer and intended to profit on her talent, sure. I get that.

Yeah, see, I don't think I'm changing anyone's minds so I won't keep arguing, but I honestly don't know how anyone can look at this mess and think that at any point of it, Sonya Larson's state of mind was "I can't outdo this woman's writing."

https://twitter.com/jayn_sand/status/1445565879534505990

As for "Was it presented as parody, or as fiction?"... I don't believe that's relevant. I don't think a work as a whole *needs* to be parody for it to contain parodic elements that are protected as parody. If the law disagrees with me on that point, I disagree with it.

And if you don't see how the Rose character satirizes Dawn... honestly, I don't know what to say about that. It's so clearly what's happening.

If you think that an author who wants to comment on something about you by incorporating a social media post or other statement into a work of fiction is plagiarizing you and *not* engaging in protected speech... you're certainly free to think that. But I don't, can't, and won't.

Can it be rude? Jerky? Unwarranted? Uncalled for? Off base? Sure. It can be any or all of those things.

But if it's plagiarism, I won an Alfie Award for plagiarizing the Sad Puppies.

And you can still think everybody sucks. You can still think it's plagiarism, for that matter. I can't stop you. But you can also think that everybody sucks without thinking it's plagiarism. I'm not trying to swing anybody's position on the AITA meter.

It's just that as a sometimes-satirist, I'm not thrilled with the discourse that holds that the literary equivalent of the "Sponge Bob repeating back somebody else's words in a mocking tone" meme is ethically the same thing as copying someone's answer to an essay question.

The doctrine of fair use is based on the idea that we must be free to comment on things, which can require quoting/incorporating them.

Would it have gone better if Larson had cited the source? I have to imagine that Dawn would be angrier if she'd had it rubbed in her face.

And if you're wondering how she could effectively satirize someone who was unidentified... well, it's possible that the satire element had a very small intended audience. And it's also possible she was more broadly satirizing a type of behavior rather than one specific person.

If your bottom line is "She copied words without attribution. That's plagiarism."... we're just not going to agree. And I know internet culture makes a big deal out of "Not my property. All characters belong to company. No infringement intended."... citations aren't magic...

...and I don't believe fair use is actually powered by proper citations. When someone incorporates a parodic element into a larger work, they don't usually footnote to say "This is from X. I'm commenting on Y. All rights reserved by Z."

Anyway. I said I'm not going to argue and then I wrote like twenty more tweets, so I'm going to tie it off here and turn off notifications.

Parody is protected. Parody isn't plagiarism. That's my take here.