A lot of people read a book and immediately go "Oh, you ripped off such-and-such author with so-and-so passage because bla-bla-bla!" And frankly, it pisses me off. In the information age of google, it is hard to come up with original ideas, I understand that-but that doesn't mean it's bloody impossible.

I took some flak from another user (name withheld to be polite), for example, that a character I wrote a short-story on was a ripoff of Artemis Fowl. I can see what parallels he drew, but they are wrong.

Read the article here (and his/her comments) to understand the point I'm trying to make: www.planetminecraft.com/blog/sevastopol/

Did the author of the Hunger Games ripoff 1984? Did she steal from Valve's "Half Life" game series? That's all I could think when I was forced to read the book for school (yes, my school system is that bad)-and it wasn't a very nice thought. I couldn't enjoy the book because I was so blinded by my feelings about it-that it was a ripoff with no originality, and that it was boring, which it was, not to mention the author's many differences in opinion over what makes good writing. I'd say she's wrong, but her bank account would beg to differ-I couldn't enjoy it, and never will be able to.
Read this, and remember it next time you think an author stole another author's idea. (By the way: 1984 was a dystopian-set, big-brother, commie-scare book about a super strict society someone in the 60's-70's predicted the next decade[s] would bring)

Aleric Fowl isn't the billionaire criminal mastermind Artemis is. He's living on the street, and he isn't decisively smart; in this story, I would say he's about the average intelligence you can expect from a Freshman dropout.

[size=10pt]As for the original Aleric Fowl (The SciFi character), he wasn't a criminal, and he wasn't exceptionally smart; he was gifted at piloting.[/size]
[size=10pt]
So no, neither Alerics are "Intelligent child-criminals."[/size]

[size=10pt]And it isn't hard to draw similarities like this for any literary character and say "Oh, such-and-such author ripped off so-and-so author."[/size]

[size=10pt]John Scalzi, who wrote the "Old Man's War" trilogy (which is amazing) had a character who didn't really want to fight a war go through shitty bootcamp and fight aliens he knew nothing about. His book came out not long after "The Forever War" by Joe Haldmen (I think!) is about a man put drafted into shitty bootcamp who fights aliens humanity knows nothing about.[/size]
[size=medium]In Old Man's War, the main character is taken from Earth and denied readmittance. In TFW, the main character can't return to earth because time-dilation (brought on my time-travel) caused him to age months well Earth aged centuries.[/size]

[size=medium]Should I go on?[/size]

[size=medium]Luke Skywalker rips off Finn the Half-Great, a nobody inbetween and nothing special child of a giant and a human who goes on to defeat a terrible evil and find true love. Of course the Irishman that wrote Finn the Half-Great did a job one million times better than Lucas.[/size]

[size=medium]Lara Croft does not like to kill, yet she risks her life and the lives of others just like Indiana Jones, who is in the same predicament (except Lora carries guns and he doesn't).[/size]

[size=medium]There's a book I read last summer (name forgotten) about a boy from our generation placed in a fantastical realm of magic and all that shazzle. Douglas Adam's main character in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is taken from earth and put into one of aliens and science, where everything is incredibly confusing and reshapes his understanding of life.[/size]

[size=medium]You see where I'm getting with this?[/size]