On Bad Faith Criticism: The "Rip-Off"

 Happy Feast Day of the Assumption! It’s one of those feast days that it’s easy to keep track of–it’s nine months before Christmas. 

Apparently some idjit on Wired decided to trash talk Brandon Sanderson? Sanderson’s response is much more gracious than I think any of us would be (and his fans have been), considering it’s a trash feature article.

Anyhow I considered talking about Fullmetal Alchemist, but I was struggling to differentiate the idea from a Note I did at some other point. I’d have to go back and re-read the thing I wrote. So we’re talking about a video I saw some of the other day!

On Bad Faith Criticism: Specifically, the “Rip-Off” Accusation

Somehow or another YouTube’s algorithm recommended to me Filmento’s review/dissection of the fantasy film Seventh Son (I suspect because I’ve been watching a lot of videos of film criticism lately) and I figured, why the heck not? I’ll start watching. And I didn’t really like it, mostly because I think it missed a couple of key points in discussing the movie. I didn’t finish the video, and I’m sure the YouTuber is generally an okay fellow.

And to get something out of the way right out of the gate: this essay is not meant to be any sort of defense of Seventh Son. I’m not going to try to convince you that it’s actually a good movie if you look at it the right way; it’s not. It’s really not. Seventh Son is a pretty bad movie.

[Part of what turned me off from this video was also the claim that one of the two only enjoyable things about this movie is that Jeff Bridges gave a good performance. This is a lie; his performance may be enjoyable, it’s not by any stretch good. He’s doing a very strange accent/voice. I saw it claimed on TV Tropes that it’s because he had fake teeth in during production, but I can’t imagine why given you never see these teeth.]

Very early on, when describing this film’s premise, Filmento implies that the film is a rip-off of Lord of the Rings, The Witcher, and Dungeons & Dragons. After all, it’s a high fantasy film with plenty of CGI spells and monsters, starring a guy whose job it is to hunt monsters. This struck me as a bit dishonest because A) none of those are exclusive to the three intellectual properties, and B) I don’t think Filmento ever brings up that Seventh Son is (rather loosely) based off of a book series by Joseph Delaney. A series that confusingly has several titles in different regions–I read the first few as The Last Apprentice–but it’s been titled Spook’s Apprentice and Wardstone Chronicles–but a book series that is its own very distinct thing.

There’s a lot of bad faith criticism out there, but the idea that something is a “rip-off” because it shares superficial or basic elements is silly. Stories about monster hunters existed long before The Witcher was written–and the adaptation cited in the video didn’t exist until years after the Wardstone books were published. And let’s not even go into how silly it is that one might view any epic fantasy story as a rip-off of The Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons. 

Just imagine, if you would, that I wrote or produced a musical adaptation of Last of the Mohicans and some critic dubbed me a hack because “Clearly, as a musical about American history, it’s just a rip-off of Hamilton!”, not realizing that there are other musicals about American history, and that Last of the Mohicans is a book that has existed for quite a bit longer than Lin-Manuel Miranda has been alive.

It also reminded me of the claim that the late great Sir Terry Pratchett received sometimes that Ponder Stibbons and the Unseen University were clearly meant to be parodies of Harry Potter and Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry. Pratchett joked that he used a time machine to parody Rowling’s books because he wrote his first, though he didn’t know what the illustrator used (“but obviously, he used something”).

I also don’t think that taking and copying specific elements is necessarily bad if it is in service to an original story. Into the Spider-Verse did its best to use an art style reminiscent of comic books, and introduced each Spider-hero with a comic book being thrown in front of the camera. 2022’s Puss in Boots: The Last Wish shot for an animation style that looked like a storybook and introduced its outlaw characters by flashing a WANTED poster on screen. But Puss in Boots is a very different film from Into the Spider-Verse, and while there are a couple of copied stylistic choices,  I don’t think anyone worth listening to would say one is a rip-off of the other.

Before making the “It’s a rip-off!” criticism, I think there are some things to consider:

ONE: Is it intentional homage or parody? Is the element being copied meant to deconstructed, reconstructed, honored, or lampooned? Then no, it’s not a rip-off, you’re just not fully understanding the work in question. Which itself could be a criticism–if a piece of media fails to convey its exact meaning, then it could be because it didn’t do it very well! But that’s not the same thing as ripping off someone else.

[I remember being at YALLFest one year and an author was confused by a negative review that said her book felt too much like Labyrinth. “Yeah, because it was inspired by Labyrinth! That’s the point!”]

TWO: Is this a basic element that’s been done plenty of other times in other pieces of fiction? A school of magic, an enchanted land, space opera–all of these are pretty common Plot fixtures, so it’s dumb to look at them and assume that it’s plagiarism right off the bat. A high fantasy that doesn’t feature elves, dwarves, an evil artifact, or a journey across the land to defeat the Dark Lord isn’t a copy of Lord of the Rings. Being high fantasy is not enough of a qualifier.

THREE: the source material. A lot of people called the Disney John Carter a lame copy of science-fiction tropes, not realizing that John Carter of Mars was what inspired a lot of those sci-fi stories they were fans of–the original books were landmarks in the genre. If the original form of the story’s older than the thing you’re accusing it of ripping off of, then I’m less likely to take this accusation seriously.

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