Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-108.44.85.110-20130806063343/@comment-7472785-20130921101106

Let's be realistic - there are only so many variations of plot lines and character builds, and with the abundance of fantasy and animes around, there is bound to be something similar around.

And that in itself is not a bad thing at all. The core is whether the plot in itself is coherent, the character build believable and the story as a whole told interestingly, suspenseful, captivating or whatever adjective you can come up with which holds you to follow a story.

A diverse audience as this will have seen and read a ton of stuff in the same genre and, let's not forget, authors also are influenced by what they have read or seen and liked previously.

My entrance into mangas and anime was 'Record of Lodoss War' - yes, I'm that old - and as this story I came from the early RPG crowd. That was when we still wrote our own plots, were game mastering ourselves, discussed whole nights on how to apply which rules. Our games were totally unplugged and images were mostly in our heads only. And we played with real people who we could look into the eyes - that is a big factor for the discussion culture... (Which here is actually very decent!)

That said, the point is that any 'does that remind you of...?' or 'could that be an allusion to...?' questions are IMHO moot - take the story as it is, enjoy and/or critisize it, but don't measure it against others which should stand on their own.