Thoughts of Plagiarism

Written by Taoan, 2021 Cohort

This week we talked about plagiarism. Because I studied Fine Arts I was rarely writing papers, except for the graduation thesis. In other words, I have no experience with plagiarism in academic writing. If my memory serves me right, our instructor told us there is a website where I can check the similarities of our thesis. Our work would be safe if it is lower than around 12%. All of my classmates passed so I can only guess that people who got higher than this number were not allowed to graduate, and I am not sure if they could rewrite the following year or got expelled from the school directly.

However, as a former art student, I know what happens when an art student plagiarizes or copies other people’s work in their project or work. I still remember when I was in the university during the graduation season, I can recognize imitations being exposed on social media. The people who were exposed put the original work with it together for other people to compare. If it looked similar, people would judge them, I believe in every case, the students were reprimanded by their respective schools..

Now I am a student in Canada, I learned that plagiarism is severely punished here, plagiarism can mean even not having followed the correct format (MLA, APA) of quotation in your paper.

Writing about this topic, reminds me of a conversation with my classmates when I was in university. Some of our staff (mostly the director or producer) will put something they love from other artists they liked as Eastern eggs into their films or games. For example, I hear that Hidetaka Miyazaki, the game director of Dark Souls series, is a huge fan of a manga called Berserk. And we can see some elements that are similar to the manga. The most obvious one was a weapon named Greatsword is very similar to the weapon Dragon Slayer, which is owned by Gus, the main character of Berserk and a monster called Sulyvahn’s Beast that looks like a complex with wolf and crocodile with long black fur, is very similar to Gus’s inner darkness.

And I learn that this is called ”Homage” in English (according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_(arts)). Back to the beginning of this paragraph, I told my classmate I was confused about the difference between homage and plagiarism, and he gave me an interesting answer: maybe the thing that you “plagiarized” became a classic, then your “plagiarism” has become homage. I know it is not true, but this point of view is very interesting, because both of us know plagiarism is to be frowned upon, yet we always want to bring homage to the things we love. Overall, plagiarism is bad and deserves a has serious punishment. We should not step over the line.