We Need To Talk... About Plagiarism

The first time I was accused of plagiarism on Literotica-or anywhere, for that matter-it happened in the comments of "Philanthropic," a story I published in February 2023. A few different anonymous accusers chimed in, but my favorite was:

Fairly certain I've read this before, certainly NOT original, stole Satin Desires story.

https://classic.literotica.com/s/indecent-proposal-9

I had a good, long laugh at that one. First off, the actual username is satindesires, who published one of my very favorite takes on the "Indecent Proposal" trope in April 2022. More importantly, you see that -9 at the end of the URL? That means there were nine previous stories named "Indecent Proposal" on the site before that one.

Of the stories still available on the site, all those in Loving Wives center around a wealthy man paying for a wife to spend the night (or longer) with him, to varying effects on her marriage. The first in Loving Wives was published in 2005.

More to the point, though, that was originally the plot and title of a movie released in 1993, based on a novel published in 1988. Chances are the idea existed before that, too. Like a lot of story starters in Loving Wives, especially the ones that draw the most outrage, it reads like a cuckold porn setup with a marital drama payoff, rather than an erotic one.

Did satindesires add something to the trope? Certainly. Beyond the generally enjoyable take on it, I think the island setting and possibly the friendly bodyguard first showed up in Loving Wives in their version. I can't be sure of that, though, because of how many stories based on the trope are out there in the wider world.

Thankfully, most other commenters on "Philanthropic" were picking up what I was putting down. They saw my story for what it was: an exploration of a trope that had existed for a long time, with some similarities to other peoples' stories that I jokingly referenced with this passage of dialogue:

"I came to understand that this was a fairly common game among the very wealthy. The script rarely changes in major ways; only minor variations here and there. The husband and wife accept, most commonly, or at least deal with what happens. They both live a week of debauchery and move on as best they can. Or the husband, a man of integrity like yourself or myself, decides he can't deal with his wife's betrayal.

"Sometimes, the wife is used roughly and hates it; sometimes she is used roughly and loves it. I've heard tell, once or twice, of the wealthy man falling in love with the wife, or of a wealthy woman wooing the wife or husband instead. The drama is the thing, not the outcome; when you reach a certain level of wealth, money is only a way of keeping score, and the taking of intangibles like love or loyalty or the future becomes the new pursuit."

Is a loving homage to previous writers' works an act of plagiarism? In most cases, I'd say "no." However, when I was accused of plagiarism again, more recently, I had to wrestle with that a bit. This time it happened in a discussion thread on the forums, and the accusation was leveled not just at me, but at numerous other writers as well. I learned that we had unknowingly and unintentionally caused, if not harm, then at least offense.

Then, after a more recent kerfuffle that created greater fallout than mere hurt feelings, I thought it might be worthwhile to discuss the issues of plagiarism, community, culture, and grace; how they intersect; and the sliding scales that we and others sometimes judge people (including ourselves) on.

That's a lot to tackle, and I'll get to the specifics in a moment. First, though, a game:

I'm thinking of a Loving Wives story right now. See if you can guess which from the description.

It opens with a disclaimer that this is something one could realistically expect to happen, given the right circumstances. It then moves into a short establishing section that tells how happy a family the husband has, with a good wife that he couldn't imagine ever hurting him.

This is, of course, almost immediately followed by an unimaginable betrayal.

His wife tries to tell him that, yes, she cheated, but it doesn't change anything, that she's still the same person, and she hasn't taken anything away from him. She seemingly believes every word of it.

When the husband balks at the wife's behavior, insulting her and threatening divorce, he's told that it's just his male ego talking. This is simply a thing she needed to do, and his life would be ruined if he divorced her, taking him away from his kids and the comfort of his home. The story ends with the husband stuck in a no-win situation, trying to see if he can find some way to salvage happiness from what's happened to him.

The response to the story was almost uniformly rage and disbelief: at the story itself, at the character of the wife, at the ending, at the assertion in the foreword that this is something a normal wife would do. It ended up scoring significantly lower than it deserved-if one were to judge solely based on writing skill-and it generated hundreds of comments and dozens of sequels, reaction pieces, and derivative stories, leaving its mark on the Loving Wives category to this day. Arguably, it even created-or at least sort of named-one of the major tropes of the category.

What story is it?

If you guessed "February Sucks," sorry. That's not it. While "February Sucks" is extremely influential, this story is arguably even moreso. It's not a fair comparison, though, as "February Sucks" has been around for only a bit over three years now, while the tale I'm thinking of first saw publication way back in 2007.

It's "Something We Have to Talk About" by nici. The folks who've read Loving Wives for a while, or those who've vacuumed up every bit of content in the category they can, are probably thinking, "Oh, yeah!" But for those of you unfamiliar with the story, it's the ur-"Honey, We Need to Talk" story (hereafter referred to as HWNTT), the originator of an entire subgenre of Loving Wives stories.

In it, a husband-who has, as per usual in these stories, done nothing wrong other than work too hard for his family, along with getting older, somewhat out of shape, and less energetic in the bedroom-is told by his wife that she's been having an ongoing affair; that if he tries to stop her or even up the odds, she'll destroy him in the divorce; that she's still the same woman he loves and who still loves him; that things will soon return to normal; and that if he loved her, she'd just let him have this.

In one story, something like 90% of the underpinning bits of HWNTT are all wrapped up in a bow. So, why isn't this story and its author talked about in the same reverent tones? Why does the name of the trope not match the name of her story? I didn't even realize most of this until it came up as part of a spirited discussion about February Sucks in the Story Feedback board on the Literotica forums.

Which brings us back to the second time I was accused of plagiarism.

The thread in question was an older one, started in April 2021 on the Story Discussion board, asking why so many versions of "February Sucks" existed. It's a fair question; while I'm a fan, why did this story, of all the ones in Loving Wives, generate so many alternate takes? Back in 2021, commenters tossed several theories around, some made by Loving Wives writers and some not. After that, the thread petered out for a couple of years.

The discussion got resurrected by another user, this time asking if there was a suggested reading order for the various takes in early December 2023. I don't want to get too much into the details of what was said in the thread, or of the back and forth between various posters. If you, really want to see for yourself, it's still up last I checked. This isn't so much about the blow-by-blow of that specific thread as it is what its revelations-and more to the point, the fact that they were revelations for many of us-mean to the larger community.

The gist of it is this: those of us in the thread who started writing relatively recently (in the last two years or so) and had written alternate versions/continuations/prequels of February Sucks believed that GeorgeAnderson had given a blanket authorization for alternate takes, and we had pretty good reason to believe that. Unfortunately, it turns out we were wrong.

Before this last month, when a whole new wave of "February Sucks" takes cropped up, there were in the neighborhood of 125 or so versions. My version was the 104th, by one commenter's count. Among the group of people who 1) either participated in the thread or were referenced in it by name and 2) did not know GeorgeAnderson personally, the earliest story numbered about 70th. Everyone involved gave credit to George for the story. Everyone involved thanked him. No one claimed Jim, Linda, Marc, and the others were their own characters, or that the portions of the plot and writing that belonged to George instead belonged to them.

More importantly, to my thinking, we were far from the first to write takes on the story without explicitly receiving permission from him. The first story which thanked GeorgeAnderson without saying the author had received permission from him was published on October 6, 2020, less than a month after the original story first went up.

It was far from the last.

Around the middle of 2021, the number of new versions that claimed to be personally authorized by GeorgeAnderson dwindled to nothing. Instead, stories started to begin with forewords that included comments like, "I would like to thank GeorgeAnderson for allowing us to write a different ending to his great story" or "I sent GA a note for permission to post this story, but haven't heard back. Given the volume of follow-ons to his story in Literotica, I assume that he isn't opposed to sequels and alternative endings so I'm posting it hopefully with his blessing." By that time, there were dozens of authorized takes, so that seemed to be a reasonable belief.

Further, as pointed out by one of the authors in the thread that started this discussion, Literotica has a rule in their submission guidelines that says they will reject stories if they contain

Copyrighted material for which the submitter is not the owner of the copyright, or for which the submitter does not have an explicit license from the copyright owner to publish the work at Literotica.

If that rule existed, and story after story entitled things like "February Sucks: My Take" were being published, all with the same starting scenario, same character names, and in some cases copying chunks of the text to establish the story, wouldn't that indicate to a new writer that everything was kosher?

Beyond that, George had been publishing on Literotica since 2015, putting out 13 stories in that time and typically publishing two to three stories in a year. His last story until October 2023 came out in March 2021. Of the stories in his catalog, all but three were sequels to other peoples' stories.

In each case, he had gotten permission from that writer, but it was certainly not a stretch of the imagination that someone who had written so many sequels would have given blanket permission to other writers to continue his story before he went radio silent, especially once he came back in late 2023-after all involved in the thread had written their takes-and wrote in his profile:

I hereby grant anyone who wishes it, permission to create derivative works from my stories on Literotica, with two conditions:

1. A link to the original must appear at the top of the derivative work. (If you don't know how to do this, ask the moderator.)

2. Quotations from the original text longer than a paragraph must be set apart (e.g. with italics) and attributed.

However, that turned out to not be the case. According to his friends, one of whom is his regular editor, he was never okay with it. He just recognized that the cows were out of the barn and there was no point in closing the door. That marked the point in the conversation when terms like "rude," unethical," and "plagiarism" started getting thrown around.

One point I want to be clear about: there were no defined "sides" in this discussion, or at least not strictly defined ones. More established writers-including ones who had gotten explicit permission from George for their takes-saw no problem with the later unauthorized takes. Newer writers criticized some aspects of the way the new stories were handled. This wasn't "old school" versus "new school" or anything like that, just people coming from different viewpoints.

A few of us went back and forth over the issues for a while, in turn accusing and defending, and it got pretty heated. We finally agreed to disagree, but several participants went on to discuss their points of view on intellectual property, what counts and doesn't count as plagiarism, why we believe the way we do, and so on, all in a fairly civil manner.

In truth, once the discussion ended in mid-December, I didn't think much more about it, other than kicking around the idea of writing an essay on nici and her largely unheralded contribution to Loving Wives. I do want to briefly talk about that, because it is relevant, as you'll see in a moment.

I've referred to her story in conversation with some writer friends as "The February Sucks Before February Sucks" because of its influence, but I think that may be underselling it. Doing a search in Loving Wives for deep breath "honey we need to talk" OR "sweetheart we need to talk" OR "honey we have to talk" OR "sweetheart we have to talk" OR "something we have to talk about" OR "something we need to talk about" yields 237 individual entries, most of them fitting into the HWNTT trope or one of its successor tropes..

Before the publication of that story, one of those phrases showed up only ten times in seven years, in stories that didn't usually remotely resemble an HWNTT story. Afterwards, however, variations on the phrase showed up much more frequently. In 2018, twelve stories including one of those phrases were published. 2021 saw a total of twenty-nine stories published with some variation of the phrase "Honey, We Need to Talk." Somewhat amusingly, several of them were "February Sucks" takes.

I found that really interesting. There was this story that existed as the creator of a major trope in Loving Wives, one whose core components were arguably used more often than the "February Sucks" "starter" and which yielded a more varied set of stories, but it almost never gets mentioned alongside GeorgeAnderson's tale as a formative part of the category.

It seemed like an interesting topic to chase down for an essay: the question of "why?" Why did "February Sucks" and "Something We Have To Talk About" both spawn so many sequels and retellings, but only the former is regularly referenced, either directly or with thanks to the author for the original concept, in most of them?

Sadly, the answers to my question of "why" ended up being somewhat anticlimactic. The primary issues are those of timing and visibility: nici posted the story in 2007, when the LW section was still much closer to the original "extramarital fun" description of the category, so it simply didn't get as much traction.

The similar stories published in the first couple of years afterwards did typically feature a shout-out to nici, even when they weren't direct sequels or reimaginings, so it wasn't a case of an author being intentionally snubbed. On top of that, it has a very low rating, currently sitting at 2.99; unless someone specifically looks for it, it's unlikely they would stumble across it except through links from other stories.

When BTB-mania really hit, about eight years after the publication of "Something We Have To Talk About," few of the authors writing at the time had been contemporaries of nici, who only posted six stories on Literotica over the course of two months before disappearing. Her name shows up in a few forewords over the last ten years-most of them in direct sequels to her stories-but almost none of the HWNTT stories outside of those direct sequels mention her at all. I tried to reach out to her through the feedback system to get her feelings on this, but she unfortunately didn't respond.

On the other hand, GeorgeAnderson's story hit just as BTB-mania really peaked, but it presented a narrative wholly unsatisfying to those baying for the blood of unfaithful spouses. More importantly, it dropped in 2020, at a time when we were all trying to find ways to occupy our minds and our time, meaning it got a lot of eyeballs on it. Both of those contributed to its longevity, even beyond the quality of George's writing.

There's one other factor, though, and it brings us, indirectly, back to that discussion on the forums once more.

"February Sucks" is popular because "February Sucks" is popular.

I know that sounds dumb, but hear me out.

Because the first few stories about celebrities spiriting away spouses that came out after February Sucks were either reworks of it or directly referenced it, e.g., "The Movie Star and My Wife" by StoneyWebb or "My Wife & the Rock Legend" by hotprof1973, it became the new standard for how to tell the story. A writer needed to reference it, because if they didn't, they'd be doing it "wrong." Well, wrong at least according to the commenters, or at least enough of them to make comments sections unpleasant and ratings unfavorable.

Don't believe me? I've seen at least two stories, each published a year or more before "February Sucks," that accused the writer of plagiarizing GeorgeAnderson's story. I'm afraid I can't offer specifics; I've read a lot of the stories in Loving Wives, and Literotica doesn't have a comments search feature for me to go find them. I do, however, remember being both amused and appalled each time I saw one.

Because nici's story went largely unheralded within a few years of publication, anyone can get away with writing a HWNTT without crediting her. Hell, like I said, most people don't know they should arguably be crediting her; I didn't know that she'd originated the trope when I wrote "I Know My Wife," after all.

On the other hand, if you write a story about a celebrity sweeping a wife off her feet, there will be people standing in line to tell you that you're ripping off GeorgeAnderson. Except, of course, for some of his friends, who will tell you that you're plagiarizing him by following the "format." Eventually. In my case, a year after I published my story.

I'll admit, that kind of irritated me. If I had done something wrong-if we all had, the 100+ people who had written unae3wuthorized followups-why didn't someone tell us? The answer to that, I think, can be found in a quote from one of the folks in the discussion thread:

You were not acting ethically... IMO.

As a writer, you understand the meaning of intellectual property.

That really gets to the heart of the matter, although I didn't realize it until a couple months later. I don't think the original commenter did, either, because she was approaching it from her point of view, which I interpreted as, "You wrote a story. Therefore, you're a writer. Writers understand intellectual property, and they understand that it is ethical to treat it in a certain way. If you breached that social contract, it makes you, or at least your behavior, unethical."

The problem with that is that I'm not a writer. I think a lot of us that write here on the site aren't, and that's doubly true of the folks writing February Sucks takes. Go through the first page of search results in ascending date order, and you'll find that at least for half the writers there, they have fewer than ten stories to their name, and many of them less than five. Their "February Sucks" take is often their first, and sometimes only, story. The story spoke to them, and they wanted to respond; they didn't know that they were breaking some kind of arbitrary rule.