: Re: Ripoff Character I've been writing a story, and recently someone came to me and said the characters are very similar to a couple of the ones in Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows, I myself read

@Annie587

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It's perfectly reasonable to say, "Hey, I think it was interesting the way this character was so calm under pressure, I'd like to use that in a story of my own." But if you write a story with a character named "Larry Skywalker" who fights an evil galactic empire using a mysterious power you call "the Energy", that's either a rip-off or an astounding coincidence.

In this case, to say that your story, like someone else's story, has two characters who are in love, no problem, lots of stories have characters who are in love. To say the heroine works in a "pleasure house", common enough to not be a big deal.

But giving your character the same name as someone else's character, and an unusual name like "Kaz", bad idea. Sounds like a copy. (If they were both named "John", different story."

The crow's head cane is also distinctive enough to sound like a copy. If you want some object to be his symbol, just make it something else. Make it a lion's head dagger, or alligator skin boots, or whatever.

I've never read "Six of Crows" or your story so I can't say if the personalities are too similar. I'd suggest you try to write a brief description of the character from "Six of Crows", maybe 5 or so bullet points of his major personality attributes. Then see if this describes your character also. If so, you have a problem. "My character is strong and brave and so is this other character" is no big deal. Lots of fictional characters meet that description. Similarly for many other things you could say about a character. "He's a black belt in karate", "he's an orphan", "he has a scar on his left hand", "he won an Olympic medal in swimming". But if ALL those things are true of both your character and this other character, that sounds like a problem. You need to vary it up. Change at least half of them. Instead of being an Olympic medal winner, make him a pro-basketball player or some such. Etc.

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