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Comment by arkensaw | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. If someone pitched you a book about a young kid who goes to a school of magic to learn how to use his powers, makes friends and enemies and ultimately battles evil, you might shoot down their dreams because "some cocaine-addled sales critter" already had that idea, and she's called J K Rowling and she's worth billions and shes so successful she can't even be cancelled because she makes so much money.

And yet, Patrick Rothfuss's The Name Of The Wind is the same concept, and sold over a million copes,

Lev Grossman's The Magicians is again the same concept, sold millions, and was adapted into a 5 season TV series for SyFy.

If anything, the success of an idea only leads to a bigger appetite for that idea.

Google was not the first search engine.

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Ot to the article, but I just feel I need to strongly recommend The Hierarchy by James Islington.

It's pretty much the same idea as the above titles but omg it's so well written. Absolute must read!

oh thanks, I'll check that out!

BTW, The Magicians TV series might be the best thing SyFy ever made. It's got so much heart, it's properly funny, it's creative, it's epic despite a shoestring budget, and the characters stay with you long after you finish.

Agreed I loved it! Right up until they turned it into a musical for some reason. Me and my wife call it "doing a magicians" when a TV show suddenly starts singing for no reason.

But yeah up until that point it was great!

It's a whole thing. The Magicians was just following a trend that genre shows need a musical episode if they've been on long enough. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MusicalEpisode

Damn I had noticed a lot of series doing it, but I guess it's wider than I thought!

The Magicians overdid it though. It's not a musical episode, iirc it's like 2 seasons

Edit: just to be clear, I still watched those 2 entire seasons, because the story is genuinely that good, plus I was invested. But I really wish they hadn't gone musical, it really messed with the mood of the series.

Magicians was one of the few series where it actually worked, I thought. I just recently watched the Star Trek Strange New Worlds musical ep and it was painful

> book about a young kid who goes to a school of magic to learn how to use his powers

Add to this the 50 bajillion manga/anime's with the exact same trope.

Is TNotW really the same concept as Harry Potter? It has a university in it, which I guess is similar to a school, and after a while the main character ends up there, but it's a very different concept - it's classic high fantasy that includes a period of learning and study, whereas HP is primarily boarding school fiction with magical elements. Similarly, The Magicians, as I understand it, is also more about a university, and is perhaps closer in lineage to Buffy or Charmed than to Harry Potter - it has more of that focus on the interpersonal relationships between characters, and a more complex morality.

The better comparison is probably with Percy Jackson, which isn't quite the same concept (being an American series, where boarding school fiction isn't quite as well-known a genre) but matches the ages, sense of discovery, and relationships to authority figures far better.

This isn't directly relevant to your point, but I really find it wild that people see two stories that have magic and a school in them and go "look, it's the same thing", especially when the genres and tropes of the two books are so utterly different. For that matter, Harry Potter is also nothing like Earthsea, which is another common reference point. I wonder if Americans just don't have as much experience with boarding school fiction to be able to categorise Harry Potter as a series?

> This isn't directly relevant to your point

Well, that kind of was exactly my point, although I feel now I didn't make it very clearly.

Someone might shoot down a prospective author who intends to write a book featuring a young protagonist getting a formal education in magic because it's "been done", but the resulting works are very different. It was a counterpoint to the article saying that we should not try to realise our ideas because someone somewhere has had "the same idea". They probably have had an idea which could be described in a similar fashion, but it doesn't really mean its the "same idea"

I probably stumbled a bit describing those books as the same concept when I should have put "same idea" in quotes

Your point came through clearly to me. Shared tropes or setting do not make identical stories and, in fact, often enhance them as a counterbalance or familiar thing to compare against.

A wise friend of mine once said, in regard to "ideas are nothing; execution is everything": you can tell a thousand artists to paint a portrait of an Italian woman with a countryside landscape behind her but, good or bad, none of them are the mona lisa.

I think in that case, you're missing what the article is saying. It's not talking about building something new but not having people understand it. It's saying that anything new that you can build, someone else can build faster with AI.

To stretch the book analogy beyond breaking point, it would be like if Patrick Rothfuss released The Name of the Wind, and JK Rowling immediately put out "Harry Potter and the Kingkiller Chronicles, now with added Kvothe", and basically used her name and the Harry Potter brand to outcompete Rothfuss selling the same thing. (Obviously for books, you've got copyright, but there's no copyright for your favourite app idea.)

I think the extent to which that is actually true is hard to say, but I think it's a different point to the one you're arguing against here.

Harry Potter has much better writing and morals than Percy Jackson. I had to stop reading Percy Jackson to my kids.

Thank you, it was time for my annual check on the status of Doors of Stone. Whelp. I wonder why LLMs don’t help such cases of writer’s block.

Scholomance but it’s highschool!

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