Fandom Rivalry / Literature

• A Court of Thorns and Roses:
  • Some fans of Anne Bishop's Black Jewels series don't have the highest opinion of A Court of Thorns and Roses due to perceiving the latter as ripping off many elements from the original Black Jewels trilogy. Admittedly, there are some similarities between the two works that seem too alike to be a coincidence and for what it's worth, Sarah J. Maas herself has stated she is a fan of the Black Jewels series. Some readers don't mind the similarities too much and see it more as Maas just taking inspiration from earlier works she likes (she'd hardly be the first author to do so), but others are less forgiving and see it less as inspiration and more as bordering on plagiarism.
  • The Plated Prisoner by Raven Kennedy can be considered this for its similarities to A Court of Thorns and Roses (fae romance with a toxic Romantic False Lead and an Anti-Hero romance). On the flip side, there are readers who say Raven Kennedy managed to take the basic plotline and make it better. It’s often argued that there’s less of a grey area in The Plated Prisoners' Romantic False Lead, as while there are humanizing moments, he’s just a bastard who happily uses the heroine to get up in the world. Whereas Tamlin, arguably, is simply reacting to present-day trauma and isn’t given a chance to cope. They also argue that the series true Love Interest is more of a feminist ally than Rhysand ever was, by respecting the heroine’s autonomy at every step and never using cruel or manipulative tactics under the guise of “helping” the heroine to get what he wants. Of course, that being said, there is also quite a bit of Friendly Fandoms at play with readers liking both series because of their similarities.
• A Song of Ice and Fire vs. Sword of Truth: Unsurprisingly, given both are very dark takes on High Fantasy but the former is known for its Grey-and-Grey Morality and favoring gritty realism over magical solutions, while the latter has extreme Black-and-White Morality and relies heavily on magical Deus ex Machina. The animosity is mostly limited to the ASOIAF fans, who have made a long-running game of mocking the SoT series, its author Terry Goodkind, its fans, and its similarity to Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy (it's notable that George RR Martin is socially and economically quite left-wing). Animosity on the SoT side is mostly limited to reactions against this game.
• The Wheel of Time vs. Sword of Truth is far more flammable due to fans of the former accusing the latter of being nothing but a thinly-veiled ripoff.
  • It really does not help that when asked about the similarities between the two series, Terry Goodkind (author of Sword of Truth) suggested that people that find any similarities "probably aren't old enough" to read his books...
• Harry Potter, being such a massively popular fantasy franchise, has multiple rivalries across the literature landscape.
  • Some fans of The Dresden Files never pass an opportunity to point out that Harry Dresden would utterly destroy Harry in a fight. Never mind the fact that the only similarity between the two characters that even warrants any comparison at all is that they're both wizards named Harry... who have difficulties with the magical authorities, snark in response to emotional pain, and had awful childhoods. Okay, a couple of similarities, though they're still very different.
  • There was some animosity between Harry Potter and Discworld fans due to a misconception that Discworld character Ponder Stibbons (and the Unseen University as a whole) copied Harry Potter (and Hogwarts), or the other way around. In reality, Terry Pratchett said that J. K. Rowling is a friend of his. (And besides, Ponder appeared years before.) Pratchett also pointed out that like many mythological or fantasy components appearing in their respective fiction, the concept of a school or college for magic-users goes back for thousands of years.
  "We're all fishing from the same stream."
  • When both Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings had their first movie adaptations released within a month of each other, many comparisons were made, with small skirmishes between the two fandoms resulting. The two mentor wizards (Richard Harris and Ian McKellen) even sniped at each other in the press, and the latter turned down the role of Dumbledore when offered to him after Harris' death (though that was apparently out of respect for Harris).
  • Thanks to Orson Scott Card's fairly harsh criticism of Rowling for her lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon, a few fans of Ender's Game have turned against it too.
  • There was a bit of a rivalry with The Inheritance Cycle, but that died out when people noticed that it was entirely manufactured by the marketers.
  • The Camp Half-Blood Series. Fans of Harry Potter accuse it of being a rip-off and criticize it for being too lighthearted. Fans of Camp Half-Blood defend that the series stopped being "Harry Potter with Greek Mythology" after the first book and came into its own as it progressed, that it kept a consistent tone while HP started taking itself too seriously after Goblet of Fire, and the Camp Half-Blood books do a much better job with racial, ethnic, and LGBTQ+ representation than Harry Potter does. The rivalry only intensified in late 2019 when J.K. Rowling got hit with accusations of transphobia after defending Maya Forstater.
• The polarizing Twilight book series has inspired quite a few fandom rivalries.
  • There's Potter vs. Twilight. Never has such a fandom rivalry been so whipped up by the media itself. Twilight, like Potter, is something of a literary phenomenon, and its movie adaptation stars a Harry Potter alumnus, so the two were constantly compared. They really have nothing in common though, apart from both being children/young adult fantasy series.
  • To a greater extent, fans of other vampire-centered media, especially those of the Buffyverse and Anne Rice fans. Just go to the trope page for Your Vampires Suck, where more than half the potshots are aimed at how Twilight portrays vampires.
  • The Hunger Games is a stranger case. While most of its fans praise it as a better series than Twilight for its darker and heavier themes and having less emphasis on the romance, many Twilight fans like it nonetheless due in part to Stephenie Meyer's glowing review of the books.
• The Chronicles of Narnia versus His Dark Materials serves as a microcosm for Christianity versus atheism. On the Narnia fans' side, it was primarily caused by the author of His Dark Materials loudly criticizing the Narnia series and aiming specifically to be Lewis' atheist counterpart. You can't say stuff like that without causing a fandom war, folks.
• For some time there was an entirely mock rivalry between Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison, who in real life were close friends: Ellison brought it to an end, because his regard for Asimov was so great he was worried fans would take the rivalry as real.
  • Asimov had mock rivalries with several writers. He once wrote that he and Lester del Rey had been playing a friendly (no, really) game for decades, wherein one of them would "insult the other. The proper response to an insult is a slur, which must then be topped with a minimum of delay." Their wives would keep it from escalating to Global Thermonuclear War by making them stop by the time it got to three exchanges.
  • Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke reached an understanding in which Clarke would admit he was only the world's second best science writer and Asimov would in turn admit he was only the world's second best science fiction writer.
• There exists a minor rivalry between Science Fiction and Fantasy. Some, like author David Brin, regard fantasy as inherently anti-science and pro-authoritarian.
• Fans of Jane Austen vs. fans of the Brontë sisters. Charlotte Brontë personally never liked Jane Austen's work herself, and many fans of Austen's romantic comedies and the Brontë sisters' Darker and Edgier Gothic romances dislike the other's works. This even gets a professional shout-out, in the "Jane Bites Back" series by Michael Thomas Ford, Charlotte Bronte appears as a rival to "Jane Fairfax."
• Lit Fic fans vs fans of Speculative Fiction.
  • Lit Fic fans vs fans of any genre based writing for that matter.
  • Fans of the classic books vs. fans of popular contemporary books.
• Battle Royale fans (book, movie and manga alike, who also have their own rivalries) vs. The Hunger Games fans. Fans of Battle Royale aren't happy about how much more popular Hunger Games is and frequently accuse Suzanne Collins of having ripped off BR while writing her series, an accusation that HG fans counter by noting that BR's plot itself isn't all that original (see The Running Man, The Long Walk and Gladiator Games in general). Moreover, Collins herself has stated that she had never heard of Battle Royale until her publishers brought it up to her and cited the inspirations for The Hunger Games as the legend of the Minotaur in the Labyrinth and the Mood Whiplash that came from channel-surfing between horrifying news of war and superficial reality television.
• Within the Cthulhu Mythos, some fans prefer H. P. Lovecraft's original inscrutable, human-morality-means-diddly-squat vision of Cosmic Horror Story, while others have no problem with August Derleth's belated addition of good-vs-evil and four-element themes to the Mythos. Even the "Lovecraft Circle" itself had members who'd argued over this one.
• There's a small degree of this between Animorphs and Everworld, due to the fact that K.A. Applegate (the husband-and-wife team of Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant) left to work on Everworld, causing the Animorphs series to largely be ghostwritten and its quality suffering as a result. Fortunately, nothing gets too overly heated.
• Fans of 1984 vs Fahrenheit 451. Fans of 1984 criticize Fahrenheit 451 as being a knockoff due to similar themes such as censorship and a dystopian government advocating anti-intellectualism and criticize the book's sci-fi elements. Meanwhile, fans of Fahrenheit 451 criticize 1984's length and writing style.
  • Fans of Brave New World sometimes get thrown in due to similar themes.
• There was some rivalry between A Song of Ice and Fire and the Malazan Book of the Fallen during their common hey-day, courtesy of both being major Genre Deconstructions of High Fantasy and willing to kill off important characters, even though that's where the similarities end. Malazan fans were arguing that at least there was rhyme and reason beyond the shock value in their series' character deaths, and besides, at least Steven Erikson was delivering his Doorstopper volumes on time, while George R. R. Martin's fans were claiming they'd rather wait five years for a book than deal with the inconsistencies and Asspulls the Malazan series was riddled with. The situation wasn't helped by Malazan fans also often being fans of A Song of Ice and Fire but leaving it behind due to the increasing Schedule Slip and ASoIaF fans looking for a palate cleanser between books but finding the Malazan series to be nothing like their favorite series and turning away in disgust. Lots of mudslinging happened. The authors themselves are on friendly terms, and tried to discourage any thoughts of competition but ended up fueling it even more in some cases by stating that they'd read each other's first volume and found it not to be their cup of tea. The rivalry died down when ASoIaF became hugely popular thanks to the TV adaptation and the Malazan series had its last volume published.
• Warrior Cats:
  • There is a rivalry between Warriors and the other Erin Hunter series. Warriors versus Survivors is most common but a lot of the arguing has less to do with the series' and more to do with whether the reader is a "cat person" or a "dog person".
  • Warriors has rivalries with almost every cat xenofiction book out there simply because they all star cats. Varjak Paw, The Book of the Named, Tailchaser's Song, and The Tygrine Cat are some of the few works that have some level of a fandom rivalry. It's mainly friendly in that the series often share fans, but it can get ugly when fans of one call it "better" than the other or accuse one of ripping off the other (even if the book predates the other).

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