We're back on Charliesstar's plagiarism. Again. This time about the Pretty (Charliesstar) VS Monster (-buzzbuzz) plagiarism debate.

For those who don't know, Charliesstar has already plagiarized two stories, both of which have been taken down to avoid criticism. However, many have brought up worries that their most popular (and now only story), Pretty, might have been copied from another story, Monster.

And I can see why. The first chapter — the prologue — is functionally the exact same chapter with different names.

Now, if you can't tell from the title, this is only the first chapter on this. Mainly because it would take a long time to read through each story and compile all of the similarities in the story itself. Instead, I will be focusing on the evidence people mention a lot: the chapter titles.

To start, a key:

Yellow = Exact Same

Green = Similar

Blue = The Same in Context

I actually made a chart of each chapter, in order, for each season. Left is Pretty, right is Monster.

* In the scene, 'normal' replaces 'pretty'

** Dustin thinks Lucas says 'Kitty Hen' instead of 'Mad Hen.' I assume this is so,El's because the author misheard the canon line and, even if it did, it's fundamentally the same

* the & symbol is to combine multiple chapter names, because I ran out of slots. I change this later because I realized an easier alternative

Now, that is a whole lot on every season. I think season three had the most unique chapter titles, at least in the sense that they are different from each other.

Some of these, I'll admit, are very generic. Chapters you would expect from a Stranger Things fics, like "The Battle of Starcourt," "The Gate," "The Snowball," or "The Weirdos."

However, some are so specific that it's weird that they would show up in two different stories. For example, the weird grammar of "Those Who Are Flayed," or the phrases "In Too Deep" and "Party Games."

But, maybe this is normal. Maybe all Stranger Things fics have super similar chapters, so this means nothing.

So, I did that. I originally meant to compare Pretty to Firestarter/Firelight, but I realized the series were so different that it wouldn't be a fair comparison. Of course the titles are different. They don't even follow the same plot — even in season 1, they're barely the same with how Anne leaves the party for a second and Campbell's inclusion.

I tried to find a story as similar to Pretty as possible. I'm not going to give the name of the story I used, since I didn't as their permission to talk about it so I want to limit myself to chapter titles only.

What you need to know is Pretty is on the left, the Control Story (as I'm calling it, since it's the control variable in this experiment) is in the center, and Firestarter/Firelight is on the right. Ignore, of course, the fact that Firelight season 3 isn't totally finished.

Anyways, here's what I got:

So, yeah... very different. Not a lot of color. Which, I'll admit, I didn't go over enough stores to find a trend, but you get the point! Yes, there are some generic titles, but stories rarely have the exact or near exact titles over, and over, and over again. People latch onto different details, even if they had written the exact same scenes in the exact same chapters. The only time I see a consistent patter is when people use the episode titles as the chapter titles which is a bit of a duh moment.

Even if you don't call that plagerism (I almost wrote "even if you don't call that capitalism" which...not sure where that came from), the argument that this is suspicious is a lot stronger when you

1. See exactly how similar the chapter titles really are

2. Realize how un-similar the titles are with other stories

I...haven't quite decided on that yet. It's not a for sure sign, but I'll hopefully get into the stories themselves later on.