[arkensaw]

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.

[amarant]

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!

[arkensaw]

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.

[pixl97]

> 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.

[MrJohz]

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?

[arkensaw]

> 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

[drivebyhooting]

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

[manmal]

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.

[hinkley]

Scholomance but it’s highschool!