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RE: The Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 5 # 1 [July 2018]. Slott Departs; Spencer Steps In. [Spoilers]
I need to go back & re-read, but I think the plagiarism thing makes more sense than you’re thinking. Octavius was Peter, submitted papers as Peter, etc. The whole consciousness in Peter’s body thing. The university retroactively scanned papers using a new plagiarism machine learning A.I. kinda program that matched the writing style with papers previously published by Otto (in his scientific career pre Doc Ock) or somesuch. It wasn’t an exact match of a paper by Otto and didn’t require that Otto was ever a student at the University as well.
Still a stretch, but a lot of convoluted stuff had to happen to get Peter back to his “roots” and out of the tech CEO - Spidermobile era!
Hey Bryan!
Thanks so much for dropping in. It has been a very long time since I have written any reviews. I am extremely grateful for the effort you take to read the article AND give such a detailed responses. This may seem silly, but the more I write and build my skills, the more dependent I am on people validating my work (even if they disagree or point out I "Stuffed up" in my reasoning etc!).
Having thought about this again, it still doesn't seem to make sense. Why would Octavius plagiarise his own work under the name Peter Parker? Still doesn't make sense to me. Having a similar writing style doesn't necessarily mean he was plagiarising. I understand that if you write about ideas or newly created equations etc without referencing them, that would constitute plagiarising.
Although.. thinking out loud here - maybe Otto was writing as himself when he was writing those papers and assumed he didn't need to reference himself? But then again, he was registered as Peter Parker, so surely he knew he would have to reference Otto.. OR it was a diabolical plan from the get-go where Otto was setting up Peter for this exact moment?
Ideas?
Nick.
The key is to suspend disbelief and broaden the concept of plagiarism to include Marvel universe plagiarism! 😂 Again, not that it makes it great writing (although I found these kinda funny).
Peter didn’t get caught simply because Otto failed to properly annotate the bibliography! His paper was run through a system that is apparently sophisticated enough (Marvel style) to know if he’d been demonically possessed while writing it! The paper itself was wholly original, in Pete’s name, etc. but recognized as the work of Otto Octavius. The patterns of language and potentially even thought processes simply didn’t match Peter’s. As far as they’re concerned Pete potentially paid Otto to write his thesis for him.
So in this case it does come down to the equivalent of “having a similar writing style constituting plagiarism,” but on a whole other Marvelesque level!
This bizarre, geeky conversation is making me think of http://thelegalgeeks.com, a fun site that brings a bit of our real world expectations and procedures into the worlds of comics! 😆
I was trying to find a story I vaguely recall reading, with no success yet. It was a murder trial in the Marvel Universe and the lawyer used a defense strategy to imply that there was no way of knowing the victim was actually killed citing all the ways death is impermanent and identity is fleeting (shape changers, alternate realities, etc.) in the Marvel universe. Ingenious!