BJ Alex Pt. 2

Akaito February 12, 2025 9:01 pm

I can’t really say much because I’ve not read BJ Alex in literal years to the point where I can’t remember jack diddly shit about what it was about frankly lmfao (though I think it’s funny that way back when I was a wee fetus I had enough of an opinion about it even then to rate it just 3 stars amongst the stories I left either unrated or rated 5 stars…) but it’s interesting seeing the comparisons being made between the two webtoons and the critiques being made about it.

On one hand I’m like as a writer, it’s inevitable that you have a few tropes, themes, ideas, character archetypes, etc that you end up cycling around a lot in your stories. And it’s also inevitable that you might end up self-plagiarizing a bit, consciously and/or unconsciously, when you’re writing because you know, all your stuff’s coming from the same brain. Finally, there’s simply no original story ideas anyone can come up with and all that…basically, to an extent, I think it makes sense for this story to have commonalities with BJ Alex, or to be something like BJ Alex taken at a different angle. And obviously, the author can write what she likes too, and if this is what she likes then of course she can write it again!

But on the other hand, if it’s really as copy-paste-like as people are claiming it to be in terms of borrowing the same exact story beats without adding the nuance needed to accommodate the fact that these are somewhat different characters in a somewhat different situation…then I do think it’s kind of lazy writing my friends and I have honestly wondered if she is writing into these tropes out of genuine enjoyment of them or if the #market is playing a guiding hand in how she approaches this story, maybe it’s a mix of both. Obviously BJ Alex in and of itself was a hit, and then you obviously have much broader BL tropes that people ceaselessly eat up no matter what, so it makes me wonder if she may have felt the need to do an encore for the sake of securing an audience rather than try something new/different and potentially risky.

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