So My Content Got Plagiarized (and Here’s How I Feel About It)

On appropriating another’s ideas and what that says about, well… you.

Here I am, scrolling on TikTok after my lunch break at work, trying to empty my brain for a few minutes before heading back, when, lo and behold, I stumble across a video from a content creator who follows me (and whom I followed back a few months ago). Her opening line immediately grabs my attention: “Fiction is the domain of women.”

I pause. That’s interesting, I think. I actually published something about this over a year ago. Let’s see what she’s focusing on.

As the video goes on, I realise (to my surprise) that she’s using the exact same book I had chosen as an example: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. That’s fine, I tell myself. After all, I didn’t “discover” the book either, and Austen is, of course, a brilliant lens through which to examine the eighteenth century and its gender norms.

But then she continues, building her case for the gendering of literary genres by drawing on historical resources without citing a single source. At the same time, her phrasing starts to sound eerily familiar: almost word-for-word what I had said in my own video.

For a moment, I wonder if I’m being paranoid. But no. I know my own work, I know the intellectual exercise behind it, the way I connected each dot, the very specific examples I chose. And I know the time it took me to write that paper. Because, yes, before it was a TikTok video, it was a paper for my Master’s thesis, one I was extremely proud of because it had taken me a great deal of effort to put together, especially given how limited the available secondary sources were.

Of course, I don’t have a big TikTok audience, and I could’ve passed it as a coincidence were it not for the fact that she follows me, and that recently she’s been trying to pivot away from template-style BookTok content toward something more informative, educational, and politically engaged. That shift is, in itself, commendable. But what isn’t commendable is passing off someone else’s ideas as your own, and then accepting praise in the comments for work that you didn’t actually do.

Writing essays like the ones I have previously published here (or have drafted for future publication) takes time, effort, and care. I am always meticulous about citing my sources, acknowledging inspiration when it exists, and offering recommended readings for those who wish to delve deeper into a given topic.

And if you are still wondering why I am certain these were my ideas, the answer is simple: there were no existing sources that directly developed the analysis I carried out. Her structure follows the same one as my video, which I’d constructed by weaving together multiple secondary sources, and deliberately avoiding the well-trodden discussions of Gothic parody and gender satire in Northanger Abbey. Instead, I wanted to move beyond that, showing how Austen critiques something much broader: the systemic impositions placed on women, and the ways in which men sustained their dominance by policing and diminishing certain forms of culture (among many other things).

To frame this, I set Austen in direct conversation with Richardson’s Pamela, which offers a diametrically opposed ideal of womanhood, one Austen undoubtedly knew well. That juxtaposition allowed me to ground my analysis historically, highlighting how literary forms reflected, and sometimes resisted, gendered power structures. In the end, what I produced was simply a cultural studies approach to a narrative, which is precisely the kind of work I have always been committed to in my academic life.

For some time, especially since leaving academia, I’ve wondered whether it’s worth publishing my papers (slightly adapted) here for anyone to read, with open access to the materials. But my relationship with the Internet changes every day. Yes, it’s an advantage unlike any other in history: we have almost limitless knowledge at our fingertips (if we know how to use it), and yet it also exposes us (our ideas and our work) to circulation without context, to misinterpretation and something to outright appropriation.

In the end, the reason I like to write here is simple: I like to yap. I like having a space to write down my ideas, that can be stimulating both for me and for those of you who choose to read my posts, and because in a world where misinformation runs free, I’d like to believe that there are some corners of the internet where we can create meaningful conversations, share ideas freely, and learn free of charge.

And so, if she truly found my work inspiring, I’m glad. That’s what ideas are meant to do: to spark thought, to be built upon, to be shared. But they’re not meant to be stripped of their origins and passed off as someone else’s. Recognition matters—not out of vanity, but because intellectual labor deserves to be acknowledged. After all, if we want to build a culture of knowledge that is free, accessible, and genuinely collaborative, it has to begin with honesty about where those ideas come from.