Sorry for not explaining! But thanks for posting, I found your comments interesting! Especially meryl, I think you are right about many things, but I'm not sure in many cases it's so easy to know if the person is stealing another person's style intentionally or not. Some people like a mangaka or more mangakas, and are very used to the style of the artists they like, they maybe tried to copy at the beginning, then they try to develop a personal style. It's not that they are imitating and they are aware of it. They end copying because the influence is very strong and they had no occasions to try to look carefully at other styles and work on them. I don't draw much, but when I do, since I'm not very good, I try to look at what others do, to have an idea of the proportions and so on. It could end the final work looks a bit like the ones I've been looking at. I could be wrong, I don't know if it works like this for anybody.
Well... this friend of mine, who I am going to call A. in the rest of the post, is a very good person in general, as I said. She's very nice and fun. She's also a clever person from many points of view. The problem is A. seems to be unable to think with her own head or work on a personal project. For example, if she's going out with me, she becomes very interested in everything I like, she starts buying the music I like, she starts watching the movies I love the most. She starts acting as if those were her interests, not mine, she even buys things I'd like to buy, but I can't, and talks about the recent album I couldn't purchase. It makes me very mad. One day A. starts going out with other friends, and she does the same with them. As all the things she was liking before, just because I liked them, never existed for her. New music, new movies, new anything. She's like a completely different person. She also dresses in a different way.
A couple of years ago we decided to have a party for Halloween and decided to list all costumes people were going to wear, trying to avoid to have too many persons with the same costume. A. reads the list and says her costume is going to be x. Then at the party she has another costume, that was already taken, but since her costume is made by professional tailor, looks way better than the one of the other person, who simply got it from a local store. It was not a big deal, really, having two persons wearing the same kind of costume. It's the principle that pissed me off, that she had to steal the idea, just because she couldn't decide with her own head, and made the other girl feel bad because her costume wasn't as good as hers.
The same goes for anything A. has to do on her own. She is supposed to do it on her own, but in fact she copies from somebody else. At school we were often given some form of creative project, like writing, to do. She reads what other write, or asks others about what they are going to write. She says she's curious, nothing more. Then she steals the ideas she likes more. Since she's good at school and she studies a lot, her stuff is often better than the stuff that inspired her. Sometimes a person that is more creative ended with worse results just because she knows how to make things look better, because she's good at writing or she's a very diligent student and knows what teachers will enjoy more reading. It's not her creation, it's somebody else's but it looks like it's the other person who copied from her. Sometimes she even copied from the internet.
She doesn't understand it's wrong. She says: "I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm just looking for inspiration" or "If it's not copyrighted, it means it's public domain" or "Nobody invents anything. All the things you like are copied from another source too. That is not copying, it's reinventing" or "What's wrong if I like the same things you like? Is the album or the movie x your exclusive property? No, it isn't, you're only jealous that somebody else likes it as much as you do, if not more".
I don't know what to do when a person is like that
