Mangaka Claims Kill la Kill Plagiarizes His Manga

roseofbattle

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Apr 18, 2011
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Mangaka Claims Kill la Kill Plagiarizes His Manga

Mangaka of Gakuen Noise sees many similarities between his work and the anime Kill la Kill.

Studio Trigger's Kill la Kill is one of the more popular anime of the season. With a determined and rough protagonist, clothes-based combat system, and a rigid student council that takes away students' freedoms, Kill la Kill has been accused of plagiarizing an older and somewhat similar work, a manga called Gakuen Noise (otherwise known as Campus Noise).

Hiroyuki Ooshima and Daisuke Ihara created Gakuen Noise over a decade ago. The protagonist seeks to avenge a deceased friend and fights against a scheming student council that wields control over a boarding school so large that it functions as a town. Anyone who has seen Kill la Kill recognizes that the show's premise sounds quite similar to Gakuen Noise. The protagonist of Kill la Kill pursues a school council president whom she suspects killed her father, and she's vowed to get revenge. The school council of Kill la Kill controls a town and decides which students live where - students who contribute to the school and perform well are awarded special uniforms and residence in higher class areas while other students live in a shantytown.

Ooshima, who now lives in France and works in the French comics industry, suggested in a blog post after watching a Kill la Kill trailer that the anime plagiarizes his work Gakuen Noise. Ooshima was upset and said he had symptoms similar to PTSD after watching the trailer. He believes Kill la Kill did not use Gakuen Noise as inspiration but as a work that's unoriginal. He wrote that there have been authors who have borrowed elements from his work, but he adds, "all their works were full of originality and can't be compared to Kill la Kill, and I don't think of complaining about them." Gakuen Noise is an obscure manga - old and unknown, which Ooshima argues makes it easier to plagiarize without consequences.

Ooshima's partner in creating Gakuen Noise does not feel the same. Ihara notes [http://iharadaisuke.hatenablog.com/entry/2014/01/02/124832] that while there are similarities between Gakuen Noise and Kill la Kill, he argues that the latter's story is different and will head in a different direction. (Kill la Kill is halfway through its run.) Ihara's definition of plagiarism is "tracing the pictures and completely mimicking the story development."

Gakuen Noise is available to read in Japanese [http://www.j-comi.jp/book/comic/46021], and anyone interested in similarities between the two works can look for themselves.

Source: Anime News Network [http://ooshimahiroyuki.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/2013/12/post-9673.html]


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Fappy

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Jan 4, 2010
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Similar to PTSD?! That's a bit of a stretch, wouldn't you say? I certainly feel for the guy, but his co-creator is correct that the show is taking the plot in a different direction. Anyone who is caught up on the show can attest to that.
 
Dec 14, 2009
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Cue the flood of users with KLK avatars XD


I'm pretty sure KLK plagiarises that about as much as Gurren Lagann plagiarises Evangelion.

Similarities, plagiarism does not make.
 

Casual Shinji

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Jul 18, 2009
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Well, the premise for Kill la Kill is hardly original though, is it?

It's supposed to be a parody, right? So it's no surprise it's going to seem similar to other works. But then I don't know Gakuen Noise, so maybe he has a point.
 

Fappy

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Casual Shinji said:
Well, the premise for Kill la Kill is hardly original though, is it?

It's supposed to be a parody, right? So it's no surprise it's going to seem similar to other works. But then I don't know Gakuen Noise, so maybe he has a point.
Yeah, considering its parody status it should be obvious they are actively trying to make the premise similar to those stories they are poking fun at. Then again, as you say, I suppose I'd have to actually read Gakuen Noise myself to say for sure.
 

JonB

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Sep 16, 2012
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"Plagiarism"

That word: I do not think it means what you think it means, Mr. Ooshima
 

HorrendusOne

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Mar 29, 2011
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Sooo so so many anime have the same overused similarities,(that idk why people would watch) and to say he felt similar to someone with PTSD is insulting, just makes me not want to hear from this guy anymore due to that alone and no longer care at the least.
 

Fox12

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Jun 6, 2013
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So an Ordinary High School student comes into possession of a Powerful Object, and then uses it to fight an Absurdly Powerful Student Council? No, no ones ever done that before. It must be plagiarism.



http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AbsurdlyPowerfulStudentCouncil

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NewTransferStudent

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ClothesMakeTheSuperman

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouKilledMyFather

...

The trope codifier even features a Nazi student council. I don't even care much about the show, but this is silly. PTSD, really?
 

Fiz_The_Toaster

books, Books, BOOKS
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Wow, really? PTSD? That's not insulting to any that has it at all. >.>

I think his partner has it right, and, let's be honest, there's so many tropes at play in Kill la Kill that I would hardly call it plagiarism, let alone original.

Me thinks that the guy doesn't know what a parody is since that's what the anime is in a nutshell.
 

Shanahanapp

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I might have seen his side a bit better if he had actually watched it. Seriously? "After watching a trailer." How does he know that they aren't completely different.
 

Legion

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The sheer amount of anime's that seem to be based around "Highschool club is going to be closed unless students do X" would suggest that originality isn't exactly it's strong point. Like the Triple A gaming market and Hollywood, if a concept is popular, it will be bled to death.

The fact that one of the other people working on it doesn't see the connection suggests the claims are somewhat tenuous.
 

medv4380

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Feb 26, 2010
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Both weak descriptions of the plot match Revolutionary Girl Utena with a "tragic" death in the leads past mixed in rather than the abused romantic interest so unless both of them have talking garments, and have nearly identical designs this is a nonsense claim. The PTSD thing being tossed in makes it sound like he wants to sew for emotional distress. I'm hoping Kill La Kill makes a turn for something outside of the Student Council bit because that's been way overdone, and revenge for the death of ones father was overdone long before even Iniago Montoya, now prepare to die.
 

Candidus

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Dec 17, 2009
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You know, I don't for a moment believe that Ooshima's claim is legitimate, but even if it were, I don't want to hear another word he has to say after likening the stress of maybe-being-copied to PTSD.

Nobody wants to support a melodramatic crybaby.
 

Azkar Almsivi

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Sep 3, 2012
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So does that mean all the harem style anime with a single, dense beyond reality male character without an ounce of social etiquette or a single clue about the opposite sex getting mindlessly pursued by every female within his school/job/war/battle to avenge grandpa/SAVE THE WORLD FROM EVIL WITH FRIENDSHIP AND/OR DETERMINAAAAATION!!!!11...

Lost myself for a second. Point is anime isn't really original anyway, they might have taken some ideas from his work or something else similar but it's not flat out plagiarism.

I haven't seen or looked into KlK at all. I'm rolling through my anime backlog and only left it to watch Infinite Stratos 2(AKA International wife wars with terrible soft sci-fi that suffers extremely from the example of regurgitated ideas found in my first paragraph.)
However it has best girl in it, so I watch anyway.
 

crazygameguy4ever

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not sure what to say.. but considering how crappy the anime is, i wouldn't be worried about it plagiarizing anything
 

Keiichi Morisato

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medv4380 said:
Both weak descriptions of the plot match Revolutionary Girl Utena with a "tragic" death in the leads past mixed in rather than the abused romantic interest so unless both of them have talking garments, and have nearly identical designs this is a nonsense claim. The PTSD thing being tossed in makes it sound like he wants to sew for emotional distress. I'm hoping Kill La Kill makes a turn for something outside of the Student Council bit because that's been way overdone, and revenge for the death of ones father was overdone long before even Iniago Montoya, now prepare to die.
i think that it will, judging from the story so far, the student council president isn't the real antagonist, and the she is doing everything the way she is, is so that she can usurp her parents company and control over the nations. i think at some point she and the protagonist will join forces and battle it out against her families corporation. this is sorta like with Gurren Lagan in how the antagonist for the first half of the series wasn't actually the antagonist, but another entity was that you don't find out about till about half way into the second act (episode 15-17).