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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8198836" data-attributes="member: 18">That's a good reminder, but I think it would have to be a pretty unusual circumstance that caused it to "re-evolve" as it were.I don't think you've provided any reasoning or logic as to why you're demanding this particularly high standard, which is far out of line with how influence is discussed in most critical fields. Sure, if someone has definitely never come across something (particularly if chronology makes it impossible or implausible), you can rule it out as an influence, but on the flip side, people have denied being influenced by stuff where it's pretty staggeringly obvious that they were, even if it was perhaps subconscious. So the idea that they have to outright say it or it has to be staggeringly obvious (i.e. from direct references etc.) seem unreasonable to me. Also fans can be complete and utter denialist idiots about influences in a very problematic way - a good example would be the Warhammer-Warcraft influence. It's obviously pretty obvious that Warhammer influenced Warcraft. Indeed, in an interview when Warcraft came out in 1994/1995, I remembered reading precisely that they'd wanted to do a Warhammer game. But that was in a paper mag long-forgotten. By 2001, when WC3 arrived, fans were typically aggressively denying there was any influence, and claiming both were merely drawing from the same sources (which was complete horse-dung), and that only got more intense with World of Warcraft. You'd be shouted down if you even pointed out the similarities. But later Blizzard did a post-mortem-type piece of WC1, and whilst the main writer tried to play it down, he was clear that, yes, they wanted to do a Warhammer game but just as the article I'd read decades before had said, things had fallen through. This was reconfirmed on the 20th anniversary where Blizzard posted another piece discussing WC's history. You still get people today who get into an absolute tizzy about this and try to deny there was any influence and that the Warhammer thing was just a brief idea (man what lol?). It's wild.And then there's indirect influence, where someone hasn't actually been exposed to something, but to the derivatives of it. I strongly suspect this is the case with Terry Pratchett. AFAIK he'd never suggested he played D&D or GURPS or the like (nor was the proud type who might hide that), but there's so much stuff that seems RPG-derivative in his books that it seems certain he knows people who do, and has read work by people who do.Another thing that can be tricky with influences is dead influences - by that I mean, stuff that was a thing at the time, but totally isn't a thing now, and is even largely forgotten. A good example here would be Robert Jordan and Terry Brooks. Both of them were obviously heavily influenced by Tolkien (and many other sources with Jordan -  particularly Dune and Taoism). But what's notable is that they're both influenced by a once-common, now forgotten understanding of Tolkien, which is as a quasi-sci-fi story, specifically that it was far post-apocalyptic from an industrial/high tech society, perhaps set in Earth's own future. As discussed in the BBC documentary "Worlds of Fantasy" this was once a very common approach to Tolkien's work, because people were familiar with sci-fi, but much less so with fantasy, in the 1960s and earlier 1970s. And I don't think it's any coincidence, given the ages of the authors, when they started writing, and so on, that in both cases (minor spoilers) their big series are largely Tolkien-inspired fantasy, but technically set in a post-apocalyptic future (it's a little more complicated with WoT but same basic idea). If people don't know that influence even could exist, they may think elements are more original than they might be, or think stuff was an influence which probably wasn't.On top of that, a lot of authors just haven't talked about their influences very much, so demanding they specify them or we have to pretend they aren't there is extremely silly in my eyes.</blockquote>

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