cool and unusual punishment

PSA

If you read someone's work or look at someone's art and your immediate first impression is 
"This reminds me of..."

For the love of God don't say it. I've seen a lot of artists who are f*cking sick of having their original characters compared to Steven Universe, mainly on account of body shape or basic shape composure... and essentially nothing else? This isn't to say this doesn't happen in other fandoms- see this video by BlazeTheFireDragon, below:

Writers are a lot less vocal about this (because for one thing no one reads our shit) but it still happens. 

Often.

  Aaaaaaaand it's infuriating! 

Same goes for people saying "this concept reminds me of x" or "LEL UNDERTALEZ". Obviously a lot of us do put easter eggs in our works (look, Hearts of Gold is littered with them, and they really do ruin the book for me when I reread it) but seriously not everything is an Undertale/Hamilton reference. This goes double for books written before either of those franchises were established. It's super obnoxious.

Of course, obvious references aside*, it's unlikely characters were made as a deliberate nod to some other show. Authors and artists often take inspiration from franchises they like, as has been tradition for generations of professionals, but we really do consider our characters fully ours and comparing them to other established works is very degrading. Concepts work the same way. Yes, someone's magic system may use the elemental shtick that has been going on... forever... but I can assure you they don't want to be reminded of every other franchise that uses it every chapter. It's not constructive. At the risk of repeating myself.

OBNOXIOUS.

People don't seem to understand that comparing people's works to established fiction is not a compliment. It's a criticism. In fact, I agree with its use entirely when IT IS FORMULATED AS A CRITICISM. For example, if you see a book labelled "Fighters" and it's about wild foxes with a long ass allegiance page roughly divided into ranks...

then yes, if the author takes constructive criticism, you might want to suggest they toggle their concept a bit to at least make their idea fresh. If you think an author is leaning too heavily on a franchise, AND THEY ASK YOUR OPINION, THEN YOU GET TO SAY SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Sure, there are a bunch of character designs that are evident mirrors of canon characters, especially with OCs (see: every undertale skeleton fancharacter under the sun), but you have to look a liiiiiiiiittle deeper when you shit on people for doing that than, as seen above, color. Drawing comparisons where there are none does not make you look smart. 

This is not that large of an issue on Wattpad. I have not seen it to this extent, at least, but I have seen. I do not think anyone who has done this on my books has had any kind of negative intent, nor do I think most people have any when they engage in this kind of behavior with the intent to upset creators. I only ask that people be a little more alert when making this kind of comparison in the future. 

*I'm kind of the poster child for not teaching what I preach, here, because there were literally reference characters in my books (see again the HoG trilogy). For the record, if you are a young writer, don't make characters whose entire personality is a reference to some franchise you like. You will regret it. Hell, I never even watched Doctor Who or Supernatural, which is the only reason Ten is even remotely redeemable.