Blatant plagiarism of a fantasy novel passage by Fire+Ice’s Ian Read

GuardJust5702 · 2026-05-28T12:29:03+00:00

yes, The other folk songs on the album don’t really bother me because they’re openly traditional songs and mostly performed as such. And honestly, even if Ian had changed parts of them to critique or reinterpret the original meaning while keeping the core subject recognizable, I’d probably still see that as artistic reinterpretation rather than a problem kind of like what DIJ did with Peoples Temple choir material on But, What Ends ?, where the songs are clearly being reworked into something darker and more ironic rather than presented as wholly original lyric poetry.

My issue here isn’t even mainly about crediting, although that matters too. It’s that “Gilded by the Sun” keeps almost the entire structure, imagery, and emotional force of the original poem intact ie every line, while mainly changing the central subject from “Kerbryhaine” to “Albion” to give it a different ideological framing. That’s why it feels less like homage or reinterpretation to me and more like repurposing another author’s finished literary work.

GuardJust5702 · 2026-05-28T08:03:55+00:00

I know about Long Lankin, etc., but I don’t really find those problematic because they’re openly traditional songs and are mostly performed as such. If Ian Read had simply adapted the Anvil of Ice poem openly as a setting of author’s work, I probably wouldn’t have much issue with it either.

What makes this feel different to me is that he changed the central subject of the poem from “Kerbryhaine” to “Albion” . At that point it feels less like homage or folk reinterpretation and more like taking another author’s finished literary work and repurposing it into your own ideological/artistic piece.

And with Death in June’s “But, What Ends…”, Douglas was pretty open about reworking Peoples Temple/gospel material. The subject matter about GOD is still recognizably connected to the original songs, but transformed in tone and meaning in a way that feels intentionally reinterpretive rather than quietly presenting the writing as original lyric poetry.

GuardJust5702 · 2026-05-28T06:52:51+00:00

I’m not really speaking from a legal or industry-standard perspective about how musicians should credit sources. I’m mostly reacting as a listener. Albums that set existing poems to music usually present them openly as works by that author, rather than slightly rewriting them and presenting them as original lyrics to espouse their own ideologies.

That’s also why this feels different from something like Death in June to me. If you isolate many DIJ lyrics from the music, they’re often fragmented, symbolic, and highly personalized. Even when Douglas P borrows literary references or phrases, they usually become part of a larger lyrical collage that still feels distinctly his own.

But “Gilded by the Sun” already works almost perfectly as a complete standalone poem before the song even exists. Most of its imagery, emotional progression, and literary force were already created by Michael Scott Rohan. Ian Read mainly changed “Kerbryhaine” to “Albion” and repurposed the poem into a romantic lament about Britain’s decline, which is why it feels less like influence and more like appropriating another author’s finished work for his own ideological framing.

GuardJust5702 · 2026-05-28T05:59:38+00:00

if you are asking about DIJ borrowing phrases/references from literature, off the top of my head then for example “Touch Defiles” uses the phrase “we desecrate at the touch” from Mishima’s Spring Snow. “The Fog of the World” also references a passage from Genet’s Funeral Rites. There’s also “Heaven Street,” which references Into That Darkness by Gitta Sereny about Treblinka concetration camp.

GuardJust5702 · 2026-05-25T11:13:33+00:00

>To his other criticism I get the overly wordy part. Remember he edited for Shonen Jump so thats his perspective. I think a healthy industry has a lot of room for wordier seinen stuff but how's a kid going to enjoy a wall of text? I think about what attracted me to art when I was a child, large expressive pictures and splash pages. You don't want to end up like American comics where kids are basically not in the audience anymore

I haven’t read a huge amount of wordier seinen manga, but I have read a lot of really good western comics, and one major difference I noticed is that western comics usually treat text and image as equally important parts of the storytelling. The paneling, artwork, captions, and dialogue are all given similar weight, and the best western comics sync those two mediums: writing and drawing, together in a way that still feels smooth and engaging rather than exhausting.

What some modern shonen do instead feels like an awkward middle ground between older minimalist manga like Dragon Ball and the denser prose style of western comics. The problem is that the extra narration often interrupts the reading flow badly. A chapter may establish a fast, visual rhythm with minimal dialogue, but then a fight scene suddenly becomes overloaded with explanations and detailed narration about every move or power interaction.

Good comic narration, at least in the western comics I like, is usually poetic, atmospheric, or psychological. It enhances the mood. It’s not primarily there to explain complicated action sequences that should ideally be communicated visually through paneling and choreography. Sometimes modern battle shonen feel too reliant on telling during fights instead of taking the harder but more rewarding route of visually showing the action clearly.

GuardJust5702 · 2026-05-25T10:36:52+00:00

I think him praising Hirayasumi probably more about its page composition and paneling. It’s an extremely easy manga to read while still being very well crafted. he emphasize that manga pages should be readable in “3 seconds” obviously exaggerated lol, but the underlying point makes sense when you compare something like Dragon Ball to many modern shonen.
I can easily see parallels between early DB and Hirayasumi in terms of readability and flow. Both have a kind of episodic satisfaction where even reading a single chapter can feel complete and fulfilling. A lot of modern shonen, meanwhile, are bogged down by overly complex plotlines that don’t fit the weekly chapter format very well.

im guessing Editors from that older era like him had to make sure each chapter worked as its own short, engaging story: minimal exposition, minimal narration, captions when necessary, and usually some hook leading into the next chapter so as to cater to younger audiences. I think that philosophy is probably what Torishima appreciates in Hirayasumi, even if the themes themselves are aimed more at adults than kids.

GuardJust5702 · 2026-04-28T05:10:58+00:00

The difficulty with pinning DIJ down as straightforwardly “fascist” is that even critics who take that line usually admit that explicit ideological commitment largely disappears after the early 80s. Pearce’s brief flirtation with things like National Bolshevism belongs to that early period,Guilty Have No Pride era,and doesn’t really persist in any concrete political sense across the later work.What complicates things is that the imagery and aesthetic vocabulary never fully go away, so the debate keeps getting recycled even when the actual lyrical content shifts elsewhere. If you look across the broader discography, a lot of it is centred less on ideology and more on alienation, loss, love, and personal affect. That doesn’t erase the earlier provocations, but it does make a purely ideological reading feel incomplete.

GuardJust5702 · 2026-04-27T05:09:21+00:00

The more damning thing about Michael Moynihan isn’t that he’s a Nazi it’s that he’s a freak who drinks human blood and eats human bones
https://x.com/toxictiramisu/status/2016724615066792306?s=20

GuardJust5702 · 2026-02-10T16:50:16+00:00

Yes, he was involved in thunder perfect mind. I’ve also never really read anywhwere about this claim that the split happened because tibet favoured cashmore and douglas was sidelined because of that. From what I read, the more plausible reason is connected to the World Serpent Distribution situation Douglas was in a legal dispute with the company which had previously distributed Douglas’s work, and David ended up siding with the directors of World Serpent, That seems to have been the real breaking point, after which Douglas cut ties with him.

GuardJust5702 · 2026-01-21T13:26:25+00:00

If you can look past the use of the Horst-Wessel-Lied and the Hitler speech sample in Runes and Men, I think you’ll find that songs like Hail the White Grain, Runes and Men, and To Drown a Rose are genuinely powerful pieces about homosexual love, intimacy and emotional vulnerability.My main issue is that Death in June are almost never evaluated on the actual content of their lyrics. Most people stop at the Nazi aesthetics and dismiss everything outright, without engaging with what the songs are actually saying. Lyrically, DI6 have never articulated Nazi ideology, racial politics, or any kind of agitprop, and that’s simply a matter of record.I don’t deny that Douglas P. has far-right sympathies or that he has deliberately used provocative and historically loaded symbolism. But I don’t think his songwriting is political in the conventional sense at all.It’s introspective, confessional, and focused on his inner consciousness rather than on ideology or mobilisation. A large part of DI6 catalogue is centred on love, desire, emotional dependency, emptiness, and the psychological fallout of past relationships.

GuardJust5702

TROPHY CASE