Whew! Today’s released topic, Formless Oedon, was a bit of a doozy. In retrospect, I wish I had found a way to break it up further, but by the time I realized that it would have taken more time to break it down than to just finish it.
The first essay, The Eldritch Truth, was mostly a retelling of a single source, and did not require a lot of citations. However, this recent essay was the first to pull from multiple sources. As such, I felt I needed to up my citation game. While it still needs improvement, I wanted to take this space to share a little bit about the originality of my content.
All of the theories on Lore Hunt are my own unless otherwise cited. That said, I have come to learn that there is no such thing as an original thought. As I came to many conclusions during my research, I turned to the internet to see if there is anybody else who has come to the same conclusions that I have. In most cases, the answer is “yes”. And this makes sense, considering that we are all pulling from the same source.
However, if I came to a conclusion and find a random Reddit comment where someone else came to the same conclusion, I feel no need to cite them. They are not the source of my conclusion, we just happened to come to the same one. That is not plagiarism.
However, if I learn something from another source that I did not discover on my own, I feel it is very important to cite that source. In Formless Oedon, you will see links to my source for the original Japanese texts and the tools I used to determine my translations. These are sources to content which I could not have facilitated on my own.
You will also see that I cite LastProtagonist, who you might recognize best for Fear the Old Lore. Although the information I cite from him is available in-game and in the Japanese translation, it is not something that I discovered myself. Therefore, I find it important to cite his discovery.
I hope this makes sense. I will inevitably make a claim that someone else has already made. Please recognize that I am striving to be transparent in my citations. If you ever believe that I have failed to give appropriate credit where it is due, please file an issue in GitHub through the link below.