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At some point, all writers worry about originality. Whether it’s a familiar plot beat, a character that feels inspired by something you’ve read before, or simply a nagging sense that your idea isn’t entirely new, these fears can slow your momentum before you’ve barely gotten started. But in most cases, those concerns are based on a misunderstanding of how great stories are actually built.
In today’s blog, Ginger explores how some of the most iconic characters and franchises ever created weren’t born from pure invention, but from transformation. By tracing the surprising lineage behind everything from anime classics to modern novels, he shows how influence is often at the very heart of creativity. So if you’ve ever questioned whether your story is original enough, this may be the perspective shift you need to confidently steal like a storyteller and turn those influences into something familiar, yet uniquely your own.
My kids are obsessed with anime. I mean obsessed to the point that our living room TV hums with the sound of badly-dubbed Japanese at all hours and half my Amazon recommendations are now inexplicably for anime figurines, special edition DVDs, or obscure soundtracks on original vinyl. For the most part, I’ve watched this unfold from a comfortable parental distance, nodding politely whenever my eldest son tries to explain the nuances of some epic battle arc I’ve never seen. However, a few weeks ago, he looked up from his screen with an unusual gleam in his eye and said, simply: “Dad, you’ll really love this movie.”
And so I agreed to watch it. The movie was The Castle of Cagliostro, a 1979 animated film featuring a character called Lupin III. I’d never heard of the character or the movie, so I sat down to watch it with zero expectations except to politely endure it if it wasn’t my thing.
What I got instead was something that felt instantly, warmly familiar. It was the beautifully animated tale of a roguish, clever thief with a heart of gold, racing across a fairy-tale European landscape and rescuing a princess from a sinister count. The film had the kind of breezy, witty energy that immediately reminded me of two things I love dearly—The Saint and Tintin. It was like the two characters had been pressed together into something new and wonderful.
Directed by a then-unknown animator named Hayao Miyazaki (yes, that Hayao Miyazaki, years before Studio Ghibli existed), the film is quietly one of the most charming adventure movies ever made. I was hooked, so I did what any writer does when they discover something wonderful: I went down the rabbit hole.
The Gentleman Thief Who Stole His Own Identity
Lupin III, it turns out, has a history as tangled and mischievous as the character himself. The franchise began in 1967 as a manga by Japanese artist Kazuhiko Katō, better known by his pen name Monkey Punch. The series follows the escapades of master thief Lupin III, the grandson of Arsène Lupin, the gentleman thief of Maurice Leblanc’s series of novels. And, as an aficionado of gentlemen thieves, I found this is where the story gets deliciously complicated.
In 1905, Maurice Leblanc invented the character of Arsène Lupin, a gentleman burglar who operates on the wrong side of the law but who steals from individuals who are far worse than him. Leblanc’s Lupin became enormously popular in France—think Sherlock Holmes’s stylish, morally flexible French counterpart—and inspired the later gentleman thieves I came to love, like Raffles and Simon Templar.
Sixty years later, Monkey Punch, having read fifteen of Leblanc’s stories, decided to build a new character from those foundations. He decided to chronicle the adventures of Lupin’s fictional grandson, reimagined as a swaggering, comedic action hero for a modern Japanese audience.
The legal trouble came swiftly. Monkey Punch did not ask permission to use the Arsène Lupin name, and at the time Japan did not enforce trade copyrights. However, the rest of the world did, and in 1967 Arsène Lupin was still protected intellectual property.
By the time Leblanc’s estate launched legal action in Japan, the name was considered to have entered into common use. That ruling protected the series in Japan, but Western releases were a different matter entirely. The estate of Maurice Leblanc demanded a large amount of money for the use of the Lupin name elsewhere, which the producers refused to pay. As a result, foreign versions of the character were renamed: “Wolf” in some markets (a literal translation of the French name Lupin), “Rupan” in others, and in France, with pointed irony, Edgar de la Cambriole (Edgar of Burglary). This state of affairs finally changed in 2021, when the character of Arsène Lupin finally entered the public domain, seventy years after his creator’s death.
There’s a wonderful irony threaded through all of this. Leblanc himself had once written a story in which Arsène encountered and bested Sherlock Holmes—without asking permission from the estate of Conan Doyle. For all future reprintings, that version of Holmes was referred to as Herlock Sholmes. The original Lupin’s creator was himself guilty of the very sin for which his estate would later pursue Monkey Punch. Intellectual property, it turns out, has always been a slippery thing!
Yet here is what matters: Despite the lawsuits, the name changes, the legal fog, Lupin III became something entirely its own.
Monkey Punch brought together a range of eclectic influences spanning Alfred Hitchcock films to the irreverent humour of Mad magazine, combining elements of Leblanc’s Lupin and James Bond to develop a flirtatious and narcissistic main character entirely distinct from his literary grandfather.
The franchise has now run for nearly sixty years, spawning multiple anime series, feature films, and a devoted global fanbase. With its jazzy soundtrack, killer opening sequence and sharply dressed lead, it positively oozes authentic retro cool. Lupin III is not a copy of Arsène Lupin. He is something that could only have existed by standing on those original shoulders, but then leaping somewhere completely new.
The Monkey King Goes Super Saiyan
My son’s other great anime love is Dragon Ball, which, once you start looking, tells a remarkably similar story about creative inheritance (or copying somebody else’s ideas.)
When Akira Toriyama created Dragon Ball in the early eighties, he adapted one of history’s most significant literary works: a 16th-century Chinese novel called Journey to the West. That novel, written during the Ming Dynasty, follows a Buddhist monk on a pilgrimage to India, accompanied by a cast of supernatural companions—most famously Sun Wukong, the irrepressible, supernaturally powerful Monkey King.
The main character of Dragon Ball, Goku, shares profound similarities with Sun Wukong. Goku’s Flying Nimbus and Power Pole are directly inspired by Wukong’s magical cloud and his staff, which can grow and shrink at will. Similarly to Goku, Wukong was capable of great and powerful transformations.
The parallels extend across the whole cast: Bulma mirrors Tang Sanzang, who gathers warriors along a journey. Oolong is a direct reference to Zhu Bajie, a pigman who is comical, powerful, and morally ambiguous. Yamcha’s counterpart is Sha Wujing, a bandit from the desert. Even the Dragon Balls themselves echo ancient mythological objects, sacred items sought across a perilous journey, granting the deepest wishes of those who collect them all.
Toriyama didn’t stop there. He admired Bruce Lee, and Lee’s film Enter the Dragon had a profound impact on the series. Not only did it contribute to the title, but the battle-focused intensity Goku channels in his fiercest moments draws on Lee’s legendary presence. Toriyama also pulled from Superman’s mythology, Japanese epic literature, and even the visual comedy of Tom and Jerry for the relationship between Goku’s equivalent duo of eternal antagonists.
And yet ask any Dragon Ball fan whether Goku feels like a copy of Sun Wukong and they’ll probably look at you as though you’ve asked whether a skyscraper is just a pile of bricks. Despite being written over 400 years apart, the influence of Journey to the West is apparent throughout Toriyama’s series, yet what he built from those foundations is something that stands entirely on its own, just like Lupin III remains apart from the stories of Arsène Lupin.
Dragon Ball didn’t just borrow from its source material. It transformed it, filtering it through a unique creative sensibility, a specific cultural moment, and a particular sense of humor and scale. The result was something so original that it has itself become a foundational text, inspiring generations of manga artists who came after.
Thorn in the Forest
I loved discovering Lupin III because he’s a gentleman thief just like Simon Templar, the eponymous Saint. Templar himself was described as “the Robin Hood of Modern Crime” which shows that there was more than one inspiration behind him. Taking older ideas and making them new is part of what makes characters like The Saint and Lupin III so appealing.
It was a thought I had when I read the latest novella by my friend Terrance Layhew, who’s appeared on the Fully Booked podcast a number of times. Terrance recently published a novel called Thorn, a story set in medieval England, following a masked vigilante who moves through the shadows of a corrupt society, stealing from the powerful to protect the powerless. The character wears a disguise. He has a secret identity kept hidden from the very authorities hunting him. He is noble-born but fights for the dispossessed. His legend grows with every deed, told in whispers among the people he defends.
You know this character, don’t you? Just like Lupin III or Simon Templar—or even Arsène Lupin himself—you’ve met him before in Sherwood Forest, and you’ve read about him masquerading in the drawing rooms of Revolutionary France as The Scarlet Pimpernel. The masked protector with a double life is one of the oldest and most beloved archetypes in Western storytelling.
And Terrance knew this when he wrote Thorn. He wasn’t hiding it. What he was doing, consciously and deliberately, was the same thing Monkey Punch did when he sat down with fifteen Arsène Lupin stories before putting pen to paper to create something of his own.
He was learning the grammar of a beloved tradition and then writing his own sentence in it. Thorn sits in a specific medieval English world rendered with genuine historical texture. Its masked hero has a voice, a wound, a moral complexity that belongs to no other character. The story explores questions of justice and sacrifice that feel startlingly contemporary. Readers who love Robin Hood will feel immediately at home, only to discover they’ve walked into somewhere they’ve never been before.
That’s not theft. That’s the entire history of literature, and I celebrate it.
The Lesson for Self-Published Authors
Here is what all of this has to say to you, sitting down with your manuscript and worrying—as writers always do—whether you’re being original enough.
Every story you love was built on the bones of stories that came before it. The Saint borrowed from Raffles, who borrowed from Arsène Lupin, whose creator borrowed from Sherlock Holmes. Star Wars borrowed from Kurosawa and Joseph Campbell. Every heist movie owes a debt to the ones before it. Every fantasy novel is in conversation with Tolkien, who was in conversation with Norse mythology, which was itself passed down from earlier voices now lost to us.
The anxiety about originality is almost always misplaced. The real question is never “did I borrow?” It’s “did I transform?”
Did you take what you loved, filter it through your particular imagination, your specific way of seeing the world, your own questions and preoccupations, and produce something that couldn’t have existed without you?
Monkey Punch loved Arsène Lupin and made Lupin III. Akira Toriyama loved an ancient Chinese myth and made Goku. Terrance Layhew loved Robin Hood and made Thorn. None of them were pretending those influences didn’t exist. All of them were honest about their creative inheritance. And all of them, by being genuinely themselves in the work, ended up making something that has its own unmistakable fingerprint.
Your influences aren’t a weakness. They’re your foundation. Stand on them, and then, like any good thief, make off with something entirely your own.
English (US) · 