CheatSheetProductions @cheatsheetproductions - Tumblr Blog

Joh Fredersen: I need a robot to do work

Rotwang: I made a robot that can dance. A robot that can give speeches. A robot that can inspire lust. A robot that can feel feelings. A robot that can make moral choices. It chooses to be evil. I made a robot you can bang crazy style. I made a robot with breathtaking eyes

Joh Fredersen: But does it do work?

Rotwang: ✨No✨

hays-code-evader

Fritz Lang movie alignment chart (very normal).

thebendtimes

Still getting this up and going, but I figured I'd post a link now: https://discord.gg/MeDXf4vZ

^^ I've created a Discord server where anyone affected by the situation can come together to talk about next moves, including potential legal action. Whether you or someone you know are owed a refund by Milo Winter, or if you're sympathetic to their situations, here's a place we can discuss it.

hello! i have a question ☝️

what is that creature in your header and videos? i'm super embarassed to ask, but i haven't figured it out by myself yet

No need to be embarrassed, it is kinda obscure.

It's a Gorgoneion from Minoan Greece.

Basically the concept of the creepy face with furious eyes (i.e. Jeff the Killer) has kinda existed since always. When talking about Ancient Greece, these kind of demons are called Gorgoneion and are most likely the origin of the myth of Medusa. I was reading up on them last year and I found this one in the paper "Prehistoric Gorgoneia: a Critical Reassessment" by Anna Lazarou and it was painted on a jug in Phylakopi ca 2000-1600 BCE.

I saw it and I loved it on first sight.

(Yes, I know that the description of these drawings give a different origin than the paper, I don't know why they contradict each other)

seoulmama

(TW: This post contains information with descriptions of SA; discussions of mental health issues and other harmful topics such as abuse and manipulation)

[View Discretion is Advised]

burningdreambanana

I don't know if this is any helped you or not but Milo winter has either deleted or made the Pinterest boards private in relationship to the werewolf book, they've all disappeared

Yeah, those disappeared several weeks before my last video was done (maybe a month+, that video took looooong). Good thing I had screenshots xD. There's a small chance they dissappeared because he abandoned the book-idea, but it's much more likely that he deleted those pinterest-boards, because people (@seoulmama) found out about them.

Fun fact: A significant part of Milo's "10,000 hours of worldbuilding" were also spent assembling pinterest boards (tho on a different account back then)

#age of scorpius #the age of scorpius #booktube #milo winter

cheatsheetproductions

I don’t know if you’re still interested in talking about Milo on here at all, but have you heard about the allegations of him having took heavy inspiration from Romina Garber’s book series “Zodiac”? It was published in 2012, so Milo theoretically could have read it before he and Heir wrote Zodiac Awakened and used that as inspiration. The series ended in 2018 which iirc is around the time Milo returned to the internet to promote the book.

There was a tiktok i saw talking about this a long time ago but I can’t find it anymore. It outlined some of the similarities between Milos story and Zodiac. Heres what I remember from it plus my own observations

- The leaders of Garber’s world are called “Guardians”…

- They are both post-Earth stories although Zodiac isn’t set on Earth, it’s just referenced a lot as having been “destroyed” and the Houses all fled from it with help from some deitic figures

- Both main characters have special knowledge about some secret history of the world; in Zodiac it’s that Ophiuchus the 13th sign exists and in AoS it’s that nonsense about Blaine making the Scorpio Code and getting all the Zodiac Turners killed

- Main characters have to go on a fetch quest to find proof of this secret history and testify in front of the other signs to prove themselves

- Both main characters heavily expo-dump about the worldbuilding of their own universe

- Both main characters are water signs (Cancer & Scorpio)

- In Both stories the main character’s sign is persecuted in some way. For Zodiac, Cancer gets attacked and their planet basically falls into an apocalypse and they have to become refugees.

- Both main characters have a bad relationship with their mom and adore their father (adoptive in Rieka’s case)

- Both main characters have older protective siblings (In Zodiac its a brother though)

- Both main characters’ love interests are Libras (before Milo made Rieka lesbian she and Chase were a thing)

- In both stories there is the ability to somehow change your sign. In Zodiac, if your core personality does not match the sign you were born into, then its possible you may physically change into another sign. These people are called Risers, and they are also heavily persecuted. In the last book (again, 2018) we find out that all of the 13th sign, Ophiuchus, are Risers who can change sign at will, and they were genocided for it. Like Zodiac Turners.

- It is illegal in Zodiac world for any one to marry someone from a different sign. In AoS at least it’s only illegal to marry from a different Union.

- In Zodiac theres the “psy network” which is a collective consciousness people can tap into to communicate across long distances or access the psychic plane. Kind of like AoS Spirit Walking

- Theres a hotheaded Aries girl who bullies the protagonist in both books, in Zodiac she shows up in book 2 though

There are some notable differences:

- Zodiac is a science-fantasy series set in space, each sign has their own solar system that they live in. Then again Milo keeps insisting for no good reason that AoS is somehow also “science fantasy.” So if he wants to claim that genre then fine, it counts to me.

- There’s no ecological themes in Zodiac or a cursed forest

- Bloodlines/family history arent a thing in Zodiac

- Each sign is depicted in different ways and they are in charge of different things

- There was no prophecy in Zodiac, or “trials,” which were in early versions of aos

- There is no 13th sign in AoS

- Chase and Hysan (Zodiac’s Libra guy) are quite different in personality. Hysan is clever and sarcastic while Chase is balanced and bland. But Hysan is also very flirty and vain like Chase, and Chase is similar to the other love interest in Zodiac, Matthias (um… 🤦) who is like a tall stoic gentle giant.

And some other considerations:

- In a zodiac-based story, the ability to change signs is a natural source of conflict that both authors could have come up with independently, also the methods are different, Risers just change on their own vs Zodiac Turners who have to change with magic. No Zodiac Turners means no changing sign. Also in faction genres “forbidden romance” is a given

- Cancer is the author of Zodiac’s sign and Milo’s is scorpio so it could mean theyre both just self-inserting

- I didnt see Zodiac on Milos goodreads list during that part of your video, but its entirely possible he purposely didnt log it on his goodreads if he and Heir were actively ripping elements from it for their pokemon fic and later TZT

I read zodiac as it came out and havent reread it since 2018 but I noticed the similarities right away the more people talked about AoS. I think it af least shows Milo is not the genre pioneering genius he thinks he is. Like oh technology destroyed humanity so now we dont use it/replace it with something else? Great you just described the backstory of Dune, the most famous scifi story ever. And it proves to me he does NOT read within his own genre like he and totes-real-editor Kaitlyn claimed in her q&a. if he did he would have found this book really quick and he should have deliberately tried to make the similarities less obvious.

Hey anon,

I have heard about that theory, too, but since I haven't read Zodiac I can't say how close or different those books are to AOS and I also don't know if Milo read them. If he has, then there would also be a debate to be had about which similarities are inspired by Zodiac and which are common genre conventions (i.e. the 13th sign in Zodiac vs the 13th district in Hunger Games); marriage restrictions are also common genre conventions in fantasy and dystopia books.

But AOS was definetly inspired by other media. The 2020 rewrite of AOS happened around the same time Milo watched She-Ra and there may also be some Dragon Prince. The festival at the beginning may also be inspired by Divergent (which I think was part of his reading list, tho I don't remember that one too well) and Kaia's design is very similar to Katara from ATLA.

My guess is that Milo had his fantasy world and whenever he consumed new media he found things he liked and started inserting that into his daydreams (at least that's what happend when I had my own fantasy world)

coralkitt

Oh Good Morning im the one who made that tiktok forever ago LMAO. the video is gone because tiktok nuked my account and i still don’t know why :’) i think i also left comments on the supercut and Krimson’s video comparing them but not as “i think AoS plagiarized”, rather “Zodiac did this premise 10 times better over 10 years ago”. my video went over the similarities between Rhoma and Rieka as protagonists, the secret history of the world, and the Zodiac Turner/Riser comparisons. i didn’t even clock the love interests both being Libras or Scarlet and Avia both being Aries.

the conclusion of my video was indeed that Milo most likely did not plagiarize or even take that much inspiration, precisely because most of the glaring similarities can be explained by other, more benign things. the plainest source of conflict in a zodiac book would be the ability to change sign, and if Milo had actually ripped off the Risers, let’s be real, his magic system wouldn’t be this fucking convoluted. there’s actually not even magic in Zodiac (you can argue the Psy Network is soft magic and i’d agree but meh). Chase and Hysan are superficially similar, sure, but calling Chase a merger of Hysan and Matthias is… generous. Scarlet and Avia are also very different characters in terms of function, and “hothead” is a widespread stereotype of Aries. the “gods” in Zodiac aren’t really gods either and they’re not based on the Sun, Moon, and Stars, so i wouldn’t really compare them. also, the more obvious similarities only show up in books 2–4 of Zodiac and by that point in time, i’d be genuinely shocked if Milo still read books on the reg, especially because Zodiac was a lot less popular by then.

i have reread the series as recently as last year and the two books generally read totally differently—chiefly because Garber is a Harvard alumni and actually knows how to write and because Zodiac is science fantasy. there are no instances, to my knowledge, of scenes, sequences, or tropes from Zodiac being copy+pasted into AoS a la Red Queen and Powerless, and most of the major similarities can still be explained by both writers drawing from the same source material (astrology) and both writing within the confines of a very specific genre (y/a dystopia). a secret history the government has tried to cover up, forbidden romance, secret factions, etc. could all be drummed up by Milo without Garber’s book in hand. and it is very much true that AoS has the DNA of tons of other books and shows that Milo likes. maybe Zodiac is where he and Heir got the idea for a zodiac story, but there’s no good evidence honestly

all that said—i also agree that it shows Milo’s ignorance about the industry he apparently wants to be part of so bad that he apparently didn’t know this series existed. it never saw much mainstream success, but it was definitely popular in the 2010s off the back of Hunger Games, and i still see it out on display in local and chain bookstores quite a lot. had AoS ever breached booktok/booktube, i really think the comparison would have been drawn regardless. “oh, you also wrote a zodiac book where the main conflict is changing your sign? how original.” it’s right there, and i do think would be fair to point out, because if Milo were actually book-savvy, i think he would’ve foreseen that and tried a little harder to come up with a less obvious, already-done conflict.

so. while it’s theoretically possible Milo has at least read the first Zodiac book, i’m not too convinced. i think what matters more in this discussion is 1) just how grossly negligent Milo is and how much he and bluuuggghhh his “””””EDITOR””””” lied about his credentials yet again. the fact that Zodiac exists and Milo never said a goddamn word about it definitely solidifies the idea that he does not read within his own genre or know that much about it. there’s more to y/a dystopia besides Hunger Games and Divergent buddy. 2) even if AoS didn’t have the prose of a Wattpad fic + the plot of a lucid dream and managed a successful launch, it would still be the far, far inferior “zodiac fantasy.” this may not be another case of Red Queen vs. Powerless, but it’s absolutely a case of “this other one did it better, read that instead.” Zodiac is no masterpiece, but its author at least understands the source material (astrology) far better than Milo. the zodiac aspect of AoS is lazy, confused, and superficial. for all its flaws, at least the zodiacs in Zodiac are actually Zodiacing