It's pretty much the same idea as the above titles but omg it's so well written. Absolute must read!
BTW, The Magicians TV series might be the best thing SyFy ever made. It's got so much heart, it's properly funny, it's creative, it's epic despite a shoestring budget, and the characters stay with you long after you finish.
But yeah up until that point it was great!
The Magicians overdid it though. It's not a musical episode, iirc it's like 2 seasons
Edit: just to be clear, I still watched those 2 entire seasons, because the story is genuinely that good, plus I was invested. But I really wish they hadn't gone musical, it really messed with the mood of the series.
Add to this the 50 bajillion manga/anime's with the exact same trope.
The better comparison is probably with Percy Jackson, which isn't quite the same concept (being an American series, where boarding school fiction isn't quite as well-known a genre) but matches the ages, sense of discovery, and relationships to authority figures far better.
This isn't directly relevant to your point, but I really find it wild that people see two stories that have magic and a school in them and go "look, it's the same thing", especially when the genres and tropes of the two books are so utterly different. For that matter, Harry Potter is also nothing like Earthsea, which is another common reference point. I wonder if Americans just don't have as much experience with boarding school fiction to be able to categorise Harry Potter as a series?
Well, that kind of was exactly my point, although I feel now I didn't make it very clearly.
Someone might shoot down a prospective author who intends to write a book featuring a young protagonist getting a formal education in magic because it's "been done", but the resulting works are very different. It was a counterpoint to the article saying that we should not try to realise our ideas because someone somewhere has had "the same idea". They probably have had an idea which could be described in a similar fashion, but it doesn't really mean its the "same idea"
I probably stumbled a bit describing those books as the same concept when I should have put "same idea" in quotes
To stretch the book analogy beyond breaking point, it would be like if Patrick Rothfuss released The Name of the Wind, and JK Rowling immediately put out "Harry Potter and the Kingkiller Chronicles, now with added Kvothe", and basically used her name and the Harry Potter brand to outcompete Rothfuss selling the same thing. (Obviously for books, you've got copyright, but there's no copyright for your favourite app idea.)
I think the extent to which that is actually true is hard to say, but I think it's a different point to the one you're arguing against here.
A wise friend of mine once said, in regard to "ideas are nothing; execution is everything": you can tell a thousand artists to paint a portrait of an Italian woman with a countryside landscape behind her but, good or bad, none of them are the mona lisa.