Seriously hacked off

So a couple of days ago I got this review on ff.net of my fic Respect Your Elders, that I’ve only just looked at. It consists of one line:

Lovely story, but I was under the impression that Shapinglight from LJ wrote it.

...

It’s anonymous, meaning I can’t reply. There isn’t a mechanism, to my knowledge, for me to respond in the ‘reviews’ segment publically on that site.

Now I don’t mind the confusion. Respect Your Elders is Giles/Spike smut, and shapinglight’s written a bunch of great Giles/Spike fic, she’s who I associate with the pairing too. It’s easy to misremember this stuff and I’m not going to get precious about it.

But. The phrasing.

Maybe I’m being oversensitive but that really looks like someone semi-politely semi-accusing me of plagiarism. Particularly because it’s anonymous, but even before I noticed that I was like ‘wtf… this is like the warning-shot review before you start compiling links for stop_plagiarism.’ And there’s nowhere for me to respond, and perhaps link them to the damn LJ post.

I know it doesn’t come right out and say it, but I literally can’t read it any other way. Especially the phrasing - “lovely” story, and “from LJ”, I just. I HOPE RIGHT AFTER THIS THE “GUEST” DID SOME RESEARCH AND FELT ASHAMED OF THEMSELVES.

Dear “Guest”,



No love,

me.