Fanfic Etiquette Question

[moon_custafer]

What do you do when you come across a story that’s either hilariously bad, or deliberately hilariously bad, but you’re not sure which?

80% of me wants to recommend this Agent Carter soulmate AU as an amusing Larry-Blamire-style parody, but 20% doesn’t want to embarrass the author if they are, in fact, innocently unaware of the redundancies filling their prose: reiterations of what has just been stated in an earlier sentence, or an earlier clause of the same sentence, almost as if the characters, or the author, were repeating themselves.

Oh well. 

Comments

[pedanther]

Does the author have other work you can look at to get an idea of their usual style?

[moon_custafer]

About a dozen works— the others I looked at seemed mildly stilted, but not like the one I was reading today; and going back to that one, the style really seemed to explode around Chapter Four (rot13’d):

"Gunaxf sbe pbzvat," Puvrs Qbbyrl fnlf nf uvz naq Wnpx trg vagb uvf cevingr bssvpr. "jung unir lbh urneq nobhg gur F.F.E.?" Ur nqqf, jnagvat gb xabj ubj zhpu Wnpx xabjf nobhg uvf ntrapl.

"Abg gung zhpu, gb or cresrpgyl ubarfg," Wnpx nafjref ubarfgyl, nf rira gubhtu ur unq urneq fbzr guvatf nobhg gur F.F.E., ur qvqa'g ernyyl xabj ubj gur ntrapl bcrengrq naq jung glcrf bs pnfrf vg gbbx ba.

[pedanther]

...wow. Like you, I'm not sure what that is, but it's certainly something.

[moon_custafer]

I’ve got a new hypothesis: the beginning of Chapter 3 was the point at which the author pounded a pot of coffee brewed with Red Bull and turned into the Jack Kerouac of Soulmate AUs.

[sabotabby]

Hah yeah, I kind of stealth send it to people I know with the caveat that I'm not sure if it's parody or not.

[notasupervillain]

Ah, Poe's law. It's impossible to tell apart a well-done parody from the real thing on the Internet.

I wouldn't take the risk of reccing it in a way that could hurt the author's feelings. So I might DM close friends, but that is all.