Dilemma
Oh dear.
I was reading a fic yesterday. It was a pretty good fic, in a tiny fandom most people have never heard of. As I came to the end, some of the dialogue seemed strangely familiar, perhaps, I thought, because I had read the fic before.
You know where this is going, don't you?
Eventually, I remembered exactly what the dialogue was reminding me of. A different obscure book, in a different genre, with a different tiny fandom - that I happened to reread a month ago. And that particular dialogue was my favorite scene, so I remembered it fairly well. I looked it up. The dialogue was the same, word for word. The dialogue tags were different - in fact, the POV had been changed, which is no doubt why I had trouble recognising it at first.
And now I have no idea what to do. The fic was written in 2009, and in a larger fandom, it would have been long buried. The author is still active, and appears to be pretty good, unless that's all plagiarized too. I guess my choices are to report it to ff.net, which seems overly harsh for something that happened 4 years ago, to ignore it completely, which doesn't seem very fair, or to send the author a PM, which is probably the right thing to do, but really really awkward. It's really tempting to just leave it be.
Not a problem I ever expected to have. Advice would be much appreciated.
UPDATE: PM sent. To the author in question, in case they come over from my ff.net profile: Please, please fix this. You are too good a writer to do this.
I was reading a fic yesterday. It was a pretty good fic, in a tiny fandom most people have never heard of. As I came to the end, some of the dialogue seemed strangely familiar, perhaps, I thought, because I had read the fic before.
You know where this is going, don't you?
Eventually, I remembered exactly what the dialogue was reminding me of. A different obscure book, in a different genre, with a different tiny fandom - that I happened to reread a month ago. And that particular dialogue was my favorite scene, so I remembered it fairly well. I looked it up. The dialogue was the same, word for word. The dialogue tags were different - in fact, the POV had been changed, which is no doubt why I had trouble recognising it at first.
And now I have no idea what to do. The fic was written in 2009, and in a larger fandom, it would have been long buried. The author is still active, and appears to be pretty good, unless that's all plagiarized too. I guess my choices are to report it to ff.net, which seems overly harsh for something that happened 4 years ago, to ignore it completely, which doesn't seem very fair, or to send the author a PM, which is probably the right thing to do, but really really awkward. It's really tempting to just leave it be.
Not a problem I ever expected to have. Advice would be much appreciated.
UPDATE: PM sent. To the author in question, in case they come over from my ff.net profile: Please, please fix this. You are too good a writer to do this.