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xparrotAbout two years ago I posted No Time Like the Present (No Present Like This Time) (also on AO3), a Gintama/Doctor Who crossover fic that starts out relatively dramatic and halfway through takes a sharp right into Gintama-appropriate 4th-wall-shattering crack.
Since posting that fic, I have repeatedly gotten anonymous reviews on ff.net helpfully informing me that Doctor Who has broken the 4th wall before. Usually that's all the reviews say; sometimes they specify a date for the first Whovian 4th-wall-breaking, or protest that "Of course this messes Doctor Who up." To date I have gotten 14 reviews of this nature (on a fic that's only got 16 reviews otherwise!) - a glut when it was first posted, and then coming in regularly every few months. The latest one was this morning. I've gone and deleted all of them since I didn't like how they were artificially inflating my review count - but I still have the email alerts and I'm tempted to post them all here for posterity.
As far as I can tell, though the reviews have been signed by different people, judging by word choice and sentence structure they're all by the same guy (I say "guy" because most of the names given have been male). I am so very curious who this person is! As far as I can tell, they aren't familiar with Gintama or at least don't care about it, so I can't figure out how they came across my fic at all, or why they bothered reading it. Though that's nothing compared to the real mystery, which is what drives someone to return again and again and again to a little-known fic to spam the reviews with Doctor Who trivia? What is it about this story that was so offensive and "unfair" to Doctor Who - a series approximately a hundred thousand times more popular in the English-speaking world than Gintama - that it garners such dedication? I actually went to the Doctor Who crossover section to see if it was some sort of trolling tradition, but found no other fics with such reviews.
Last year they did post one signed review, from mark3232, a completely unused account. I PM'ed back but never received a reply, but a month later my mystery "fan" was back (again anon) to correct someone else's review. I've now put up an amended author's note on the fic stating that I am aware of their thesis and I will be deleting any more such reviews I get, but I doubt this will have any effect; a mission of this importance cannot so easily be silenced!
(What makes it especially silly is that in the fic itself the characters discuss how they're in a non-canonical fanwork and not in their respective "real" universes at all...)
Since posting that fic, I have repeatedly gotten anonymous reviews on ff.net helpfully informing me that Doctor Who has broken the 4th wall before. Usually that's all the reviews say; sometimes they specify a date for the first Whovian 4th-wall-breaking, or protest that "Of course this messes Doctor Who up." To date I have gotten 14 reviews of this nature (on a fic that's only got 16 reviews otherwise!) - a glut when it was first posted, and then coming in regularly every few months. The latest one was this morning. I've gone and deleted all of them since I didn't like how they were artificially inflating my review count - but I still have the email alerts and I'm tempted to post them all here for posterity.
As far as I can tell, though the reviews have been signed by different people, judging by word choice and sentence structure they're all by the same guy (I say "guy" because most of the names given have been male). I am so very curious who this person is! As far as I can tell, they aren't familiar with Gintama or at least don't care about it, so I can't figure out how they came across my fic at all, or why they bothered reading it. Though that's nothing compared to the real mystery, which is what drives someone to return again and again and again to a little-known fic to spam the reviews with Doctor Who trivia? What is it about this story that was so offensive and "unfair" to Doctor Who - a series approximately a hundred thousand times more popular in the English-speaking world than Gintama - that it garners such dedication? I actually went to the Doctor Who crossover section to see if it was some sort of trolling tradition, but found no other fics with such reviews.
Last year they did post one signed review, from mark3232, a completely unused account. I PM'ed back but never received a reply, but a month later my mystery "fan" was back (again anon) to correct someone else's review. I've now put up an amended author's note on the fic stating that I am aware of their thesis and I will be deleting any more such reviews I get, but I doubt this will have any effect; a mission of this importance cannot so easily be silenced!
(What makes it especially silly is that in the fic itself the characters discuss how they're in a non-canonical fanwork and not in their respective "real" universes at all...)
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Date: 2013-03-23 07:56 am (UTC)no subject
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