He was disappointed, then went on about that book to me all over again.
After that, we exchanged a few words and stopped chatting.
Then I opened the author's profile.
Under a book he'd abandoned earlier, a bunch of readers were asking what had happened to it.
All he said was, "It was too similar to another book, so it got taken down."
That reader of mine was among them, of course. He asked the author, "Will you write more Date A Live fanfiction?"
The author said he would.
So my reader started eagerly telling him how to write it and offering all kinds of suggestions.
When I saw that, I had a bad feeling.
Sure enough, sometime after June 20, the author started another Date A Live fanfiction.
It was called My Date A Live Is Different.
Maybe he'd learned his lesson, because he didn't plagiarize again in this one.
But the work itself, and the way the author and his readers behaved, were as bad as ever.
First, the author never apologized to me, the writer he'd plagiarized.
Nor did he explain in his new book why the previous one had disappeared.
Of course, you can see why. If people knew it had been taken down for plagiarism, he'd lose more than half his goodwill with casual readers.
And because I hadn't gone into his comments to call him out, his reputation was still more or less intact.
The book in which he'd plagiarized me had been reported and taken down, but that was all.
His account hadn't been banned, and he hadn't lost his status as a contracted author.
As for the royalties he'd earned through plagiarism, who knew whether he'd returned them to the site?
In short, only the book was gone. His reputation survived, and