Skulduggery was home. He sat down at his computer and directed his web browser to the Fanfiction website. Checking the section for the Skulduggery Pleasant series, he was surprised to see a new story with the genre listing of "Adventure/Parody". Intrigued, he clicked on the story listing and over the course of the next 2 minutes, he read what was quite possibly the worst-written story he had ever read. He found this mildly amusing, but decided that the story did not have much in the way of commentary on the issues it raised. It was not a very good parody.
He decided to click on the Reviews section to see if anyone who had not realised that the story was a parody was angry at the poor writing quality. Skulduggery happily discovered that one person had definitely realised that the story was a tounge-in-cheek mockery of the general poor quality of fan fiction for almost any IP. However, much to his disappointment, at least two of the other reviewers seemed to not realise that the story was a joke, and, inexplicably, seemed to think it showed potential. He wondered if this too was a joke, providing the commentary on the quality of fan fiction that was missing from the story itself, but this theory just didn't work for him.
This vaguely interesting analysis sparked further thoughts in Skulduggery's mind. What makes a story count as a parody? Many writers seemed to think that all you needed to do to create a parody story was to make something deliberately terrible, exaggerating the flaws in depressingly serious works. Skulduggery disagreed with this view. His opinion was that a parody needed to provide clear commentary on the flaws it highlighted. Knowing that a problem exists is not the same as understanding it, after all. Thus, Skulduggery decided, this ThatDude92194 had failed at writing an effective parody. It was at this moment that Skulduggery reallised the author was writing a parody of parodies, not a parody of poor-quality stories. Skulduggery was about to give the author props for this cleverness, until he realised who was telling him it was clever.