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My Immortal is the quintessential piece of bad fanfiction, a story so notorious that the very concept of badfic immediately brings up mention of it in virtually any circle. Much like a discussion about bad movies inevitably breaks down into someone screaming quotes from The Room into the middle distance in a terrible impression of an even worse accent, My Immortal is a guarantee whenever bad fanfiction comes up. It’s risen above the entry-level masterworks like My Inner Life and “the Goku/Anne Frank” fic, and with its sheer fame completely obscured the deep cuts of a 4 AM fanfiction.net binge where you learn things about yourself that you were much better off not knowing. Regardless of a person’s fandom or even how into fanfic they are, they understand the story to be the utter distillation of everything terrible about fanfic. There is something for everyone, whether the dark specter of a writer’s own teenage shames or something to cackle quotes from and spiral off into dramatic readings of. No fanfic has ever united people across barriers of fandom so easily.

And it’s all a lie.

Several months ago, I wrote a rather long-winded explanation of how My Immortal is not the creation of a teenage girl embodying the very worst in fanfic writers, but in fact the most masterfully-constructed piece of troll fiction ever conceived, which has, for going on nine years, managed to fool the internet at large into believing it completely genuine. But I was left unsatisfied with the initial result, which didn’t delve as deep as I would have liked into the points it raised, and missed quite a few important parts. So I’m making a second pass on the, hopefully concisely enough that I don’t need to make a third, because after writing a second essay about My Immortal, heaven knows I’m miserable now.

Special thanks to oisiflaneur for proofreading this 14,000+ word monster.

Preamble: People Who Are Young And Alive

For the purposes of best understanding everything I’m about to talk about, I suggest going and reading My Immortal first. ‘Context’ might not be the best way to explain what you’ll get by knowing what I’m referring to, but familiarity with the source material will make this a much easier read. Due to it having been long-since purged from fanfiction.net, you can find it reposted across the internet, in particular here. It is quite a read and I greatly reccomend it, although I do so as somebody who has read through countless times and liked it enough to write thousands upon thousands of words about it.

However, it’s certainly not an easy read for some people due to its clusterfuck of misspellings and incomprehensibility, so in addition to the quotes and excerpts I will provide to illustrate my points, I will briefly give a quick rundown of the major players in our tale.

Our heroine, Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way’s own words sum up her existence better than I ever could:

Hi my name is Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way and I have long ebony black hair (that’s how I got my name) with purple streaks and red tips that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like Amy Lee (AN: if u don’t know who she is get da hell out of here!). I’m not related to Gerard Way but I wish I was because he’s a major fucking hottie. I’m a vampire but my teeth are straight and white. I have pale white skin. I’m also a witch, and I go to a magic school called Hogwarts in England where I’m in the seventh year (I’m seventeen). I’m a goth (in case you couldn’t tell) and I wear mostly black. I love Hot Topic and I buy all my clothes from there. For example today I was wearing a black corset with matching lace around it and a black leather miniskirt, pink fishnets and black combat boots. I was wearing black lipstick, white foundation, black eyeliner and red eye shadow. I was walking outside Hogwarts. It was snowing and raining so there was no sun, which I was very happy about. A lot of preps stared at me. I put up my middle finger at them.

This paragraph is the first of the story, and it is also the longest of the story, saying so much and yet so little about our protagonist. We know almost nothing of the personality that she is alleged to possess, but we do know that she wishes to be familially related to Gerard Way because she finds him attractive, and presumably has an incest kink that will never be touched upon again in the story. The rest of this thesis will touch on all of the other woeful elements of this monstrous violation of ‘show, don’t tell’, but now you have the definitive look at who and what Ebony is.

Ebony is in love with Draco Malfoy, who save for a few minor elements remains largely unchanged in My Immortal. The same cannot be said for Harry “Vampire” Potter;

In the Great Hall, I ate some Count Chocula cereal with blood instead of milk, and a glass of red blood. Suddenly someone bumped into me. All the blood spilled over my top.

“Bastard!” I shouted angrily. I regretted saying it when I looked up cause I was looking into the pale white face of a gothic boy with spiky black hair with red streaks in it. He was wearing so much eyeliner that I was going down his face and he was wearing black lipstick. He didn’t have glasses anymore and now he was wearing red contact lenses just like Draco’s and there was no scar on his forhead anymore. He had a manly stubble on his chin. He had a sexy English accent. He looked exactly like Joel Madden. He was so sexy that my body went all hot when I saw him kind of like an erection only I’m a girl so I didn’t get one you sicko.

If nothing else, it’s certainly a nice change from the usual traits about his mother’s eyes and taped-up glasses. In this story, Harry goes by ‘Vampire’; he used to date Draco Malfoy and they got tattoos with each others’ names, he is gothic and now part of Slytherin for reasons never elaborated upon – these two traits go hand-in-hand for every character in the story– and resembles the lead singer of Good Charlotte for some reason. Thankfully, our author also notes that the character who was born, raised, and lives his entire life in Great Britain happens to have a “sexy English accent”.

“Satan” is the name that Tom Riddle went by when he was a Hogwarts student. In the 1980s. And gothic. We’ll touch on him a little later. There’s a lot of trainwreck going on here, in case you haven’t noticed.

The two meta players to what is one of the greatest internet performance art pieces ever created are our author Tara Gilesbie, and her best friend/beta reader Raven, noted in the story by her own self-insert Willow. I have a lot to say about these two, who are characters in their own ways and who the understanding of is vital to seeing My Immortal as something greater than it appears to be. Tara is a budding teenage writer, Harry Potter, and goth, who doesn’t like that people keep ‘flassing’ her story and threatens self-mutilation as retribution for it, because if there is one thing the mid-2000s internet was, it was caring and serious about such issues. She plays it rather loose with things like literary devices or the English language, as we shall see.

Part 1: Bigmouth Strikes Again – Matters of “Da Story and Spelling”

Upon reading My Immortal for the first time, one of the most egregious and clear issues with the story lies within the spelling and grammar: they’re fucking abysmal. You can see it in the author’s notes right away, and it slowly trickles into the story itself. It starts with ridiculous run-on sentences that seem more like lists than the placement of words into a coherent and complete thought, delivered in a halting and completely jarring cadence. Allegedly, Tara’s friend Raven is editing the story until chapter 15 – more on her later – but even under her tenure as beta, little slips become more frequent. The job of trying to edit something so terrible would certainly be taxing and likely require intensive rewrites of whole chapters at a time, and it’s understandable that perhaps someone would simply be past the point of being able to handle this, and would get sloppier in their job. Chapter eleven, where the author’s note explicitly stated Raven helped, contains of the most infamous and brilliant mistakes in the entire work; ‘Loopin’ 'masticating’.

Once Raven leaves as Tara’s editor, the story nosedives even further into a death spiral of spelling and grammar. Typos become common and any lip service paid to writing words out fully is discarded. Without a beta, we see the depths of Tara’s unfettered lack of shits given for her story to come off as anything resembling presentable. And it needs to be this way, because one of the hallmarks of bad fanfiction is being incomprehensible. Not quite as much as it once was in the days before My Immortal shook the scene up, but it’s a clear indicator of the writer being unprincipled and very young, which are all vital to the character of Tara. The story needs to be poorly written, because if it isn’t, a site like fanfiction.net which, let’s be honest, doesn’t have very high standards–or really any at all–won’t react with all the venom and vitriol the story is meant to induce. It would merely fly under the radar as another mediocre story in the ever-swelling Harry Potter section, which even years after the fandom has cooled off, still moves faster than any person can possibly read through completely. That’s why the author’s notes are so terribly formatted; the very first thing a reader will see upon opening the story is, “Special fangz (get it, coz Im goffik)”.

And it is that word 'goffik’, my darlings, that marks the first place in My Immortal where Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

Everyone who types regularly can see certain little flubs and bad habits develop in their words; muscle memory kicking them in the ass and accidentally writing an incredibly similar word, or having some consistent errors that come through very clearly. And she does have a few, such as “jacket” as “jackson” (chapters 26, 37, 41, 42) and “converse” as “congress shoes” (chapters 24, 39, 41, 42), but they are few and far between in a dizzying array of random misspellings as chaotic as the story itself. They’re just layered beneath what is already a no-shits-given typing style that was back then incredibly commonplace within the subculture presented in the story, but they can be made out clearly if looked for beyond using Z in place of S or 'da’ for 'the’.

The easiest case to make in this regard is with names. Nobody has their names consistently spelled correctly, but they aren’t even consistent in their incorrectness. Our main character, Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, is referred to as Enoby, Enony, Egogy, TaEbory, Ebony, and Evony, among others. Hagrid’s name is spelled correctly a grand total of zero times, but can be noticed as Hargrid, Hairgird, HAHRID, Hargirid, etc. Is her boyfriend Draco, or is he Drako, Darko, or Drago? Voldemort has almost as many misspellings as he does appearances; Volfemort, Vlodemort, Volxemort, Voldemint, Volremot, and Darth Valer, to name a few. Sirius Black becomes Serifs, Series, Sodomize, Socrates, and my personal favorite, Spartacus. Professor Slutgorn, Cornelia Fuck, Dumblewhore, Preacher McGongal are also highlights.

But there’s  perhaps too much convenience in how words become other words so easily. From Loopin’s mastication and the pointing of his womb, to being sent not to Azkaban but to Azerbaijan, to recording a sex tape on a caramel, to Dracon being hung like a Stallone, the story is littered with mistakes that seem almost too good to be true. Not all of this can be explained away as just a stray finger. Some of them defy keyboard logic in how they came to be, and somebody who could be that sloppy with a keyboard would be incapable of making sentences that could even be pieced together by someone intent on understanding what was meant by them, which as it stands is already how much of My Immortal is written. Sort of like Finnegan’s Wake, except the analysis of it is performed by significantly sadder people.

Matters like Azerbaijan and caramel might be explained away by spellcheck, if there was even the slightest evidence that Tara spellchecked any of this. It’s very, very apparent that she didn’t, because these passages are surrounded by misspellings that have gone unedited and unfixed, which means that she had to type out these words to the full extent manually.

Could it be some kind of celestial alignment that leads to there being so many absolutely perfect typos? It could be. But I believe that the typos not in fact  the meanderings of someone who doesn’t care, but in fact a labour of love from someone who cares far, far too much. Poor typing habits and a lack of care for what’s being put down are hallmarks of bad writing, and My Immortal strives to push it to heights that become almost impossible for an actual human being to accidentally make. Words are put into the story that aren’t even in the same neighborhood as the ones they’re supposed to be, and names steadily spin out of control in ever-escalating insanity like a Fibonacci sequence from hell.

In the chapter 4 author’s note, Tara notes “her name is ENOBY nut mary su ok!” In chapter 12, hot off the heels of Loopin masticating is the line, “Who MASTABATED (c is dat speld rong) to it he added silently.” What are the odds that she misspells the words on the two occasions where it matters most? In particular the latter one, where you’d think she would bother looking the word back over first to make sure it wasn’t, in fact, misspelled. Raven doesn’t pick up on it either, even though as we’ll see later she is most certainly capable of spelling words properly. It highlights the character of Tara’s hubris and incompetence, that she points out that she spelled a word correctly when she in fact had not. Someone who cares enough to show up the haters mid-story, but not enough to make sure they’re actually doing so.

Accompanying the more clearly intentional mistakes is the steady clumsiness that grows with the word count. Misspellings become more prevalent and less attention is put into trying to look like words, and while the tipping point is certainly Raven rescinding her service as an editor, it’s also a measured and slow degradation. We’ll go over this in more detail in part eight, but it is rather damning that the story doesn’t just plummet right through the floor once Raven isn’t working on making it presentable, as it reasonably should. Instead, it s a careful and measured breakdown. For comparison’s sake, let’s take the opening of chapter 15, which is the final Raven-edited chapter before the breakup:

“Ebony Ebony!” shouted Draco sadly. “No, please, come back!”

But I was too mad.

“Whatever! Now u can go anh have sex with Vampire!” I shouted. I stormed into my room and closed my black door with my blood-red key. It had a picture of Marylin Manson on it. He looked so sexy in a way that reminded me of Draco and Vampire. I started to cry and weep. I took a razor and started to slit my wrists. I drank the blood all depressed. Then I looked at my black GC watch and noticed it was time to go to Biology class.

And chapter 16, where their relationship reaches its peak and Raven has left as editor:

We ran happily to Hogsmede. There we saw the stage where GC had played. We ran in happly. MCR were there playing ‘Helena’. I was so fucking happy! Gerard looked even sexier than he did in da pictures. Even Draco thought so, I could totally see him getting an erection but it didn’t matter cuz I knew know that we were da only true ones for eachother. I was wearing a black leather minidress and black leather platinum boots with red ripped fishnets. Draco was wearing a black baggy MCR t-shirt and black baggy pants. Anyway, we stated moshing to Helena. We frenched. We ran up 2 the front of the band to stage-dive. Suddenly, Gerard pulled off his mask. So did the others. We gasped. It wasn’t them at all. It was.,……………………….. Volsemort and da Death Dealers

There are certainly a few more typos in this sample, and we see 'da’ and 'cuz’ slip through without Raven’s guidance, but overall they don’t seem too far apart. 'Volsemort’ is the only thing that is clearly down to a typo rather than laziness. But let’s jump into Morty McFli’s “tim machine” and see how chapter 26 opens:

A few mutates later Vampire came 2 da tree. He was wearing a blak leather jackson, black leather pants and a Good Chralotte t-shirt.

“Hi Vampire.” I said flirtily as I started to sob. Draco hugged me sexily tryont to comfrot me. I started to cry tears of blood and then told them what happened.

“Oh fuck it!” Vampire shouted angrily. He4 started to cry sadly. “What fucking dick did that!”

“I don’t know.” I said. “Now come on we have 2 tell Dumbledor.”

We ran out of the tree and in2 da castle. Dumblydor was sitting in his office.

“Sire are dads have been shot!” Draco said while we wipped sum tears from his white face. “Enoby had a vision in a dreem.”

Dubleodre started to cockle. “Hahahaha! And How due u aspect me to know Ebony’s not divisional?

It’s night and fucking day. Raven’s presence was clearly not the only thing keeping Tara’s spelling in check, because she started off just fine without her, but somewhere along the next ten chapters clearly lost her way. But hey, just for comparison’s sake, let’s see if ten more chapters supports my claim. Chapter 36:

I loked around in a depresed way. Suddenly I saw Profesor Sinister. B’lody Mary, Socrates and Draco, Vampire and Willow were their to.

“OMFG Sorius I saw u nd Samaro and Snip nd everyone!11111 I kant beleev Snap uzd 2 b goffik!111111”

“Yah I no.” Serious said sadly.

“Oh hey there bitch.” Profesor Trevolry said in an emo voice dirnking some Volxemortserom.

Hi fuker.” I said. “Lizzen, Satan asked me out to a gottik cornet and a movie so I need a sexah new outfit for da date. Also I’m playng in a gothic band so I need an ootfit for that too.”

“Oh my satan!1” (geddit lolz koz shes gofik) gasped B’lody Mary. “Want 2 go to Hot Topik to shop 4 ur outfit?”

“OMFS, letz have a groop kutting session!11” said Profesor Trevolry.

“I can’t fucking wait 4 dat but we need 2 get sum stuff first.” said Willow.

“Yah we need sum portions for Profesor Trevolry so she wont be adikted 2 Volxemortserum anymore nd also………….sum luv potion 4 Enoby.” Darko said resultantly.

It’s almost difficult to believe they’re from the same story we saw twenty chapters ago, and it’s sure as hell not because Tara has improved her craft. Within the confines of the story itself, it seems so gradual that you might not even realize it, but laid out in chunks like that, can you really say it’s not someone trying their best to destroy as many words as they possibly can?

Part 2: It’s Gruesome That Someone So Handsome Should Care – Matters of Identity and “Goffikness”

At the very core of My Immortal is what Tara believes being a goth to be. From the very first sentence of the first author’s note we learn this fact, and the first paragraph in the story, which is also the longest, is devoted to showing that Ebony is as well. Whether or not one is a goth becomes the most important character trait for the entire cast and defines their relationships with one another. Throughout the story, we are regaled with all the evidence of band fandom and other ultimately superficial traits that assure us that these characters are indeed true goths. The only things that receive anything approaching description are the clothes Ebony wears, all black and leather and band t-shirts. Nothing matters more than being a goth.

In this strange world, Ebony’s lifestyle is supported in ways that are beyond belief. Merchandising is so invasively ever-present that you can buy just about anything branded with her interests. In chapter 38, Satan smokes a Nightmare Before Christmas cigar (over a decade before The Nightmare Before Christmas came out), capes can bear Avril Lavigne’s face on them without anyone raising an eyebrow, and cars have pentagram decals all over them. Although band t-shirts are perfectly normal – and if I’m anything to go by, having pretty much nothing but band shirts isn’t unheard of – Ebony also has a wide range of band-branded everything, like skirts that have 'Simple Plan’ written across her ass.

Ebony looks like Amy Lee, and any boy she thinks is attractive will invariably be compared to the lead members of bands she likes, because those positive associations are marks of her dedication.

In the world of My Immortal, being a goth or a prep is not down to musical choices and circles of friends, but instead a sweeping statement about where you fall in matters of good and evil. Everyone she approves of fits her lifestyle whether it makes sense for the character to or not, radically changing their personalities to fall into the box she wants them to. The Golden Trio, alongside Ginny and Neville all goth up and convert to Slytherin, because as the 'dark’ house it is the only logical place for goths to go be. She does not have any friends who aren’t goths, because to not be a goth is to a prep, and preps are evil. Preps have middle fingers put up at them when they do nothing wrong, because on mere principle they must be hated and despised.

Which forms one of the many problems with the plot, but one that is not specific to the madness of Tara Gilesbie. At almost no point do characters coded as preps actually do anything wrong. Britney is consistently insulted and called a 'fucking prep’ in every appearance she has as though 'prep’ is an earth-shattering slur. Her presence consists entirely of being in a room, sometimes with middle fingers put up at her, and in one case, singled out by Professor Trevolry to do extra homework, because Trevolry is a goff teacher, which means she punishes preps for being preps. The only time Britney does anything wrong is in the final chapter, when it’s revealed that she released Snap and Loopin from Azerbaijan.

Britney is also the only actually preppy character in the story. We know this because she wears pink and little else, due to the lack of dialogue or character shown. But other people are referred to as preps constantly, including Snoop, Lumpkin, and Valmont. As are everyone who criticizes the story. We receive no indication for these, and often they are completely baffling for how decidedly un-preppy these characters truly are, but it’s vital to the narrative and the division of the cast that everyone Ebony does not approve of is a prep.

It’s not an uncommon attitude among teenagers, especially those with interest or belonging to subcultures out of the approved mainstream, to draw lines and assume everyone who falls into divisions other than them are inherently opposed to them. The idea that anyone who isn’t different must assume that difference is bad is so pervasive that it often comes to define works of fiction taking place in high school, even when written by grown-ass adults, because it provides cheap and easy conflict. Most teenagers grow fairly quickly out of this, but because of its convenience as a device, it persists. Tara is far from the only person to ever believe this, but the degree to which she takes it is a little further than most do, lumping the world into only two categories, but defining 'them’ as a one-dimensional army of preps even when they’re the opposite of preppy.

Which makes it an incredibly mockable and therefore desirable  angle to write her plot through, doesn’t it?

Once again setting herself up for incredible failure is the fact that she’s completely off the fucking mark about what a goth is. With favorite bands ranging from My Chemical Romance, Evanessence, and Linkin Park, to a bizarre interest in pop punk through Simple Plan and Good Charlotte, her taste in goth music is a lot like her taste in klezmer; it doesn’t fucking exist. This is not the musical taste of a broody, dark goth, it’s the stock standard taste of a teenaged rock fan in 2006, which is exactly what it’s supposed to be. To believe this is all to be pure, gothic music is to be so disconnected from the entire concept of the goth subculture that Tara would have to have not even given it a cursory Googling to discover what sort of music goths listened to.

This 2006; 'emo’ was already a word so pervasive that it was insufferable, but had TaEbory identified as emo, she would have lost one vital piece of the puzzle. Merely being wrong or incredibly forward about one’s identity isn’t enough; she had to be both simultaneously. Her fervid defense of what it is to be a goth, paired with being so off the mark, turns her into a hypocrite and a fool, a strawman whose every word is only making worse her whole case. It makes her stand out as a special and egregious case, an author so wrong about everything and whose self-insert only looks worse off for it. And this is how My Immortal rose to the top of an ocean of mediocre, bad, and downright terrible fanfiction.

Dubious musical categorizations aside, another element of the gothicness that pervades the story is authenticity. Among the more snobbish and elitist of any subculture since the beginning of time, the desire to be seen as authentic and real is an incredibly pervasive element that My Immortal predictably lingers on quite heavily. “Poser” is a word loaded with as much venom as prep is, because in the false dichotomy Tara instills upon the world, to have airs of goffikness while not truly being a goff is just as evil as wearing pink is. Perhaps even more so, because these fakers are infiltrating her circles. When Tara and Raven cease being friends, Raven’s stand-in Willow is referred to as a poser. When Draco feels betrayed upon discovering that Voldemort has tasked Ebony with killing Vampire, he refers to her as a “poser muggle bitch”.

While we can’t hold My Immortal to a rigid understanding of proper Harry Potter canon, it does explain a lot about Tara’s worldview. Draco Malfoy has spent his whole life of privilege being taught about the importance of blood purity by his parents, who — we’re all adults here, right? We can accept this? — are fucking wizard nazis. A lot of his early character is specifically centered around his beliefs on blood purity and his use of slurs like 'mudblood’ toward Hermione and dismissals of families like the Weasleys as blood traitors. Such traits are so surface level and blatant that even someone like Tara could pick up on them, which makes the inclusion of 'poser’ in his insult, a triple threat along with fantastical racism and straight-up sexism, into something very telling about just how important it is in her version of the Harry Potter universe to be seen as genuine.

You can’t simply become a goth, you have to already be one. You have to shop at the 'real goth stores’, which are known only to goths. Any attempt to learn of them is met with derision, because goffikness is not something you can attain, except for all the characters who are noted in their new backstories to have become goffs in their transfers over to Slytherin.

Simmering underneath this obsession with being seen as authentic, with a narrative that constantly asserts with very insecure undertones just how much Tara wants to be seen as a real goth, is how shallow her interests really are. She prattles off lists of the clothing she and her friends wear like she’s Patrick Bateman, a laundry list whose obsessive detail forms the only proper description anything in the story receives. And much like in American Psycho, the narrator’s obsession with clothes comes off as remarkably phony, a desire to fit in with a group they desire to be a part of through a series of checklist points, although while Patrick Bateman is deranged within the narrative, you must go one level of abstraction away from the character’s portrayal in the universe, to look on a metafictional level into the delusions of Tara to see where she gets it all so wrong.

We’re told in the narrative that Ebony is depressed and suicidal time and again, but despite slitting her wrists in lieu of an afternoon snack, we never truly see actual depression. She uses 'depressed’ in ways that don’t really make sense, such as to describe the movie Corpse Bride, coloured contact lenses, and makeout sessions. Chapter three even contains the passage, “'Hi Draco!’ I said in a depressed voice.” Given how wonderfully the entire world caters to Ebony and the fact Tara seems to not really understand what it means, it comes off not like Ebony is a character that actually has depression, but instead that since depression is gothic, she must therefore possess it. She isn’t somebody who wears black on the outside because black is how she feels on the inside, she just says she’s depressed because it’s all a part of the goth package.

As is Satanism, which Ebony is apparently an adherent of. Much like being depressed, a vampire, listening to Simple Plan, and being a Slytherin, it is vital to the gothic identity that you are a Satanist, even if you don’t know what Satanism is. That you sometimes refuse to acknowledge the words 'cross’ and 'god’. It’s so casually mentioned and without even the slightest bit of conviction that it feels thrown in by someone who doesn’t really care, but, once again, wants to fit in.

The end result is an all-encompassing, story ruining obsession with ensuring the reader know and believe that Ebony–and by extension the author she is an avatar of–is the most true and devout goth in the world. Setting herself up to be so very, very wrong on this account is an easy way to discredit Tara and add another layer of pure mockability to the story. She is truly the greatest poser of all, and her entire worldview comes crumbling down around her under the slightest scrutiny, all by design.

Part 3: Just a Miserable Lie – The Impossible Mistakes

This news may shock and surprise you, so make sure you are very securely strapped your seat.

My Immortal is not entirely consistent.

Certain little things creep out of the woodwork in both the narrative and off to the side, hidden amid all of the craziness around them, that I believe are little winks at the camera on the part of the author. Hints meant to clue you in as to the fact that this whole thing is, in fact, one big joke. A lot of them have gone rather unnoticed, it seems, but let’s start with the most noticeable of all.

In chapter 31, we meet Tom Bombadil. I’m not fucking with you, here, it really does happen.

Suddenly I was in fornt of teh School. In front of me wuz one of da sexiest goth guyz I had ever seen. He was wering long blak hair, kinda like Mikey Way only black. He had gren eyes like Billie Joe Amstrung and pale whit skin. He wuz wearing a blak ripped up suit wif Vans. It was…………………….Tom Bombodil!1

Now, some of you may be asking who the balls Tom Bombadil is, and that is my point entirely. Deep in the first half of Fellowship of the Ring is god of the forest and walking filler arc Tom Bombadil, whose three-chapter appearance leaves most readers wishing for a violent end to existence for how long it all drags. For the express reason that his appearance is so incredibly pointless, he appears in no major adaptations of the series, which means for Tara to know about him, she’d have to read Fellowship of the Ring, a book that is done no favours by Tolkein’s incredibly dry and long writing style, not to mention an entire chapter chronicling the genealogy of Hobbiton.

To be a teenager at a reading level high enough to tackle Tolkein precludes you from being capable of doing something like My Immortal genuinely. Tara would know how words are spelled and that, hey, stories are considerably better when you give a quarter of a crap about typing them properly. The levels of literacy involved in Tom Bombadil and writing My Immortal are so far removed that these two traits are mutually exclusive, impossible for Tara to possess if she’s genuine. After all,

I dntn red all da boox! dis is frum da movie ok so itz nut my folt if dumbeldor swers!

But wait.

Among the many baffling changes Tara makes to the canon, one of the weirdest and most damning to me is Professor Sinister/Trevolry/Sinatra/Siniater/Relory. This bizarre composite of professors Sinistra and Trelawny is a half-vampire, half-Japanese goff, and the only teacher in the school Ebony likes, because she dresses like her and assigns the preps extra homework, complete with a pun about doing an 'exorcise’ in the book. Her presence is bizarre, for being the only positive authority figure in the story, and for the utter perplexity involved in picking the two professors as a composite goth character at the expense of more conventional fanfic fodder like Snape and Lupin, who are both obviously villainous preps in this story.

Professor Trelawny is a strange choice whose incongruity I feel is another one of those expectation-defying twists meant to seem strange as an indicator to the audience where a more mainstream and believable choice would have been to romanticize Snape as so much of the fandom has, but the real headscratcher is Professor Sinistra. Her presence in the canon is entirely off-screen, mentioned by Hermione as a teacher for a course that Ron and Harry don’t take; she has no lines or purpose anywhere, and even in the movies is only a background character identified by virtue of there being an actress credited as her. Her absolute lack of lines makes her presence here troubling, because if Ebony’s reference base for this is the movies, where this dialogueless character coming from?

Of course, there’s also the aspect of how fluidly she switches between names bastardized off of the two professors which, unlike the matter of Hagrid being Cedric but not really, is so consistent and ever-present that it again seems like a level of sloppiness entirely beyond human capability. Two completely disparate names that are way too far removed to be keyboard fuckery, with bastardizations of both used in each scene she appears as though there is a quota on how many of each get used in a chapter for full effect. Because there absolutely is; here’s the introduction of the professor in chapter 24:

Well we had Deviation next so I got to ask Proffessor Trevolry about the visions.

“Konnichiwa everybody come in.” said Proffesor Sinister in Japanese. She smelled at me with her gothic black lipstick. She’s da coolest fucking teacher ever. She had long dead black hair with blood red tips and red eyes. (hr mom woz a vampire. She’s also haf Japanese so she speaks it and everyfing. she n b’loody mry get along grate) She’s really young for a teacher. 2day she was wearing a black leather top with red lace and a long goffik black ripped dress. We went inside the black classroom with pastors of Emily the Strong. I raced my hand. I was wearing some black naie Polish with red pentagrams on it.

In the tweet-sized morcel from “well” to “Japanese”, Tara has already methodically sank this character’s introduction, making someone paying even the slightest attention to what’s in front of them look back up to that previous line to see if they lost something somewhere. Trevolry is used to refer to her next, and then Sinister again, which are the only four mentions of this character in the chapter. Tara’s handle on the chaos of her own story is perfect, and the entire existence of the professor in this chapter serves as a massive wink to the camera.

Also a strange decision is to note that Professor Sinister and B'loody Mary “get along grate”. They don’t interact, as is expected from a narrative that marginalizes everybody except for Ebony and her love interests, relegating all of the friends to satellite roles where they interact only with her, but it’s perplexing for the way it’s made note of out of nowhere. I feel it goes beyond a strange decision to include more female friendships in the background of her story, and serves as a one-two punch of running afoul of “show, don’t tell” and of the canon itself, as in the original series the teacher that Hermione clashes with the most, to the point of dropping the class altogether, is Professor Trelawny. And yet here they are, besties in gothhood. Another subtle note that indicates how carefully woven this entire mess is.

For someone with the reading comprehension of a microwave-made baked potato though, she has an oddly prescient view on the series endgame in chapter 42’s author’s note.

AN: omg da new book iz kumming out rlly soon I kant wait!!!1111. I fink dat snap will be really the same person as Volximort koz dey are both haff-blood so dat will explain y he kild dumblydore and he hated hairy!!!!!1111 nd den hairy wil have 2 kommit suicide so voldimort will die koz he will rilly be a horcrox!!!!!111

On one hand, the idea that Snap and Volximort are the same person is so unfounded and bizarre that you kind of dismiss what comes next, but despite retaining nothing beyond the most surface-level details about the canon, she somehow managed to make the connection of Harry’s abilities and scar as evidence of him being a horcrux. It’s not a massive leap, and many in the fandom saw it coming, but for someone whose grasp on the canon simply doesn’t exist, it’s suspect.

I’ve unfortunately already blown the “big deal of a revelation that is fairly obvious” joke, so I won’t bother setting it up again, but this revelation is genuinely a noteworthy one. Contained within My Immortal is one reference that is unambiguously and inarguably gothic. Not one of the borderline cases like Marilyn Manson where it depends on who you ask, but a genuine reference to a piece of gothic music. From chapter 28,

We went in2 a blak room. The wallz were blak with portraits of gothic bands lik MCR, GC and Marlin Mason all over them. A big black coffin was in the middle. Red vevlet lined da blak box. There were three chairs made of bones with real skullz in dem. I wuz wearing a blak corset bar wif purple stuff on it, fishnet suckings and a blak leather thong underneath.

It’s so subtle and unexpected a reference that even if you know what it’s from, you may not pick it up. “Red velvet lines the black box” is a lyric from Bauhau’s 1979 song Bela Lugosi’s Dead, which is generally considered to be the very first gothic rock song ever written, thus making it the only genuinely gothic sentence in this entire tale. However, devoid of teenage angst or guyliner, it makes no sense that such a reference would be in the repertoire of somebody who believes that Marilyn Manson was a band from the '80s. In fact, it is impossible to believe that a Tara taken at face value would have ever so much as encountered the song, because the collision of matter and anti-matter annihilates both. However, it would be the fodder of somebody who, baffled at how easily people have accepted their work as a genuine offering, got bored and decided to throw a wink to the camera that couldn’t have possibly slipped under the radar.

Littered among the litany of showy, “look at how goffik” I am references to things, as though My Immortal were a PSA about the goth cred of Tara Gilesbie, are a few rather suspect notes. Tara is somebody who can’t mention certain names without indicating her undying hatred toward them, and yet,

“I love you!” I said and then we started to kiss just like Hilary Duff (i fukin h8 dat bitch) and CMM in a Cinderella Story.

We are apparently to believe that Tara, somebody who is so slavishly devoted to her identity and to a dichotomy that has coloured the entirety of a fictional universe, not only watched A Cinderella Story in spite of her hatred of Hilary Duff, but then drew a comparison to it in how she and Draco kissed? Drawing comparisons to things the author is interested in is a rather frequent amateur move for young fanfic writers who merely draw the blunt comparison to something rather than learning to describe the individual features themselves. Tara is not a good enough writer to describe the facial features of her favorite band leads, so she just mentions that people look like Gerard to indicate that the absolute pinnacle of human attractiveness is this.

The only comparisons she ever draws are to her favorite things, because it’s a way to prove that her life is so goffik that everything around her draws its existence from her interests. And yet she cites a Hilary Duff movie that she quite frankly should not have even seen, if she is so diametrically opposed to being perceived as a prep, which veering so far off of the beaten goff path and into would most certainly indicate. Something doesn’t add up about this.

On what I believe to be the intentional cliffhanger that chapter 42 ends on, we hear another mention of goffik cinema right before the very end of the story.

“Save us Ebony!” Dumbledark cried.

I cried sexily I just wanted 2 go 2 the commen room and slit my wrists with mi friends while we watched Shark Attak 3 and Saw 2 and do it with Draco but I knew I had 2 do somefing more impotent.

“ABRA KEDABRA!!!!!!!!!!!11111” I shooted.

For those not in the know, Shark Attack 3: Megalodon is a phenomenally bad direct-to-video monster movie whose sole claim to fame is in being so laughably bad that it’s found an audience in bad movie circles. And while one could make the fairly weak argument that on the basis of some super edgy “I love watching people dying” attitude, a movie like Shark Attack might appeal to Tara the same way slashers and gorn like Saw and “Hoes of Wax” appeal to her, it’s so bizarre in its sudden presence at the very end that I believe it yet another wink, but this time a more final one. The second-to-last sentence in the story makes mention to a notorious bad movie to draw the connection to the story, a final and overt declaration of a joke that you’re supposed to be in on. The last punchline before the music hits and Porky Pig bursts from out of the big drum to say, “That’s all folks.”

Part 4. What Difference Does it Make? - The Desecration of Canon

Calling out My Immortal for distorting and twisting the Harry Potter universe into something unrecognizable and monstrous is like calling out a bear for shitting in the woods, but it’s impossible to explain how carefully crafted a piece of perfect trollfic it is without examining just how many 'liberties’ Tara took with the canon.

All of the characters that Tara seeks to lionize convert to Slytherin, because apparently people can just do that if they decide they really like black lipstick. But that’s not enough to make them more 'like her’. Backstories are revised to include a quite frankly startling volume of sexual abuse backstories and characters secretly adopted by abusive parents. Vampirism is not a trait anybody received through the narrative, but instead a species inherited by birth that somehow, people don’t know they have, showing no signs or hunger, until they learn about their parentage. Characters all receive new, gothic nicknames like B'loody Mary, Vampire, and Diabolo.

What Tara has done is remove everything about the characters one may think noticeable about them in the slightest. Everyone now resembles Tara’s favorite artists. Harry’s iconic lightning bolt scar, a symbol of the series, has been changed by makeup and magic to instead be a pentagram, because that is a design change of her choice, visually reclaiming the character from Rowling. The only character whose visual traits at all line up with the canon is Voldemort.

Then all of a suddenly, an horrible man with red eyes and no nose and everything started flying towards me on a broomstick! He didn’t have a nose (basically like Voldemort in the movie) and he was wearing all black but it was obvious he wasn’t gothic.

But then it gets stranger. Hagrid becomes a member of Ebony’s band Bloody Gothic Rose 666 and a “little Hogwarts student” (chapter 11). Although she appears to retcon that in chapter 12 with,

AN: stop f,aing ok hargrid is a pedo 2 a lot of ppl in amerikan skoolz r lik dat I wunted 2 adres da ishu! how du u no snap iant kristian plus hargrid isn’t really in luv wif ebony dat was sedric ok!

Although she seems to take a strange “whatever I want” approach to her own retcons like the most hackish of comic book writers, since we get in that very chapter,

Anyway I was in the school nurse’s office now recovering from my slit wrists. Snap and Loopin and HAHRID were there too. They were going to St. Mango’s after they recovered cause they were pedofiles and you can’t have those fucking pervs teaching in a school with lots of hot gurlz. Dumbledore had constipated the cideo camera they took of me naked. I put up my middle finger at them.

Anyway Hargrid came into my hospital bed holding a bouquet of pink roses.

“Enoby I need to tell u somethnig.” he said in a v. serious voice, giving me the roses.

“Fuck off.” I told him. “You know I fucking hate the color pink anyway, and I don’t like fucked up preps like you.” I snapped. Hargrid had been mean to me before for being gottik.

Hagrid is in this canon simultaneously a pedophile and presumably grown-ass adult, but also a Hogwarts student who may or may not be Cedric Diggory, who not only survived the events of Goblet of Fire, but also managed to fail two years at Hogwarts to join Harry as a seventh-year. He is also a poser who is mean to Ebony for being 'gottik’, but is also in her gothic rock band which sounds like “a cross between GC, Slipknot and MCR”, which as we all know would make it the most authentic gothic rock band since Mungo Jerry.

Except in chapter 14 a Death Eater is referred to as “the fat guy who killed Cedric” so maybe HAHrid really is Hagrid after all?

Then there is the odd decision to align Lupin and Snape as pedophilic voyeurs in the service of Voldemort while bizarrely championing Professor Trelawny, in stark contrast to a fandom that especially in the golden days of Harry Potter fandom, where people would dick ride Severus Snape all the way to the moon on the weight of how 'misunderstood’ he was. A pale man who seems conventionally 'dark’ in his interests and mannerisms is the perfect place to begin projecting on when you’re telling a story about how you’re the exact same things, but it seems almost too obvious a decision. Like the rest of Professor Siniater’s composite existence, she’s so odd a choice that it startles you, and I believe within that shock value is the decision to buck expectations.

A trip to the past begins to paint an even more bizarre picture, as apparently the parents of our heroes all went to school in the 1980s, alongside Voldemort and Hedwig. They were also all Slytherin goffs who at some point seem to have just turned into poser preps whose children had to re-convert out of Gryffindor and into gothhood. This timeline yet again causes a great many headscratching tears in the fabric of space and time, but the most vital and important of all is Hedwig.

In the canon, Hedwig is Harry’s owl, female and not much of a doer, speaker, or goth. But in the horrible alternate universe that My Immortal takes place in, Hedwig is a bisexual human male who is very much a goth, the ex-boyfriend of Tom Riddle, whose dumping of the boy starts his descent into becoming Volxemort. It is a change that is so wrong, so removed from not only the canon but from the possibility of anything ever being accurate to the canon, that it can’t be accidental. One cannot fuck up that badly by accident.

Voldemort himself is a great many things. In the past, he is Tom Riddle, gothic musician at Hogwarts and love interest to Ebony, but also Tom Bombadil, the master of wood, water, and hill. But in the present time, he is both the Bark Lord, as one may expect, but also potentially a young, thoroughly goffik employee at a “punkgoff” store in Hogsmeade, Tom Rid. Tom Rid is described as “OMG HOTTER THAN GERARD EXCEPT NOT CAUSE THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE“ and, like every other guy in the story, is “bisezual”. Tom Rid is never the setup for Voldemort’s secret infiltration of the goth subculture, but nonetheless seems to be a template earlier in the story for the later time travel storyline and Tom Riddle as a love interest. It’s another nonsensical “mistake” thatjust doesn’t mesh with any fathomable stupidity. It would be like introducing a character called Harry Pot and having him be completely disconnected from Harry Potter in any way.

Littered with iPods and anachronistic pop culture that manages to miss its mark in two different time periods, the only reason we know that this is the same world and not just one with suspiciously similar names is the fact that it’s fanfiction. Not a deep AU that interestingly adapts elements into a different world to see how they work out, or which shows characters and how they might develop under different circumstances. This is a mangled mess where muggle bands play concerts in Hogsmeade, seemingly well aware of wizards’ existence. There must be panic on the streets of London.

The big question is “why”. Why would somebody do this bad a number of canon, accidental or not? And the reason is simple.

Part 5. Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want – Wish Fulfillment

By changing the context of everything except for the most basic connections of who the characters are 'supposed’ to be, they cease to be J.K. Rowling’s. They instead become Tara’s playthings. The canon is so distorted that it may as well not be fanfiction for how few things that remain intact, and yet it is vital that the world be the world of Harry Potter, at least nominally. Tara needs to turn a world that she loves, as off the mark as she may be, into a wonderland in which to self-insert, to mold into a countercultural paradise that centers completely around her.

We can’t speculate on the life of Tara – who this entire paper of course serves as a document meant to disprove the very existence of – but we can very clearly see the desires of this alleged person. Ebony is the single most important person in My Immortal, supplanting Harry as the only one who can kill Voldemort, whom every attractive character and even many unattractive ones profess their love to and fight for without provocation. Her interests are catered to on an unrealistic level and divine karmic justice makes those who sit culturally opposed to her suffer undeserved retribution solely for existing.

Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way is, even by those who see her as an entirely genuine creation, often held up as the ultimate self-insert. On top of very clearly existing as an author avatar who holds the exact same interests as her creator, her very presence distorts and twists the canon around her like an eldritch abomination tearing the very fabric of the reality she occupies. One of the more criticized elements of self-inserts in fanfiction is of course the ease with which a narrative becomes wish fulfillment for the author, and My Immortal has this in droves. Ebony is the most important character in the world not because she’s the protagonist or the narrator, but because she has supplanted Harry as the only person who can stop Voldemort, and whom everybody’s 'motivations’ center around.

Ebony is loud, angry, and has access to a time machine. When Ebony isn’t on-screen, all of the other characters ask, “Where’s Ebony?”

The love triangle between Ebony, Draco, and Vampire begins with Vampire solely wanting to reconnect with his ex-boyfriend Draco, but as the story goes on that element is lost and replaced with him instead lusting after Ebony, as evidenced by the time they had sex right in the middle of Hair of Magical Creatures. One of the only connections that two different characters had with each other is slowly replaced with an attraction to Ebony that they fight over, because everyone in My Immortal is defined by how Ebony perceives them. Their own attractions to one another take a backseat to their lust for Ebony, save for occasions where she permits them to have sex for her enjoyment, at which point it is presented as titillation for her.

Also among the characters with stated romantic interest in Ebony are Tom Rid, Hairgird, Snope, Lumpin, Tom Riddle, and Snaketail.

Everybody who has things in common with Ebony is Ebony, essentially. Every character is so interchangeable due to the pre-packaged identity she assumes is the only authentic way to be gothic that nobody feels like an actual character. Willow and B'loody Mary both occupy the role of female best friend for Ebony, save for a brief period where Willow is killed and Lupin has sex with her corpse before her resurrection one chapter later. In fact, the only time a character Ebony isn’t sexually attracted to is complimented is when she tries to lay on really thick her attempt to suck up to Raven in the hopes she’ll return to editing. The only difference between Vampire and Draco is how many times Ebony has sex with them, and that’s not getting into the masses of other goff guys who may as well be nameless, such as Diabolo (Ron), “Crab”, Goyle, and “Dracola” (Navel). In the past, Tom “Satan” Riddle proves to be just as generic a love interest as the other two, and then more faceless characters in Hades (“Serious Blak”), Lucian Malfoy, James “Samoro” Potter, and Hedwig.

Nobody has any character, save for Ebony, because they’re not meant to be characters, they’re meant to be imaginary friends for Ebony to play with, to fawn over her and have everything in common with her. If we buy into the belief that Tara is a rather lonely teenage girl who has apparently pushed away her only friend over a My Chemical Romance poster, then her decision to basically strip away everything that makes the Harry Potter world what it is so that she could rebuild it from the ground up into her gothic paradise makes a lot of sense.

Of course, she isn’t that at all, but first we need to look at all the other things that Tara is and isn’t.

Part 6. Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before – Raven

Fifteen-year-old Eternity Demen'tia Johnson warily took a seat on the Hogwarts Express. As she did so, she heard many giggles in the air. Ugh. Stupid preps. Eternity had hoped she wouldn’t see any when she came to Hogwarts. They had made her life in Los Angeles High School miserable. Now she was supposed to put up with them here? She sighed sadly, and stared out of the window. In her mistery, she took her iPod out of her Emily the Strange bag and blared on some My Chemical Romance (A/N: Don’t they rock?). Oh great. Now even more preps were giving her dirty looks. Eternity tried her best to ignore them. It wasn’t because Eternity was dirty or deformed or anything. Maybe it was something to do with her black leather corset, or her ripped black miniskirt or her black combat boots or the metal music she was listening to. Eternity hated how people judged her like that just because she was a goth.

The above is a snippet from I’m Not Okay, written by Tara’s friend Raven. And in it, you can see a lot of the same themes present in My Immortal. Anachronistic technology, a misunderstanding of what the goth subculture is, preps hating her on mere principle, authors notes spliced in mid-sentence to herald the glory of her taste, and more description offered up for her clothes than for anything else. Throughout I’m Not Okay, we see Draco Malfoy as the gothic love interest, comparisons of characters to members of bands the author likes, and canon Harry Potter characters becoming gothic and taking on nicknames like Dracula, Sea, and Darren.

Good sense and suburban decency run screaming at the sight of a dark name like “Darren”.

Rather than shit all over preps of her own design, Luna Lovegood and Hermione Granger, two characters so far removed from the stereotype of an American high school “popular kid” that it’s almost infuriating, are turned into the superpreps to be hated. Slytherin is still so gothic a house that their common room password is “bleeding kisses” and the portrait is a woman described as the “splitting image” of the lead singer of Sisters of Mercy, an actual goth band whose frontman Andrew Eldritch is most certainly not a woman and not even particularly androgynous.

The same out-of-place theme of sexually abusive adopted parents that plagues My Immortal’s side characters returns in Eternity’s backstory. She sticks her middle finger up at preps unprovoked and veers off course to call out the shittiness of preps. Really, Eternity is in every imaginable way just Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way with a marginally better writer, as is to be expected from the editor of Tara’s disasterpiece.

The authenticity of Raven’s works isn’t in doubt, in my mind. It predates the memetic nature of My Immortal by a great deal, they co-wrote a story entitled Ghost of You that, again, features the exact same terrible tropes and bad ideas, albeit this time with Hermione Granger as the parentally abused goth hated by preps and now in love with Draco Malfoy, And, the fifth and final chapter of I’m Not Okay has,

a/n: TARA IS DA BIGGEST FUCKING BITCH EVERY AND BY THE WAY I’M A BIGGER MCR FAN AND GERARD IS MINE 4EVA SO FUCK U

Eternity was so happy. She went to class with the other fifth-years, Sea, Draco, Shadow, Darren, and Satan. That fucking retard Elvira (whose real name was Lindsay like that fucking ho Lindsay Loan) had gone all the way back to first-year and they put her in Gryffindor where all the retarde4d preps were because she couldn’t even write properly and she had to get her friends 2 do it for her.

Hot damn. That’s a far more scorching burn than being the offscreen victim of Lumpkin the necphilak.

Raven’s stories being the template for My Immortal is no coincidence. Tara aped everything she saw with gusto, imitating her friend who, while not a very good writer, could write sentences properly and gave description to things. Hell, as far as fifteen-year-old fanfic writers go, Raven is actually pretty decent, just entrenched in some terrible themes–again, pretty typical for teenagers–and does things like describe Eternity 'sadly putting her hair up’. On some level, Tara is trying to be as good a writer as Raven is. She looks up to her and, immediately after in a fit of anger killing off the character meant to be Raven, brings her back and guiltily sucks up to her with as many compliments as she can give.

Whether she is the same person as 'Tara’ or a friend in on the joke, I believe that Raven exists as sort of a proto-Tara, a precursor to the real juicy fun. Her story isn’t very good and she writes the exact same things Tara does with marginally more writing ability. They’re identical in every possible way, with the same interests, attitudes, and bizarre writing sensibilities. Almost no differences in the presented persona emerge, but as much as their obsessions with clothing and iconography bordering on disingenuous poserliness would imply that the pre-packaged nature of their identities is to blame, I believe it was all meant to deepen the character, provide a more grounded contrast to her and help make her seem more real.

Rather than existing as a nebulous beta reader who also has no prior internet history, existing solely through the character of Willow and authors notes that let their ongoing drama spill through into the story for us to see in what I feel is a brilliant piece of meta performance art, she has her own stories that make her very much a real presence in the extended saga of My Immortal. I believe that in the long term, she was meant to continue onward as a developing foil for Tara, someone whose existence helped back up her own. But, as evidenced by the way I’m Not Okay stops at chapter 5, which on the timeline of My Immortal would place it somewhere around chapter 16, this didn’t go as planned.

If “Raven” were a co-conspirator to “Tara”, it’s possible they got bored, didn’t have the insane devotion to a multi-layered and quite frankly absurdly deep prank. If Raven and Tara are one and the same, then perhaps the pressure of developing two 'different’ personas proved too much work, and decided to focus on the big one. After all, Raven’s stories are only notable through her association to Tara, the Art Garfunkel to Tara’s Paul Simon. Mediocre but ultimately harmless stories that by and large flew under the radar and aren’t even well known by people who know My Immortal. I’m Not Okay was never going to draw the same level of interest or vitriol that My Immortal did, thus making it a joke with far less payoff, even if by virtue of not being as poorly written, it was likely easier to write. This is helped by the immense disparity in productivity between the two; whether the primary actor or personality, Tara is more prolific, something that ties directly into the return on investment when it comes to how people reacted to either story.

And as it turned out, she wasn’t needed. The My Immortal Extended Universe has long since been forgotten, and yet people fell for the joke without it. People bought very easily into My Immortal as a genuine piece of work, or at least were so willing to enjoy it as a mockable distraction that nobody ever really asked. Raven became a redundant cog in the machine, and removing her freed up the effort to focus full time on making My Immortal something even more incredible than it began as.

More evidence of this lies in the fact that even once Raven allegedly returns to her role as editor, the spelling only gets increasingly worse; she’s credited as helping in many chapters, but her former sensibilities are gone, and no edits are ever made, as illustrated in the snippets detailing the degeneration in part one. It’s possible that this was meant to convey that Raven wasn’t actually helping; that she quit writing fanfic due to her fallout with Tara, and Tara merely went on pretending she still had a friend in Raven as she sank deeper and deeper into her wish fulfillment paradise. Raven never managed to gain the established foothold that Tara did, so nobody ever questioned it, and everyone was too busy having a good time to wonder how the chapters ever qualified as being 'edited’.

Curious is the fact that even though they made up, Raven never came back. She didn’t continue writing her own stories, the drama between them never resurged, and aside from her supposed beta services to Tara, is absent from the bulk of the saga in its entirety. This is in spite of the fact that in all apparent ways, Raven is not only the more skilled writer, but the one with a clearer passion for it. Her prose may be nothing special, but the bar should not be set too high for what is allegedly a teenage girl writing Harry Potter fanfic. She falls into a lot of the common holes, but her style is that of someone who loves stories and wants to write their own, and for her to so quickly vanish and never return is, to me, evidence that she was always a character too, and that her place in the 'real life’ layer of My Immortal was simply deemed irrelevant.

Part 7. Girlfriend in a Coma – That Time Tara Got Hacked

In chapter 38, a time-displaced Tara opens for Marilyn Manson in Hogsment, which is what Hogsmeade was called before they changed it in 2000. In Hogsmint, a store called Hot Ishoo will change its name to Hot Topic in the year 1998. Tom Riddle possesses future knowledge of both of these events, as well as the certainty that because amnesia potions haven’t been invented yet, he will not be affected by the one being used on his cigar branded with a movie that hasn’t come out yet, which is a shame because he wanted to use the potion on Ebony so that the time-traveling girl he loves will forget about her old life and her romantic entanglements in her own timeline with the sons of two of his bandmates sothat only her love for him will remain. His prescient, almost accepting knowledge of seemingly everything about his future up until his fall is almost tragic; he must know that Ebony’s involvement in his life is going to ruin it

On top of being the Dark Lord and Tom Bombadil, Tom Riddle may also be Doctor Manhattan. But that’s not the point of this part.

After xBlakXTearX performs its first big gig, the band immediately falls apart as, due to Lucian Malfoy playing the wrong song by mistake, Samaro Potter decides to shoot his arm off with a knife. Those of you attempting to follow the bizarre, Ebony-centric take on the universe may be surprised to learn that she is not the Yoko Ono of the band in what may be the only important conflict in the story that isn’t about her. However, since everything has to be about our goffik darling, Ebony jumps in front of the bullet–that, again, has been shot from a knife, like this is the second-worst Final Fantasy game ever made–and enters a coma.

Bear in mind, she does this knowing that Lucian survives this attack, going on to find love, have Draco, and despite two stints as a wizard nazi manages to avoid jail time and lead a life of incredible luxury and comfort. This also requires her to ignore her very important mission to prevent Tom from ever becoming Voldemort and the insane repercussions of dying in a timeline that isn’t her own, leaving behind all of her possessions that are even more anachronistic in the 80s, including a time machine that anyone could suddenly begin misusing.

All in all, an incredibly stupid decision with no purpose other than to insert Ebony and her useless ass selfless heart into conflicts that she has nothing to do with, because she’s the 'hero’ of our story.

Before we could see the resolution of that nail-biting cliffhanger, Tara’s account was allegedly hacked by a 'guest writer’, who claimed to have been able to crack her password with incredible ease. While there, the password cracker gives her own take on My Immortal, involving the death of Ebony, which undoes all of Tara’s damage upon the universe and returns everybody to their proper states, while sentencing Ebony to a terrifying ironic hell where she is doomed to an eternity of wearing infinite layers of preppy clothing brands.

While there, the hacker also shares with us the real chapter 39 as an act of kindness to those of us who were clinging onto the saga for dear life and wanted to know how Ebony was going to survive jumping in front of the knife-propelled bullet. Allegedly, this chapter was already written and waiting to be posted in the document area. It ends up being such a bizarre element of time travel that even the Terminator franchise never went there.

“What the fuk happened?” I asked dem. “Oh my satan!11 Am I lik dead now?” I gosped.

“Enoby u were almost shot!11” said Serious. “But da ballet could not kill u since u were form anodder time.”

“But fangz anyway!1” said Lucian holding oot his arm. I gasped. He had two arms!

Which opens up a lot of questions, then shoves them aside so I could wonder for a second if Lucius Malfoy was missing an arm in the canon. He wasn’t, making this another perplexing note of Tara’s that rewards a familiarity with the source material by highlighting all the ways in which it’s wrong. But then, after being told that Snap was Death Dealer, despite being the classmate of a Tom Riddle who hadn’t yet gone dark, Ebony comes across Snape raping Draco, and is so distraught by her boyfriend’s betrayal in this act that she runs to her room, takes out a steak, and uses it to slit her wrists.

Neither steaks nor stakes work like that.

The next chapter begins with her “back in Tim” due to her suicide, but the endgame plot batshit of My Immortal isn’t something we can even tackle in full yet.

There is a lot about the hacker that’s peculiar, and that’s because I believe that the hacker is Tara herself. A lot of minor elements of the breach of her account actually betray this secret, and it’s one of the few things in My Immortal I’m unsure about in regards to its intent.

The way that fanfiction.net handles posting a story involves uploading the story file to a document area, and then from the story menu selecting the relevant document. I always found it kind of clumsy personally, but what stands out about it is the fact that the chapter was allegedly written and left online for an indeterminate amount of time. There aren’t many reasons to upload a completed chapter to the website and then not post it. For someone like Tara, who does no editing and is clearly no longer sending the story off to Raven to be edited, there seems to be absolutely no reason for the story to be sitting idly in the documents area. I imagine Tara finished each chapter and immediately shoved it online in a frantic hurry to get it out there, as opposed to leaving it online to age like a fine vintage of toilet moonshine.

The original posting of the chapter was actually from the original document being copy/pasted into the one that contained the fake chapter nine. However, chapter 40 is then posted some time later as, “Chapter 40. LOL! Someone has taken my account over” by what seems to be the hacker. Which is odd, since they already pasted it into chapter 39, and posting it again from the document area seems rather pointless. It even includes an addition of, “THE IDIOT’S NOTE: Well… this was in the doc area… might as well let the whole world see what the real Tara wanted to show us… Have a nice day!” that the chapter 39 version lacks, meaning this hacker allegedly went into the doc, copy/pasted it into a new file with her chapter and Tara’s, but then edited the original document and posted it too. It’s an odd thing to do, like someone went in with very little idea of what the plan actually was and stumbled redundantly over ideas as they went.

But particularly odd about this whole thing is that Tara does nothing about it. She doesn’t delete the insulting notes or remove the fake chapter, she leaves them both there even though the author’s note of chapter 41 makes it clear that she’s very aware of her account being compromised, not only letting the mockery of herself remain, but even letting it effect the numbering of subsequent chapters. Which may seem like just Tara not caring enough and going with the chapter numbers listed by fanfiction.net, until you look back at chapter 10.

Chapter 10 was posted twice, and Tara never removed the second, identical version of it. It remained on the site up until the day the story was purged by site moderators. And yet, Tara always remained consistent in her renumbering of the chapters, always subtracting one from the chapter count when she posted it; what the site claimed was chapter 12 was really chapter 11. For a story with only the barest minimum of shits given, to properly compensate for this numbering accident for almost thirty chapters is a surprising amount of misplaced effort, but it establishes that she does care about the chapter numbers, and makes the sudden slip a lot more suspect. Why only go halfway in on her effort by continuing to count her double-posted chapter, but not this fake one that she’s allowed to remain as a part of the saga?

Part 8. That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore – Bringing it all together

I’ve prattled on for well over ten thousand words now about a myriad of My Immortal’s issues, but you could look at each individual flaw of the story and say that on their own, they hardly form evidence of trollery afoot, even if some of the more glaring issues are harder to explain away. But surely I’m going to show how they connected to form the cohesive peak of my argument, right? “How soon are you going to get to that?” you shout into your screen, not knowing how computers work.

Well how soon is now?

Tara Gilesbie wrote a story that set her up as the ultimate caricature of a teenaged fanfic writer who is just the worst in all of the best ways. All of the elements of bad writing on every level came into a perfect storm that only grew more powerful over time as it sank further and further into its own madness until it didn’t even resemble what it had started out as. From the self-inserted wish fulfillment to a startlingly creative use of the English language, it hits every hallmark of a bad fanfic one would think to roll up into one neat and tidy little ball, save for perhaps a massive panfandom crossover of everything the author has ever liked.

There is a clear story arc in My Immortal, but it isn’t Ebony’s tale of romance and destiny, it’s Tara’s slow descent into gibbering madness, like the story she had created was an eldritch being that she was unable to comprehend the sight of. As I went over in part one, the writing style breaks down steadily over time, becoming more typo-ridden, filled with more and more casual abbreviations and chatspeak until it’s become apparent that she simply doesn’t care, and while the decline in writing 'quality’ certainly begins with Raven’s absence, it is a steady drop for many chapters afterward. Tara’s character is not one that seems like she has a grasp on subtlety or moving slowly, but that’s the pace with which the boundaries are pushed.

Let’s look at the plot in a rather brief rundown. The story starts out fairly simply, with Ebony and Draco falling in love and having poorly written sex in the forest. Vampire comes in to complicate things in a love triangle that is surprising for leading to attraction angst in all possible directions. Voldemort’s introduction adds to the melodrama of the story, and it weaves in and out of slice of life romance angst and the Voldemort subplot rather strangely. Then, in chapter 17, my favorite part of the story occurs, and it signifies the moment where My Immortal jumps the shark in a way nobody would have ever dreamt of.

Gerard was da sexiest guy eva! He locked even sexier den he did in pix. He had long raven blak hair n piercing blue eyes. He wuz really skinny and he had n amazing ethnic voice. We moshed 2 Helena and sum odder songz. Sudenly Gerard polled of his mask. So did the other membez. I gasped. It wasn’t Gerard at all! It was an ugly preppy man wif no nose and red eyes… Every1 ran away but me and Draco. Draco and I came. It was…….Vlodemort and da Death Deelers!

“U moronic idiots!” he shooted angstily. “Enoby, I told u to kill Vampire. Thou have failed. And now……….I shall kill thou and Draco!”

“No no please!” We begged sadly but he took out his knife.

Sudenly a gothic old man flu in on his broomstick. He had lung black hair and a looong black bread. He wus werring a blak robe dat sed ‘avril lavigne’ on da back. He shotted a spel and Vlodemort ran away. It was…………………………………DUMBLYDORE

It’s important here to note that this is very soon after Raven left the story. and remember that this is around when the story began to stop caring about spelling and typing. After this point, everything in the plot goes off the rails. The melodrama ramps up, Ebony is revealed as the only one who can stop Voldemort, time travel is introduced, despite supplanting Harry as the chosen one who can defeat the Dark Lord she instead tries to seduce a teenaged Tom Riddle… Everything goes completely off the rails.

And that’s the plan all along. The angle of Raven and Tara’s feud never went anywhere, probably because nobody really cared much about two teenagers yelling at each other on the internet. At least, not until 2015 when some asshole would examine the shit out of it for very little discernable reason or gain. I believe that when it was scrapped, the brain trust behind My Immortal decided to go in a different direction. Readers may not have took the bait of their public dispute, but they were buying the troll hook, line, and sinker. People genuinely believe, or at least want to believe, that the story was written in earnest. Even a lot of the people who have doubts about it have them on the grounds that they don’t want to accept that someone could write a story so terrible. The unexpected appeal of the trainwreck that was My Immortal itself, rather than the meta saga of Tara Gilesbie, terrible writer and object of mockery, drove the project into a different direction.

The story and spelling both degrade at the same time, steadily creeping further and further into the most ludicrous things the author thinks they can get away with. As the readers continue to accept what they see as genuine, the author pushes further, which is why we see new elements constantly introduced into the story where they make no sense. It’s not Tara throwing the kitchen sink into her story in a misguided belief that a lot of everything will make her story good, it’s Tara setting the narrative on a trajectory of the most ludicrous thing she can think of, and watching as people believe it. Because they do, completely.

Sex is introduced into the story, because of course it is, through the most unappealing of ways possible. Genitalia are referred to by 'thingy’ as though using the word penis is too embarrassing for her to handle, even though later she refers to Snap’s 'clook’ without issue. To further the wish fulfillment, she must be having sex with her love interests, and it must be terrible.

We went on the bed and started making out naked and then he put his boy’s thingy in mine and we HAD SEX. (c is dat stupid?)

I believe they call that docking.

I’ve already explained how I believe Tara Gilesbie to be just as much a fictional character as Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, and what I feel that character is meant to be is the most mockable and stereotypical fanfic writer one could ever dream of. A teenage emo girl delusionally believing she’s a goth, who’s into boys kissing but has no problem throwing homophobic slurs around, who violates the Harry Potter canon in every way possible for the sake of creating her world of wish fulfillment where everything centers around her. Every bad writing trope wrapped up into sensibilities that set themselves up for mockery. Throw on a tragic lack of self-awareness that opens her up to be laughed at as she smugly highlights her mistakes, and all the pieces fall into place.

Tara Gislebie is a parody of fanfic writers.

Before My Immortal hit the scene, bad fanfiction was not as popular a fandom passtime as it is now, owing largely to new forms of media allowing us to better share the stories and our mockery of them than we had access to in mid-2006, but also because it was always rather contained within fandoms or specific LJ groups meant to deride them. But My Immortal crossed boundaries and spread far outside the reaches of the Harry Potter fandom, to become more than just a story. It was a sensation, a fic so notorious that even people who weren’t around back then have still at least heard of it, even if they haven’t gone out looking for it. While bad writers are nothing new to fandom, My Immortal set off a slew of imitators and tributes, fake sequels, adaptations using its basic setups in different fandoms to produce interesting results, and with more attention suddenly on badfic with the intent to mock it, troll writers came out in droves to try and reproduce the magic.

Some succeeded. Many failed, and I believe one of the main reasons is that people continue to take My Immortal at its word. They just whip some typo-heavy dreck up in their word processor, and ignore all of the subtler elements of My Immortal. It gets so much wrong from the very beginning, but it had to slowly stew in its own crazy long enough to become the poorly written train wreck we’ve come to love. For a story so over the top, that combines all of the elements of a bad story into one perfect package, it does it cleverly enough that it continues to fool people almost ten years later.

You may believe that this is all way too much work for anyone to put into a stupid fanfic. That if it’s meant to be a joke, that it’s a long way to go. Developping characters, faked account compromises, and an active effort put into writing as terribly as possible. And it is a lot of effort, which is meant to throw you off, because it’s the greatest trick the devil ever pulled.

Haha. Wondering why this post isn’t where it’s normally found?

Well, my friends, ask no more!

On a dark lonely evening, sweat drips through your hair

Warm smell of your butthurt, rising up through the air

Up ahead in the distance, see the laptop’s blue light

Your head grows  heavy and your sight grows dim

Gotta stop for the night

There my posts on the display

Rang the warning bell

And you were thinking to your self

Give it a week and I’d surely quell

Then I flamed all the posters and I showed you her name

There were voices ringing in your head

Swear you’d heard them say

Welcome to the Hotel Tarafornia

Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place)

Such a normal place

Plenty of room at the Hotel Tarafornia

Any time of year (Any of time of year)

I can smell your fear

Her mind is Tumblr-addicted

She got them means behind ends

She got a lotta commie, commie kids

That she calls friends

How they dance in the Discord

Sweet doxxing rush

Some post to remember

Some troll to forget

So I called up the admin

“Please bring my ban”

And he said

We haven’t had that spirit here since GC toured Japan

And still those voices are ringing from far away

But still those posts are comin’ from far away

Wake you up in the middle of the night

Just to hear me say

Welcome to the Hotel Tarafornia

Such a lovely place  (Such a lovely place)

Such a horrid face

Living it up in the Hotel Tarafornia

What an awful lie (What an awful lie)

What an alibi

Mirrors behind mirrors

Men behind the man

And she said: “We are all just copycats here

Of a copy of a fake

Among the moderators

They gathered for a feast

They stab it with their steely knives

But they just can’t kill the beast

Last thing you remember, you were

Grasping for your mouse

You had to find the permaban

To restore what was before

“Relax”, said your bete-noire

“I am

Programmed to deceive

You can ban me any time you like,

But I will never leave!”