My Immortal, attributed to Tara Gilesbie

Oh. Dear. God.

          So it’s time to have a brief look at the world of ‘fan fiction’, by digging up its worst possible example. Fan fiction, for those who have until now had minimal contact with it (a group in which I include myself), is an attempted pastiche by a fan of an original creative property, or – to use less jargon – an amateur knock-off by a fan of some fiction they like. To use a popular example, the Harry Potter series of novels by J.K. Rowling gained immense popularity over the course of their publication, and huge numbers of fans have ended up writing their own stories set in the world of Harry Potter. While many of these works have not been published professionally, many budding writers of this ‘fan fiction’ have uploaded them to the internet and are available to

Some proper goths

read for free. From what I understand, and what I fully expected given the nature of the stuff, fan fiction can vary immensely in terms of quality, genre, and faithfulness to the original story. There is, after all, a huge amount that can be done to any story, and anybody who takes it upon themselves to write something that will go straight into the public domain without need for editing or complying with any narrative efforts might still be passionate enough about the world they wish to write about that they can do something quite fresh and original with the material.

          With the acknowledgement that some fan fiction can be well written, have narrative cohesion and can be creative and original with the source material, let’s go now and look at something genuinely and truly terrible. Over the course of 2006 and 2007 there appeared on the internet a story by the name of ‘My Immortal’ (a title which alludes to an Evanescence song), and it quickly gained notoriety. Around 22,000 words long (novelette length), divided between 44 ‘chapters’, this story is set at Hogwarts where the protagonist, Ebony, is a student in Slytherin House alongside Harry ‘Vampire’ Potter and Draco Malfoy. Believing herself to be openly ‘gothic’ in terms of lifestyle, as well as a vampire, Ebony frequently takes time to tell us exactly what black gothic clothes and make up she’s wearing, and tells us about the many sordid encounters she has with Draco and other characters from the Harry Potter series. For instance, as the text is in the public domain, I’m going to plop the first paragraph down here for you to experience:

‘               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.                  ‘

My Chemical Romance, whom Ebony loves on artistic grounds

                Okay. So that was the introduction. The rest of the plot – if one can call it that – is rambling, and it jumps around so much that it’s impossible to gain any sense of what story the writer is trying to tell. The prose is stumbling, badly-written and so awkwardly constructed that one can be forgiven for believing it to be the work of an inexperienced child, potentially with learning difficulties – and it only worsens as the story goes on. In fact, by about twenty chapters into the story the text is virtually unintelligible, so riddled is it with incorrect spellings, typos and single-letter phoneticisms (r u ok wiv dis?). The author is clearly obsessed with ‘gothic’ fashion and bands such as My Chemical Romance (MCR) and Good Charlotte (GC), and many times throughout the story the protagonist ends up attending a live concert by one or other of these groups. Here’s a section from chapter 19, after Ebony and Draco have had some sort of argument, or something, just to show the level of the quality and subject matter:

‘         But it was to late. I knew what I herd. I ran to the bathroom angrily, cring. Draco banged on the door. I whipped and whepped as my blody eyeliner streammed down my cheeks and made cool tears down my feces like Benji in the video for Girls and Bois (raven that is soo our video!). I TOOOK OUT A CIGARETE END STARTED TO smoke pot.

Suddenly Hargrid came. He had appearated.

“You gave me a fucking shock!” I shouted angrily dropping my pot. “Wtf do you fink you’re doing in da gurl’s room?”

Only it wasn’t just Hargrid. Someone else was with him too! For a second I wanted it 2 b Tom Rid or maybe Draco but it was Dumblydore.

“Hey I need to ask you a question.” he said, pulling out his black wanabe-goffik purse. “What are u wearing to the concert?”

“U no who MCR r!” I gasped.

“No I just saw there was a concert dat a lot of gothz and punx were going 2.” He said. “Anyway Draco has a surprise for u.                ’

                Believe it or not, it gets worse than that. As you stumble endlessly on through the side-splitting sexual references, stilted descriptions of make-up and clothes and recurring diversions to go to the concerts in “Hogsmeade”, any efforts the author made to keep the writing vaguely comprehensible fall by the wayside. Here is the first half of 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.

“Well we have potions klass now.” Willow said so let’s go.            ’

                By now you ought to have a pretty clear picture of what this monstrosity is like. Words cannot adequately describe it, which is why I’ve had to take sizeable excerpts of the text to show. Apparently the earlier chapters are better in terms of spelling and grammar thanks to the author having a co-writer, named as ‘Raven’, but by chapter 16 they had had an argument meaning that the author had to take on a greater part in the burden of writing. The writing is at its worst in the brief author’s notes, at the heading to every chapter, in which the writer usually does two things: first to vehemently defend herself against ‘flamers’ and ‘preps’, who appear to be on a course to belittle and denigrate her work, and secondly to thank her colleague Raven for her assistance in writing. Here is the heading to chapter 11, displaying fairly typical ‘My Immortal’ spelling and subject matter:

‘               AN: i sed stup flaming up prepz! c if dis chaptr is srupid!1111 it delz wit rly sris issus! sp c 4 urself if itz ztupid brw fangz 2 ma frend raven 4 hleping me!    ’

A Gothic Camera Bag, referenced in the story

                ‘My Immortal’ is commonly considered to be one of the worst abuses of fan fiction in the public domain, and hopefully the excerpts delivered here can go some way to showing why this might be the case. Reading it makes me feel genuinely dirty, as you might feel if you are ever forced to use a run-down toilet in a backwater petrol station. It’s offensive in just how bad it is, and by God does it make one thankful that most fan fiction is nowhere near this awful. I am by no means the first person to engage with the material in this way, and all I can really do is reiterate what has probably been said time and again by critics and pundits of the work. I can offer no fresh perspectives here, and all I can do is advise you not to do what I did, and read it from start to finish. It’s a potentially soul-destroying experience.

                I will however support the theory that this text is nothing more than an elaborate hoax. It is a satirical take on fan fiction by collecting all of the worst abuses of this genre into one story, constructing an entire novelette out of stereotypes and bad grammar. There is bad fan fiction, but this text is so poor, contains too many of the clichés and makes so many comical errors that it cannot be anything except a joke. The writing deteriorates gradually over the course of the story, but to such an extent that it seems as though the writer (or writers) could be consciously daring themselves to see how bad they could make it. And then there are obvious mistakes in the text where the wrong word is included, such as in chapter 33 in which is included the line:

‘  “Oh Draco!111111!1 Oh mi fuking gud Draco!1111” I screemed passively as he got an eructation. ’

                It would be too much of a stretch to misspell ‘erection’ as ‘eructation’ (a belch, or other blast of wind), and it might be feasible had a spell-check been used – except that for a good proportion of the story no attempt at spell-check has been made. Why do so for ‘eructation’ and not for ‘mi’, ‘fuking’, ‘gud’ or ‘screemed’? There are numerous examples of this sort of thing littered throughout the story, of a slight misspelling which humorously changes the meaning of the sentence. Likewise the character of Tom Riddle, a canonical Harry Potter character who makes an appearance in ‘My Immortal’, is at one point misnamed as Tom Bombadil – which is interesting, as that is quite a spelling mistake. That Tom Bombadil is a character who only appears in The Lord of the Rings books, I find it implausible that somebody who would know who this character is would write something like ‘My Immortal’. Unless the writer, who would likely also be a consumer of fan fiction herself, had learned of this character third-hand through a Lord of the Rings pastiche.  Other things seem just a little too clichéd to be real; the author’s apparent falling-out with her friend, the numerous references to wrist-slitting, the honest an uncritical belief that My Chemical Romance is the greatest thing in the world, and the numerous digressions into ridiculous fashions of the day.

                While these arguments are based only on incidental details, I feel that whoever wrote ‘My Immortal’ must have been making a joke at the expense of the fan fiction community of the early 2000s. A novelette is not too long a thing to write for a joke such as this, especially if it was done episodically. But then, who knows really? Only the writer of this text, who may or may not have been this Tara Gilespie, knows for certain. 

                In conclusion, ‘My Immortal’ is a curious piece of writing, noteworthy mostly for its own notoriety. Whether intended sincerely or not, it contains just about everything a work of fan fiction ideally should not; bad writing, over-the-top author-insert protagonist, laughable sexual content, woeful misuse of characters and settings from the official canon, and a sickening level of obsession with ‘gothic’ subculture and My Chemical Romance.

My Bibliortal

Gilesbie, T. (XXXbloodyrists666XXX). ‘My Immortal’. [Online]. Available Online at: <https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6829556/1/My-Immortal> [Accessed 15/07/2016]. (Originally published: 2006-2007)

[As this text is open-access on ‘fanfiction.net’, here is the web address. The original story was published here, only to be taken down a year or two later, but fortunately enough copies were made to enable it to be republished by another writer. This is apparently the complete original text, should U eva wish 2 reed dis!!!1111]