Our lady of cringe Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way

[breakinglight11]

I’ve always been fascinated with the story around My Immortal. But I've never actually read it.

My Immortal is, if you don’t know, an infamously terrible Harry Potter fanfic written on Fanfiction.Net in the late aughts, full of gratuitous goth-ification of the characters and setting, a nonsensical plot, and rife with spelling errors. It became extremely well-known because of a certain so-bad-it’s-good charm, particularly because the ostensible writer, who identified herself as a goth girl called Tara Gillesbie, demonstrated so much personality in the poorly spelled, melodramatic author’s notes.

There’s been a lot of debate whether or not it was serious, as on one hand its badness was so beyond the pale and seemed to be an exaggerated parody of the tropes of bad fanfic, but on the other, fanfic can get pretty ridiculous in its badness. There’s also the shockingly strange fact that nobody has ever managed to identify who the author actually was— whether Tara Gillespie is a real person, or whether she was an invention of the actual writer, we still don’t know. Because of the fic’s fame, several people have tried to falsely claim authorship for Internet clout, but the actual person to this day has never come forward, nor been plausibly identified.

I would not call myself a My Immortal fan. I have actually never read the whole thing; I actually tend to not enjoy things on the “so bad it’s good” level, so I’ve never really wanted to. But I am fascinated by the circumstances around it, all the questions and controversies. The fact that we don’t know who wrote it, in this day of everyone on the Internet, blows my mind. Hell, people are still divided as to whether it was sincerely written, or deliberately desired to stir up outrage because of its level of fan ficcy badness. I love reading analyses of it, documenting the drama around it and examining the prose for clues as to the intent. If I find a Tumblr post or a Youtube video about it, I’m all over it, trying to form an opinion.

Still, I’ve avoided it all this time because I expect it to be a real drag; things that are so terrible don’t amuse me the way they do some people. I also tend to feel secondhand embarrassment strongly, so I expect to cringe to the point of pain. But I think it’s time to finally read it. I spend all day telling my students that they can’t create a useful opinion in the absence of facts. And I do believe there is value in absorbing things as cultural touch points.

But ugh. I might cringe my face right off.