My Immortal (fan fiction)

My Immortal is a Harry Potter fan fiction serially published on FanFiction.Net between 2006 and 2007. Known for an incomprehensible narrative and constant digressions, the story centers on a 17-year-old female vampire, a non-canonical character, and her relationships with the characters of the Harry Potter series, most notably her romantic relationship with Draco Malfoy. Ultimately, she is prompted by visions to travel back in time to try to defeat Lord Voldemort.

Since the beginning of the work's publication, it has garnered infamy for bad writing, inconsistency, and disregard for the Harry Potter source material. Often regarded as among the worst fan fiction written, My Immortal is felt to be a detriment to those attempting to bring legitimacy to fan fiction. Despite this, the series has also inspired multiple derivative works, including a YouTube web series, and is viewed with nostalgia for adolescent fan life.

The author published the story under the username "XXXbloodyrists666XXX" and self-identified as Tara Gilesbie, but the identity of the author has been a subject of debate. The story has been speculated to be a hoax designed to either troll readers or to satirize fan fiction, but the work and the alleged online presence of the author has also been described as too elaborate and too time-consuming to effectively fake. The existence of similar works produced by fan fiction writers also supports the work as genuine, however, the question of My Immortal's authorship has been deemed "unsolvable."

Background and publication

The work was published to FanFiction.Net between early 2006 and 2007, ultimately totaling 44 chapters and nearly 22,700 words.^[1] The forty-fourth chapter was accompanied by an author's note explaining that the author was leaving "dubya [sic]", commonly believed to be Dubai, and the chapter would be the last until the author's return.^[1][2] However, no further chapters were published. It was removed by site administrators in 2008, a few months after its last chapter was published. However, it survives in copied-and-pasted versions across the Internet.^[1] The work apparently takes its name from the song "My Immortal" by Evanescence.^[2][3]

Authorship

My Immortal was published under the username "XXXbloodyrists666XXX", and the author identified themselves as Tara Gilesbie. Author's notes identified a friend nicknamed Raven, operating under the username "bloodytearz666", as the work's editor and beta reader. Author's notes claimed that someone hacked into Gilesbie's account and wrote chapters 39 and 40. Since the publication of the final chapter, various individuals have claimed to have written the work in jest or as a hoax.^[1]

Due to its "systematically terrible" quality, the work is often believed to be a satire or parody of fan fiction.^[1][3] However, the "exceedingly complicated" details of the speculated hoax, including a series of related online accounts outside of FanFiction.net and effort of writing a work of such length, led to a "consensus" among Encyclopedia Dramatica users that it would be too difficult to fake and that Gilesbie was a genuine person, a sentiment apparently shared by other online communities who mocked the author.^[1] Brad Kim, editor of Know Your Meme, supported the work as genuine, citing his experiences with writing workshops on LiveJournal and Xanga where he encountered similar works, as "these were the kinds of things that would be formulated by a high-school teenager in the early 2000s".^[1] Writing for Vulture.com, Abraham Riesman wrote that "[t]he mystery of the authorship of “My Immortal” — even in this privacy-averse age — appears unsolvable."^[1]

Style

My Immortal is split into 44 brief chapters. Author's notes, indicated by "AN", precede and are dispersed throughout the narrative prose. These notes are written in a largely phonetic spelling and characterized the author as "standoffish". As the work progressed, these author's notes increasingly became "defensive, impenetrable, and prone to mentioning suicide attempts" and defended the work's poor spelling and deviation from canon characterization from negative reviewers.^[1]

Abraham Riesman of Vulture.com described the prose as having "awkward rhythm, strange digressions, and stultifyingly purple prose" and noted that the work is "agonizing" to a regular fan fiction reader because of "all the hated tropes" it employs in the opening passage alone.^[1] Adi Robertson of The Verge observed that the quality of the prose declined after the twelfth chapter, when the work's editor had a falling out with the author and became temporarily uninvolved with the work; even after the editor and author reconciled, Robertson felt that the prose "never recovered".^[2] Gavia Baker-Whitelaw of The Daily Dot noted the work "featured all the hallmarks of terrible fanfic: hundreds of grammar and spelling mistakes, a nonsensical storyline, and a Mary Sue protagonist who was clearly a glorified version of the author" and pointed out the numerous descriptions of the protagonist's Hot Topic outfits.^[3]

The work is characterized by misspellings permeating both the work itself and the author's notes, to the point that the names of the protagonist and canonical Harry Potter characters are frequently and variously misspelled.^[1][3]

The work has also been noted to fail to adhere to Harry Potter canon. It features "an incredibly OOC [out-of-character] Harry Potter universe"^[4] where "at no point do any of the Harry Potter characters act even slightly like themselves".^[5] References to "decidedly un-Harry Potterish bands" such as My Chemical Romance have also been noted.^[3]

Chapters 39 and 40, according to the author's notes, were written by a hacker, and the writing in both chapters was a "much more controlled prose that read like a lampoon of the previous 38".^[1]

Plot summary

The protagonist of the story is Ebony (occasionally Enoby or Egogy) Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, a seventeen-year-old vampire who attends Hogwarts as a member of Slytherin House. Hogwarts is depicted as being divided between two cliques, the goths and the preps. Ebony and all the sympathetic characters are part of the goth clique while the members of the prep clique are portrayed unsympathetically. Many of the main characters of Harry Potter are given gothic makeovers, moved to the Slytherin House, and renamed.

The story begins by focusing on Ebony's relationship with her boyfriend Draco Malfoy, who is depicted as a shy, sensitive bisexual. After learning that Draco used to date the vampire known as Harry "Vampire" Potter, Ebony becomes so angry that she runs crying into the Forbidden Forest, where she meets Lord Voldemort. Voldemort demands that she kill "Vampire" Potter or else he will kill Draco, but Ebony refuses. Later on, Draco learns of this encounter and he is so angry that Ebony kept it from him that he commits suicide by slitting his wrists.

In a subsequent scene, however, Vampire has a vision of Draco being held prisoner by Voldemort. The discrepancy between this and the earlier depiction of Draco having committed suicide is not explained. After rescuing Draco from Voldemort, Ebony and her friends attend a My Chemical Romance concert in Hogsmeade. The concert is crashed by Voldemort and his Death Eaters, but Ebony and Draco are rescued by Albus Dumbledore, who has just given himself a gothic makeover. The next day, Dumbledore gives a gothic makeover to the Hogwarts Great Hall as well, but Ebony feels that he is a poseur and dislikes him greatly, a sentiment shared by her friends.

During this time, Lucius Malfoy and Sirius Black are inexplicably shot by a "black guy". There is also a plot point on Professor Trelawney/Professor Sinistra (combined into one character for reasons unknown, and often referred to as "Professor Sinister") having an addiction to the truth serum Veritaserum, which is never spelled correctly in the story. A third plot point is Professor McGonagall (often referred to as "McGoogle" or "McGoggles") and Severus Snape (often called "Snap", or "Snope" at times) attempting to rape or harm the protagonists. Another plot point is Remus Lupin and Snape being bisexuals who spy on Ebony, at one point resulting in a humorous moment shortly after Draco's "death" where they are sitting on their broomsticks with "Loopin masticating [sic]" to Ebony bathing. In addition, Hagrid has inexplicably become a teenaged Hogwarts student who has a crush on Ebony, and Severus Snape is depicted as two separate characters called Severus and Snape.

Ebony begins having mysterious visions, which she is told indicates she must travel back in time to stop Tom Riddle from becoming Voldemort by seducing him, and to retrieve an antidote for Sinister/Sinistra/Trelawney. Arriving in the past, she meets the young Riddle, who calls himself "Satan", and who has been mistakenly referred to as "Tom Anderson", "Tom Bombadil", and "Stan". "Satan" is in a band with James Potter, Severus Snape, Sirius Black, and Lucius Malfoy. He is uncanonically depicted attending Hogwarts at the same time as the Marauders in what is further uncanonically portrayed as the 1980s. The author points out a few anachronisms in these scenes, telling readers to ignore them. There is also an unexplained cameo by a gothic Marty McFly, with the DeLorean time machine able to transform into an iPod.

Eventually, Ebony brings "Satan" forward in time, where he morphs into the present-day Voldemort. This leads to a confrontation between the forces of good and evil in the Great Hall. The story ends ambiguously with Ebony firing off an Avada Kedavra curse, which is misrepresented as "abra kedabra".

Reception

Before its removal from FanFiction.Net, My Immortal allegedly gained between 8,000^[2][6] to 10,000^[1] reviews per posted chapter, most of which were negative and contained flaming.^[2][6] The quality of the writing and the author's apparently Goth lifestyle also drew attacks and mockery from users on Encyclopedia Dramatica, TV Tropes, LiveJournal, Something Awful, YTMND, and YouTube.^[1]

Rob Bricken of io9 described the work as a "masterpiece of weirdness" and a "masterpiece of literary disaster".^[5] Mathilda Gregory of BuzzFeed called My Immortal a "work of comic genius" that is "oddly touching."^[7]

Legacy

The work is often cited as the worst fan fiction ever written^[1][2][4] or at least a "strong contender" for the title.^[3] The work is considered "iconic" not only within the Harry Potter fandom but also within the larger fan fiction community.^[3][4]

The infamy of the work is considered a "constant millstone around the necks of fanfiction enthusiasts who struggle to bring legitimacy to the genre".^[1]

Derivative works

Despite its infamy, My Immortal inspired further fan works, including fan art and further fan fiction. It was the subject of numerous YouTube dramatic readings intending to mock the work,^[1] and it later inspired a fifteen-episode web series satirizing the work.^[1][3]

References