The Cutprice Guignol

“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…”

(quick note that this article will contain a brief mention of self-harm and suicide)

So begins one of the most infamous pieces of literature of the 21st century to date – My Immortal. No, not the Evanescence song, though you could easily be confused by the mention of Amy Lee in this opening paragraph, but a piece of alternate-universe Harry Potter fanfiction by a user known as XXXbloodyrists666XXX that became one of the most instantly-recognizable slices of fandom culture ever to make it to the mainstream. And, unbelievably, it turns twenty this week, and I want to talk a little about one of my favourite entries into the online literary canon.

Much has been made of the intent and authorship of My Immortal over the years, and rightly so. With the creator credited only as Tara Gilesbie, a few claims have been made to the identity of the mind behind this legendary work – there was a brief flurry of interest in writer Rose Christo after she laid claim to My Immortal, but that was swiftly forgotten with her memoir on the matter cancelled when inconsistencies in her story were brought to light. And, with the identity of the author still unknown, the intention behind the work remains hotly-debated, too – is it a satirization of fanfiction tropes and culture at the time, a piss-take of scene kid culture and the poseurs within, or an earnestly dreadful piece of anti-prep propaganda? I don’t have the answers to any of these questions, but what I do have is a sincere, undying love for My Immortal, even twenty years after its release.

If you’ve somehow missed out on this iconic piece of fanfiction mastery, it’s a 23,000 word epic published across forty-four chapters (including at least one published when, according to the author, their account was hacked by a troll) between 2006 and 2007 on fanfiction.net, following the aforementioned Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way as she navigates an alternate version of Hogwarts from the Harry Potter series which, along with several major canonical characters, has been given a gothic (“goffik”, in the parlance of the author) makeover. It’s hard to explain just how glorious the inelegant insertion of scene kid culture is into this world – our leading lady spends a good portion of the story seeing popular emo bands like My Chemical Romance in Hogsmeade, while Hermione has changed her name to the Myspace-ready moniker of B’loody Mary Smith. Harry’s scar has been replaced by a pentagram, his glasses by red contact lenses, and, oh, he’s also started drinking human blood. Hagrid’s a teenager in a goth metal band called Gothic Rose 666. There is no hastily-rewirtten-to-be-goffik detail here that doesn’t delight me, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart.

Because, in 2006, when this story first came, I was a scene kid in my early teens desperately trying to cram as many references to the culture that I was so certain I needed to be a part of into every aspect of my life. If I could have dressed exactly like Ebony (frequently misspelled as Enoby throughout the story, which never fails to delight me) describes herself in that opening paragraph, I would have done it in a heartbeat. The comically casual attempts at working self-harm, suicide, and depression into the plot, the obsession with the minutiae of scene kid fashion (” I painted my nails black and put on TONS of black eyeliner. Then I put on some black lipstick. I didn’t put on foundation because I was pale anyway. I drank some human blood so I was ready to go to the concert”), even the decidedly odd attempts at sexuality feel like they belong here, a teenager playing at being a profoundly experienced woman of the world (the number of times the sentence “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” has crossed my mind since I reread the story for this post is, frankly, worrying). It’s a weird love letter to being a teenager during the scene kid and emo culture of the 2000s, a time capsule that, with at least some degree of accuracy, captures that feeling of earnestly trying to earn your neon raccoon stripes as a legitimate part of The Scene.

But, of course, my love for this work goes beyond just the scene kiddery of it all, though that undoubtedly plays a large part. In terms of sheer entertainment value, I’m not sure that there is any single piece of work that makes me laugh like My Immortal does. Usually, dreadful fiction like this becomes pretty boring by about page twenty – there’s only so many ways that you can write badly, after all. But My Immortal sumptuously and with great ease finds ways to keep surprising you. The inherently awful writing becomes a borderline new dialect once you’re ten thousand words in, the glorious inventiveness of the misused language (“Loopin” being caught “masticating” to a tape of Ebony supplied to him by “Snap”) downright mind-boggling. The howlingly consistent disrespect for the source material is magnificent – I mean this genuinely, is there any wittier moment in fiction than when Voldemort, upon asking Ebony to kill vampire-Harry, just gives her a fucking gun? As she announces early in the story, after a particularly controversial chapter that ends with a gothed-up Dumbledore catching Ebony and Draco Malfoy in the Forbidden Forest together and calling them “motherfukers”: “I dntn red all da boox! dis is frum da movie ok so itz nut my folt if dumbeldor swers! besuizds I SED HE HAD A HEDACHE!”.

Even the author’s notes that open each chapter tell a mini-narrative of their own, with Tara getting increasingly frustrated with the dreadful reviews that she is receiving and begins accusing her readers of flaming her – “wel ok u guyz im only writting dis cuz I got 5 god reviuw,” begins chapter seven. “n BTW I wont rite da nxt chapter til I git TIN god vons! STO FLAMING OR ILL REPORT U! Evony isn’t a Marie Sue ok she isn’t perfect SHES A SATANITS! n she has problemz shes depressed 4 godz sake!”. It’s bad in ways you don’t expect, the sort of magnificent range of badness that has rightly earned it a place in literary infamy.

I can’t think of many bad pieces of writing that are as consistently entertaining and inventively dreadful as My Immortal – and, yes, that might be my nostalgia goggles talking, given its obvious affection for the scene kid culture I loved for so long, but it has still well-earned its place in the worst-ever lists, even twenty years after it first hit our fanfiction.net inboxes.

I would love to hear your takes on this story – do you think it was written as parody or in earnest, and do you think we’ll ever find out who actually wrote it? Let me know in the comments below! If you’d like to support my blog, please consider supporting me by buying my books or dropping me a tip via my Support page.

(header image via The Fic Reviewer)