My Immortal

My Immortal is a Harry Potter fanfic authored by Tara Gilesbie (under the pen name of "XXXbloodyrists666XXX"), with assistance from a friend named "Raven" (pen name "bloodytearz666") and an additional contribution by an anonymous "hacker". The story is infamous for its lack of quality and potential satirical purpose, along with the minor internet phenomenon of dramatic readings and interpretations. Sadly, was the single most reviewed story on FanFiction.net and, by extension, probably the most read and talked about fanfic in existence. The story is no longer on FanFiction.net, but numerous other sites now host it.

Characters
None of the characters in this story resemble their canon counterparts in even the most vestigial way- not even their names. Everybody has been derailed into either a "goff" or a prep, represented by Slytherin and Gryffindor, respectively (guess Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw no longer exist or something). Most of the canon Gryffindor students have been moved to Slytherin (as that's where all the "Goffs" are), for no real reason, and the entire canon arrangement of friendships and alliances has been eliminated.

Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way - The protagnoist and one of the only original characters. A seventh year Slytherin girl with "long ebony black hair with purple streaks and red tips that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears" that is apparently so beautiful, it's a curse. She wears "goff" fashion (which you will get to read a lot about. In great purple prose detail) while listening to emo music (which she apparently has confused with the goth scene) and slitting her wrists when she gets depressed/bored. She's also a vampire, which basically translates into her being largely invincible and drinking blood. Apparently Ebony is the only person capable of stopping Voldemort's evil plans- nobody really knows why.

Obviously a Mary Sue, but not really that big of one, shockingly enough. The story is a bit too incoherent to really appreciate the character's universe bending.

Willow - The other original character. She's meant to represent Raven, but gets almost no screentime whatsoever. Gets expelled and killed offscreen after a real life spat between Tara and Raven, then comes back without so much as a word of explanation.

Draco Malfoy - One of the few canon characters to retain his original name (but not much else). In this story, Draco is a bisexual that is Ebony's boyfriend and "Vampire" Potter's ex-boyfriend (the story doesn't seem to involve itself on who was the seme/uke of that relationship). He wears "goff" fashion and has a tattoo of a heart with "Vampire's" name in it. His acerbic wit and nasty temperament is removed, with him being Ebony's fawning doormat. Beyond just doing it with Ebony and being the target of her rants, he doesn't really do anything. Voldemort threatens to kill him in an attempt to force Ebony to kill Harry. Obviously out of character.

Harry "Vampire" Potter - A bisexual "goff" who gets his name from his love for human blood. Also wears "goff" fashion and replaced his scar with a pentagram. He was moved into Slytherin House for some inadequately explored reason and seems to have forgotten about Voldemort. His role in the story is mostly to be yelled at by Ebony. Out of character.

Hermione "B'loody Mary Smith" Granger - Another of Ebony's friends. Turns out that her real parents are vampires who "died in a car crash", which resulted in her getting put in Slytherin House. Also wears "goff" fashion. Out of character.

Neville "Dracula" Longbottom - Another "goff". Like Hermione, turns out his parents are vampires and he got switched while in the hospital. Out of character.

Albus Dumbledore - Obstructive bureaucrat that constantly gets in Ebony's way. He's a prep that wears an Avril Lavigne robe, but tries to incorporate himself with the "goffs" later on. Gets headaches and swears at students. Out of character.

Severus Snape - A pedophile prep that spies on Ebony and friends. He was banished to Gryffindor for some indeterminate reason. Out of character.

Profesor Sybill "Sinatra/Sinister" Trelawney - A "goff" teacher that helps Ebony with her psychic visions and trains her for her mission to go back to the past. Gets addicted to something called "Voldemortserum". Out of character.

Voldemort - A card carrying villain of the highest order. Speaks in butchered old English that would make Shakespeare weep. Seems to only care about making Ebony kill Harry, and threatens to kill Draco if she does not. Out of character.

There are also minor appearances from Professor McGonagall, Hagrid, Wormtail, Lupin, Tom Riddle (who seems to be a completely separate character with no relation to Voldemort). Marty McFly makes a bizarre cameo at one point.

"Plot" Summary
The story is (mostly) written in a first person perspective from Ebony's point of view. The story starts out by introducing her in extensive detail, then segueing into Draco asking her to go to a Good Charlotte concert in Hogsmeade. They go to the concert and end up having sex in the Forbidden Forest. Dumbledore catches them and brings them before the rest of the teachers, who just let them go free. This is only the start of a total disregard for the rules that Ebony and friends are allowed to maintain.

The plot mostly centers around Ebony doing it with Draco and bitching about his old relationship with "Vampire" Potter. Nothing really happens until Voldemort appears and tells Ebony to kill Draco, giving her a gun (yes... a gun... why didn't the real Voldemort think of that?). After a suicide mix-up, Snape getting caught spying on Ebony from outside the bathroom window, more appearances by Voldemort telling Ebony to kill Draco, and a confusing sequence of MCR concerts crashed by Voldemort (along with lots of sex with Draco and a ton of whining), Ebony is eventually enlisted to go back in time to seduce Voldemort before he became evil.

At this point, the story loses all semblance of coherency (which, combined with the rapidly slipping quality standards in spelling, grammar, and structure, makes the thing increasingly less readable). Ebony is given a time turner (or something) and goes back to some indeterminate time period (seems to be the late 80s or early 90s... which is wrong on so many levels) to seduce Voldemort (who went by the oh-so-subtle name of "Satan" back then). Along the way, she joins a "goff" band headed by James Potter, Lucius Malfoy, and others. Marty McFly also makes an appearance (as if the rest of the story made little sense).

Brief salvation is found in a chapter added by a "hacker", which "ends" the story with the whole universe snapping back in place and Ebony in hell (where her punishment is to wear preppy clothing by American Eagle and Abercrombie for eternity). The story then goes back to Tara's writing, continuing with the nonsensical plot as Ebony returns to the present time and Voldemort attacks the school (his younger self having somehow turned into his present version). Everyone rushes into the room to witness Voldemort's attack, at which point the story reaches a rather ambiguous ending of Ebony casting Avada Kedavra.

List of Offenses
Where to begin? First, the story has a tenuous at best grasp of the English language. It actually starts out with fairly proper spelling and grammar, but the frequency of mistakes (either in word usage or spelling) increases as it goes along, until there is at least one incorrectly spelled/used word per sentence, with numbers and "leet" acronyms appearing more and more often (characters frequently say OMFG). Additionally, strings of exclamation marks and "1"s appear in order to denote emphasis. Names seem to provide a problem for Tara and Raven, with everybody's name getting misspelled on a regular basis (there's probably more instances of "Enoby" than "Ebony"). To top things off, entire sections of text are occasoinally repeated verbatim (perhaps she simply couldn't be bothered to write any more that day). The story is just flat out offensive to every standard of common decency and writing etiquette.

As mentioned previously, the story pretty much completely destroys everybody's original characterization and replaces it with thin shells and labels. There is almost nothing to mark this as Harry Potter fanfiction (it takes a dozen chapters before anybody even casts a spell, for example). It mostly reads like the fantasy of a culturally confused emo girl.

Additionally, much of this story's plot has no logical premise whatsoever. Probably the biggest example of this is the fact that characters who have travelled through time cannot be killed in the time they have travelled to, and taking a potion back to before the time it was invented stops it from working. In the latter case, this also raises the question as to how "amnesia" potion has anything to do with seducing someone. Countless other blatant violations of common sense aboound throughout the story (such as Good Charlotte, a muggle band, giving a concert in the Wizards-only town of Hogsmeade).

Ebony, herself, is a blatant self-insert of Tara and pretty much just exists to be the ultimate "goff" while having sex with Draco. She reads like somebody used a Mary Sue litmus test as a checklist, complete with her whining about being "too beautiful".

Parody?
The story may or may not be a parody written to troll the Harry Potter fandom and fanfiction in general. If it's a parody, it's one of the most meticulous ones ever created. There are several things that suggest that it's a work of parody. First, the character of Ebony is so specifically synthesized out of traits meant to evoke Mary Sue that it seems like references were used. To support that, there's the phrase about "icy blue eyes like limpid tears", which is both incredibly cliched but also begs the question of how the author is able to very clearly employ the relatively obscure word "limpid", but then struggle with words such as "not". Also of note is the random appearance of three technical terms ("statistically, "torque" and "photons") in the same sentence. The nature of some of the typoes suggests that they were deliberate, as the word "masturbating" is repeatedly spelled as "masticating", while every so often a regular word is exchanged for a swear word, as demonstrated by mentions of "Minister for Magic Cornelius Fuck" and the movie "Hoes of Wax". There's also the casual attitude behind the author's notes for slitting her wrists and going to the hospital and the fact that she didn't bother to remove the chapter that the "hacker" added. However, the fact that nobody has stepped forward to claim the story as their own even with it at this height of popularity seems to suggest that it really was a genuine story and just managed to hit all the wrong notes, so to speak. Tara's "goffik" persona is repeated in her profiles on fancition.net and elsewhere, suggesting that if a troll is involved, they would have had to create the entire persona, not just the story itself. It's unlikely we'll ever find out about its true status.

PPC Mission
This story has been claimed and has a PPC story forthcoming.

External link
The former home of the text of "My Immortal" [http://myimmortalrehost.webs.com/index.htm The current home of My immortal. All 44 chapters available]