#wish i got paid every time my art got reposted
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please just respect the artists’ wishes and dont be a dick. we are already sharing our art online for free, so dont be a dick.
#delete later#im tired#all my art get reposted on shit like pinterest and its NOT helping me!!!!!!!#stop it!#wish i got paid every time my art got reposted#maybe then i'd be happy
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Questions & Answers
Hi hi, finally some time to write this! Due to recent events I've been getting some questions from various people and I also have some questions for you guys so I'll try to do this in 1 post 😸
My answers:
Are you really not planning to write fics anymore?
That's the plan *nodnod*, but you know me. There's always a 'but' and a clown mask ready in my storage to put on if I happen to go against my own words. But the intention is to stop posting fics here, I'm too tired of it now lol. I might post a fic or two on AO3 once in a while, maybe write a collab with Mia if I feel like it. It's just... how do I say it.. my motivation to write more fics basically got washed down the drain together with blog #1. Let us see for how long that motivation swims in the sewers...
Can you reupload [fic name]?
If it's on my AO3, I won't. If it's not, hmm.... I probably also won't. But! It depends on the fic. Always feel free to ask, but please don't get angry when I say no! ^^ For now I have an exception: commissions. More about this down below in my question to you guys.
Why won't you try to get your old blog back?
It would require filing an objection against the copyright claims against me with all the legal risks, submitting my personal info from home address to name, and consenting to USA legal law stuffs bluhblahblah... :") For me too much of a hassle. I don't think my blog is worth it. Even if I don't know the exact details, I'm sure they're not wrong. Whether it's fair or not, most fandom stuff has copyright issues in the end, so I can't protest against the claims with 100% certainty it won't get me in real trouble. More info about this soon in another post!
My questions:
👇 only for those interested, feel free to comment, send ask or DM if you have can help :)
Do you have reblogs of my old posts?
To everyone who has some posts left on their blog that were mine, whether it's a headcanon, fic (still accessible one, so not a broken 'keep reading'- link), manga or anime scene, ask game, gif set or translation, if it's not too much trouble could you maybe comment on that post and @ me? Or... send me a link or smth in DM? Doesn't need to be every single trivial post. Maybe just the ones you liked most, or something... idk. I just might want to re-share a couple of posts here and it's so hard finding reblogs of my anonface-blog through search functions and stuff. Any help will be greatly appreciated!
P.S. I also found a lot of old posts, or posts that I liked (such as tickle art etc.) in the archives of @ticklygiggles, @ticklishdreams, @infrequent-creator - I hope you guys won't mind me making use of this (also thank you for the awesome support through the years afihs;ogojjoihgjn)!
Did you have a commission that was on my blog and do you prefer if this is reposted or not?
Some people 'bought' fics back when I had a shady kofi shop running and those fics were posted both on my AO3 and Tumblr (+ were sent in PDF format if requested). No matter how much you paid for the fic, part of the deal was that it would be posted on Tumblr so if by any chance you lost a commissioned fic and wish for me to repost this here on the new blog, please let me know...:3
Anything else? 👀
Well... With the loss of my account there were more things that went lost than just my fics, such as asks that were still in my inbox, DMs, personal stories and more. I did not back up anything and have zero overview and my memory is shit. If I am forgetting something, if you once sent me something and it's now gone (and you still have it), or if there's anything else I am missing smh, please let me know.
However please note that I am not planning to turn this blog into a copy of my previous one. If you submitted a fic to my old blog, I won't repost it here sadly (I hope you saved it). But if you posted an irl tickle story (I'll still accept these), a headcanon for your fav character or pairing or something else, I'll gladly accept it even if it's a copy of what you once sent to my old blog! With that said, I'll go back to finishing that second-to-last tickletober fic of mine... after I eat dinner. muhahah.
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— you love too easy | hitoshi shinsou (m.)
pairing: hitoshi shinsou/f!reader
genre: angst, fluff, smut
wordcount: 𝟾𝟹𝟾𝟶
cw: childhood friends!au, roommate!au
tags: unrequited love, pining, toxic relationship (oc x shinsou), brief kaminari x reader, cunnilignus, dirty talk, pet names, praise kink, fingering, size kink, loss of virginity, light virgin kink, creampie, squirting, angst with a happy ending
note: sorry if u like kaminari. i made him a huge douchebag in this. i swear i like him i just needed a character to be,,,,well, a douchebag.
— all your life you'd been by his side. you've loved him since you could remember. you've always been by his side so why did he give his heart away to everyone but you; the one who would treat it right?
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© all content belongs to seita 2020. do not modify or repost.
He fell in love too easily. You knew that your entire life. He’d give his heart away to anyone and everyone, fully and with everything he had. He loved with every fiber of his being. And it always ended in disaster.
You couldn’t count how many nights you’d spent by his side rubbing his back as he cried because his girlfriend lied to him, comforting him as he hunched over a toilet after crying himself sick because his girlfriend cheated on him, or forcing him to eat because he got so depressed after she ignored him.
It was an endless cycle.
Yet you were always there to build him back up -- to pick up the pieces.
Ever since the first girlfriend he had in Kindergarten that lasted for 2 days and ended in his tears up to the girl he dated in senior year of highschool who cheated on him with her ex...you were the one to fix him.
Yes, Hitoshi Shinsou fell in love far too easily and way too hard.
The thought that kept you awake every night, however, was why couldn’t it be you? You were the one who took the best care of his heart -- being the one to piece it back together every time it was broken. He didn’t need to love anyone else. If he just loved you, he would never have to worry if he just gave his heart to you.
But he never would.
Because he didn’t love you like you loved him.
You’d known him since you were babies -- your parents were friends in highschool and it went on well into adulthood.
Naturally, the two of you grew close -- it was inevitable. Your crush on him developed in childhood -- you two got lost in the mall after you strayed away and he kept you safe and calm until you found your parents, his hand clasped tightly around yours as he let you cling to him. That was the first time you realized he made your cheeks feel warm and your tummy fluttery.
Your parents always joked that the two of you would fall in love and get married. It was nearly impossible for that idea not to be imprinted in your mind.
Except, it was never an idea he entertained.
Part of you felt foolish. You were a grown adult with a crush that you’d harbored since childhood -- pathetic, one-sided crush at that.
The thing was, unlike Shinsou, you’d never dated before. It was never something you desired. Sure, you had confessions and love letters but you’d never once accepted them. You just couldn’t see yourself being with anyone but him.
Upon graduating, the two of you realized how terrible it was to be 18 trying to make it in the adult world. After a few years of fumbling and nearly getting kicked out by not making your rent payments on time, you decided that rooming together would be the best idea.
It was a foolproof plan; you’d known each other for your whole lives so it wasn’t like you’d suddenly hate each other, you knew he was responsible with his money and you were too, and he was a quiet, chill guy so there wouldn’t be any obnoxious ruckus.
What you didn’t think about, however, was him bringing girls home.
“This is Aoi,” he introduced, motioning to the smiling girl beside him, “Aoi, this is _____...she’s my best friend.”
“And his roommate,” you added, holding your hand out politely.
“Oh you...live together?” you didn’t miss the distaste in her tone as she reached out to give you a weak handshake, pulling away as quickly as she could. She immediately wrapped her arms around his and he leaned how to press a kiss to the top of her head.
Ouch. That made your heart hurt.
Of course, it was nothing new. This was something you’d been through time and time again.
What you hadn’t accounted for, was her dislike of you. Naturally, his past girlfriends hadn’t always been fond of you -- after all, you were a big part of their boyfriend’s life. And jealousy was a fickle disease.
But Aoi’s dislike bordered on hatred and disgust over you. Every chance she got, she was pulling Shinsou away from you with some thinly veiled excuse. It seemed your best friend was none the wiser as well.
You couldn’t blame him -- he was in love. Unfortunately.
Aoi’s glares were ice cold, often sending shivers down your spine when she set it upon you. It was uncomfortable to say the least. She was at your place often enough for you to take up the art of avoiding her.
That is until one day when things seemed to come to a head for her. You weren’t sure what you did but you found yourself cornered in the kitchen one evening while Shinsou was taking a shower -- leaving just the two of you alone.
“Listen to me,” Aoi spat, arms crossed over her chest, making her look petulant, “You need to back off of Toshi.”
“Uhh...what?” you grunted, looking up from the glass of chocolate milk you were pouring.
“Stay away from him!” she spat.
“We literally live together,” you rolled your eyes, capping the pint of milk, “I can’t stay away from him.”
“You know what I mean,” she hissed, clearly pissed off by your sarcasm. She marched up to you, grabbing your upper arm in a vice grip, her acrylic nails pinching your skin, “I see the way you look at him. I know that look in your eye. You love him.”
Your mind blanked, mouth opening but failing to produce any words. She smirked smugly, stepping back and crossing her arms again.
“I…” your brows came together as you shook your head, finally putting the milk away.
“I knew it,” she huffed, “You can’t take him from me. Toshi is mine so you better remember that. You have no idea what I can do to you.”
With that parting threat, she stormed out of the kitchen back to Shinsou’s bedroom. You felt tears sting your eyes, feeling utterly humiliated by her.
Another thing about Hitoshi Shinsou is he’s terribly dense sometimes. You had no idea how he managed to miss the horrifying tension between you and Aoi. But he somehow did.
The three of you sat in the living room -- the two of them cuddled on the couch while you curled up under a throw blanket with your phone open to Twitter on the loveseat. They were watching some movie Aoi picked out that you knew Shinsou hated, but he watched it anyway. The thought made you bitter.
You’d never make him watch movies he hated. That’s just selfish.
You let out a sigh, catching your best friend’s attention immediately.
“What is it, darlin’?” he asked, the usual pet name he used for you making your stomach flutter. Aoi’s eyes narrowed in distaste at it but he paid her no mind.
“Oh, I’ve just got a bit of a headache,” you mumbled, locking your phone to look over at him.
He frowned, concerned, pulling his arm from around his girlfriend’s shoulders. She whined at the loss, attempting to pull him back but he paid her no mind.
He disappeared from the living room to the kitchen. You could hear the refrigerator open before he began shuffling around the cabinets.
“You’re not slick,” Aoi hissed, keeping her voice low, “Why don’t you just go away. Don’t you think he’d prefer to be alone with his girlfriend? You’re just a third wheel.”
You didn’t get to reply before Shinsou returned, holding a glass of your chocolate milk and a couple pills. He smiled, handing everything to you before taking a seat with Aoi again. She immediately clung to him with a whine.
“Thank you Toshi,” you smiled, popping the pills in your mouth before taking a quick gulp of the milk.
“Anytime, darlin’” he smiled, turning his attention back to the movie he hated.
Part of you felt prideful that he was willing to pull himself away from his girlfriend to take care of you. She clearly saw you as competition and you couldn’t deny the giddy feeling it gave you when you proved to her that you meant something to Shinsou.
You noticed very quickly when Shinsou stopped calling you by his nickname. It baffled you and you didn’t hesitate to bring it up to him.
“Ah, Aoi mentioned she doesn’t like it when I call other girls pet names,” he rubbed the back of his neck in that familiarly anxious way of him. He was avoiding your gaze, further ticking you off.
“I’m not other girls, Hitoshi,” he visibly cringed at hearing his full name, “I’m your best friend. You’ve always called me that.”
He sighed, biting his lip, clearly torn, “Sorry _____,” you frowned at the sound of your name. It seemed so foreign hearing it where he’d usually call you ‘darlin’’, “She is my girlfriend and it’d be shitty of me to neglect her wishes. I want this to work, you know?”
You rolled your eyes, arms crossing over your chest, “This is stupid Hitoshi.”
He sighed, clearly growing annoyed as well, “Look, you’re just my friend, alright? So back off.”
Your jaw fell open at those words, tears already starting to sting at your eyes, “Just your friend? That’s low, Hitoshi. I am not just your friend and you know it.”
He groaned, running a hand through his already messy hair, “You’re starting to sound jealous and clingy, _____. It’s not a good look.”
Feeling that the tears were going to spill any moment, you shook your head and stormed past him, “Screw you Shinsou.”
You slammed your bedroom door, missing the sight of him burying his face in his hands. Hearing you address him by his last name was even worse than hearing his first.
Things remained tense between the two of you for a week. You had really been hurt by his words. You always thought you meant a lot to him -- that you’d never be the person who was pushed aside for a relationship. You never thought Shinsou would do that.
As a result, you made no effort to even speak to him. Sometimes you’d pass him while he sat on the couch, Aoi snuggled up to him. Whenever you made eye contact with you, she held this smug, superior look that made you want to clock her.
You’d never hated a girlfriend of his more.
Finally, Shinsou gave in. He couldn’t stand not having you to talk to. There was this heavy feeling lingering on his shoulders every time he thought about the cold way you called him by his last name. He never wanted to be addressed like that by you.
There were a series of knocks on your door and you paused, debating on ignoring him. He knocked again when you took too long to answer.
“Come in,” you groaned, putting your laptop aside to give him your attention.
“Hey,” he smiled half-heartedly as he slipped into your room, closing the door behind him.
“What do you want?” you asked, no bite in your voice.
He sighed, taking a seat beside you on the bed, “I want to apologize for what I said. I know that hurt your feelings so I’m sorry.”
You were quiet for a moment before you sat up straighter, “Hitoshi...I don’t want you to become a different person because of a girl.”
“What do you mean?” he frowned.
You sighed, “I think she’s a bad influence on you, Toshi.”
He softened briefly at your use of his nickname but it was quickly replaced by a cold stare that sent shivers down your spine, “A-A bad influence? I’m not a kid, _____.”
You frowned, “You don’t have to be a kid to be negatively influenced by another person's toxicity, Hitoshi.”
“You think she’s toxic?” he scoffed, standing up, “You don’t even know her. You’ve barely even spoken to her.”
“Well the bit that I have spoken to her was not pleasant,” you spat, moving to sit at the edge of the bed with your feet on the floor, “I don’t think she’s good for you.”
“What are you, my mother now?” he growled, spinning around to glare at you, “Maybe I was wrong...maybe you are just jealous.”
“How am I acting jealous?” you cried, growing frustrated, “Caring about your wellbeing is jealousy now?”
“Oh get off it,” he groaned, “What’s she done then, huh? Tell me.”
You paused, remembering her threat. But you were so pissed off you couldn’t keep it in anymore, “She’s threatened me to stay away from you. She’s so insecure about our friendship she threatened me over it! Said you were hers and I better remember that. She’s crazy!”
“She didn’t say that,” he argued, eyes narrowed maliciously, “You’re just making shit up to make her look bad now. That’s really low, _____.”
“You asked me to tell you what she did and then you just don’t believe me?!” you screeched, tossing your hands up in exasperation.
“I thought you’d tell me the truth, not make up some pathetic lie!” he shouted, making you flinch.
“Pathetic?” you breathed, shoulders sagging, “Is that what you think of me?”
He was quiet for a moment, jaw set. He seemed to be thinking his words carefully, which made his next even more painful, “Yeah. I do. This jealousy and lying of yours is pathetic. I get if you don’t like her but don’t make up shit about her,” he made way for the door, yanking it open, “Grow the fuck up, ______.”
You didn’t get a chance to reply before he was slamming your door shut. All at once, your emotions came crashing down and you buried your face in your pillow to silence your sobs.
Your eyes fluttered open and you groaned, feeling your head pound. A glance out the window showed that it was nighttime. You had fallen asleep.
You climbed out of bed to your desk to find your packet of headache pills. You let out a sigh of relief as you swallowed them down with the bottle of water sat on your nightstand. Flopping back into bed, you closed your eyes and attempted to relax your body.
Just as it seemed that you were going to fall back asleep, there was a loud noise from past your door. You frowned, your eyes fluttering open in confusion.
It came again and it took you a moment to realize what it was. A woman’s moan.
“Toshi!” you heard her squeal, making you flinch.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” you hissed, feeling those tears come burning their way back.
“That feel good, baby? Let me hear you,” he growled and your hands flew up to cover your ears to muffle the sounds of her pleasure.
This was low for Shinsou. Sure, he’d had sex with girlfriends before but he always made sure to keep it down for your sake. Now he was just doing it to dig at you.
He wasn’t wrong about your jealousy but you knew he thought you were jealous over his attention being taken away. But that wasn’t the case at all. It was because you were in love with him.
Now he was forcing you to listen to him fuck the girlfriend you literally had a fight over. This wasn’t like Shinsou at all.
She really was just a terrible influence on him but he was too in love to see it. She was making him into a different person and you hated it. It was happening so quickly.
As you laid in bed, tears wetting your bed as you hid your head under your pillow, you couldn’t help but think.
The stupid fool really fell in love way too easily.
Things went from bad to worse astonishingly fast. Aoi was over more often than she had been before. The snotty comments and humiliating words from her every time you saw her and the cold, deadly glare Shinsou set on you whenever you came anywhere near his girlfriend was wearing on you.
You were unhappy. It was an emotion you rarely ever felt around him -- Shinsou was always the one to pick you up, not put you down. It got to the point where he wouldn’t even respond to your greetings or questions, giving you the complete silent treatment.
It hurt.
To escape the suffocating negativity of your apartment, you picked up even more shifts at work. The video game shop became a place you found solace in.
If Shinsou noticed your absence, he didn’t make it known to you.
“Will that be all for you today?” you asked, plastering on a fake, customer service smile onto your face.
“Yeah, I guess,” he mumbled, slapping down a few bills to cover the charge, “But I think I’d like to add your number to my receipt.”
You took a moment to look at him. He had blonde hair with a lightning bolt of black through it. He was dressed in black jeans, a t-shirt, and a leather jacket. He was cute, you’d give him that.
“Is that the best you could come up with?” you asked, opening the register with a brow raised.
He giggled, making you smile despite yourself, “I was on a time crunch I didn’t want to miss my chance.”
“Who said you had a chance to begin with?” you asked, passing him his change, “3.14 is your change.”
“Well, I was hoping you’d give one to me,” he shrugged, stuffing the change into his pocket before grabbing the bagged video game he’d purchased.
You gazed at him for a moment. He was charismatic and cute. He liked video games just like you. And he’d be a great distraction.
“Sure, why not?” you mused, watching his eyes go wide.
“Wait really?” he gasped, a grin stretching across his face.
“Did you think I’d say no?” you asked.
“U-Usually I get rejected so…” he shrugged, scratching the back of his head with a cute blush reaching his ears, “Anyway, when’s your shift end?”
“Um...closing time, so about 8:30,” you replied, glancing at the clock. 5 hours left.
“Sweet, I’ll pick you up!” he grinned.
“I-I’ll have to change though!” you complained, making him pause and shake his head.
“Don’t worry about it!” with those parting words, he bolted out the door, the bell chiming to signal his departure.
As he disappeared from view, you realized you didn’t even know his name.
You would come to find he was Denki Kaminari; a college student majoring in graphic design. He had a friend named Katsuki Bakugou who was as loud as he was angry. Eijirou Kirishima was a kind, chill guy who mellowed out the explosive Bakugou well. Mina and Sato, two friends-turned-lovers, were a common source of laughter for the group.
You were together for a little over a month and a half when he finally asked to meet your friends. Truth be told, the only person you could consider a friend would be Shinsou. You had acquaintances and those you hung real casually with but Shinsou was the only person you’d consider a friend.
Well, you weren’t sure if he could even be called that anymore.
Eventually, you gave in and decided to bring Kaminari to your apartment.
“Whoa, nice place,” he mumbled, looking around.
“You think so? Thanks,” you smiled, leading him towards the living room, “Like I said...things are...tense between me and Hitoshi so…”
“Who’re you?” a familiar voice came from the entry of the hallway.
Shinsou stood there, messy hair and tired eyed wearing basketball shorts and an oversized t-shirt. His eyes burned holes into Kaminari, who visibly shrunk beneath the heated glare. You took note of how Shinsou didn’t even look at you.
That still hurt.
“I’m Denki Kaminari,” the blonde replied, approaching Shinsou to shake his hand, “I’m _____’s boyfriend!”
You didn’t miss the shift in Shinsou’s look, his eyebrows perking up ever so slightly. His gaze finally shifted to you before he scoffed from his nose, making you wince.
“Alright,” Shinsou mumbled, shoving his hands into his pockets before turning his back to the both of you, stalking back to his room with a slam of the door.
Kaminari winced, “Boy, you weren’t kidding.”
“Yeah,” you sighed, motioning him to follow you, “Let’s head to my room. I don’t know if Aoi is here or not and I don’t care to find out.”
“I kinda wanna meet her too,” your boyfriend whispered, lowering his voice so it didn’t carry to Shinsou.
“No you don’t,” you chuckled, shutting your bedroom door once the two of you were safely inside.
You sat beside him on the bed, reaching for your remote to click the TV on for background noise. He cuddled in beside you, commenting on how soft your bed was.
“You smell really good,” he suddenly whispered, nosing at your neck.
You blinked in surprise, moving your head so he could get a better angle, “Th-Thanks…”
He hummed as you shivered once he pressed a few soft kisses against your neck. It tickled a bit but also sent a strange tingle down your spine the more he kissed. Your heart hammered in your chest and you briefly wondered if Denki could hear it.
He cupped your jaw, pulling you into a deep kiss. His tongue met your bottom lip, making you sigh against his lips.
You barely noticed his hand crawling up your shirt until it snuck beneath the band of your bra. The unfamiliar feeling of someone cupping your breast had you pulled away, tugging on Kaminari’s hand to pull him away.
“W-We shouldn’t…” you whispered, unsure of how to reject him, “W-With Shinsou the way he is…”
Kaminari looked skeptical for a second before nodding his head, “Got it.”
And that was that.
At least you thought until he began trying more and more. It became common for you to find his hand up your shirt. The feeling made you uneasy, making you realize you really weren’t ready to have sex. Kaminari was your first boyfriend and you weren’t willing to give everything up to him like that.
“Why do you always stop me?” Kaminari asked one day, voice soft and reassuring.
“I just…” you cleared your throat, biting your lip, “I don’t want to go that far yet.”
He was quiet for a moment before smiling and nodding his head, pulling you closer to him with a kiss to your forehead. Your body relaxed, thankful that he wasn’t angry with you like you had feared he would be.
He began following your wishes, no longer attempting to go past kissing. You were thankful.
Unfortunately, your bliss didn’t last long because next thing you knew, he was dumping you. Over text.
You had just got home from work, your feet aching and dread pooling in your stomach at the idea of being home. You were so tired of being scared to come home, it was exhausting. Shinsou was sitting on the couch, eating something he’d made himself for dinner with his back to you. He didn’t even show any signs that he knew you were home.
Lingering by the door, you pulled your phone out to check your notifications.
One from Denki made your heart stop -- the preview text already displaying what you feared. Your fingers were trembling as you unlocked your phone to look at the message.
As you read it, the words grew blurrier until tears began to drip onto your screen -- further obscuring the words there.
A small whimper escaped your throat, despite the way you tried to choke down any sounds. You quickly scurried to get to your bedroom when a strong hand snagged your wrist. Wide eyed, you were spun around to find Shinsou wearing a frown and furrowed brows.
“Why are you crying?” he asked, voice stern with concern.
You shook your head, feeling pathetic. You didn’t like Kaminari that much. Truthfully, you were mostly dating him to get away from Shinsou. But the idea that you were dumped because you wouldn’t have sex was utterly humiliating. Your first real boyfriend dumped you because you wouldn’t put out.
“You were right,” you sniffled, unable to hold back the sob that tore through your chest, “I am pathetic.”
He didn’t have the chance to even think of a reply before you were escaping his hold to hide away in your bedroom. You haphazardly stripped and changed into your softest set of clothes, deciding you were going to wallow in your own self pity for the night.
Your humiliation overshadowed the fact Shinsou had shown you the first sign of care in weeks. He had reacted to your crying just as he always had and instinctively moved to comfort you.
You could hear muffled voices from the hallway, one male and one female. The fact he brought her over after you just had a near meltdown in front of him irked you and only brought more tears forth.
A sense of anger rushed over you -- you didn’t want her there. This was your house and you didn’t want her there while you were going through it. You had half a mind to go out there and kick her out, maybe Shinsou would let it slide since you were clearly having a tough time.
What you didn’t expect were the shouts coming from them. You frowned and walked towards your door, cracking it open to listen to their shouting from the living room.
“You’re kicking me out?!” Aoi cried.
“I’m not kicking you out,” Shinsou sighed, “You don’t live here. I’m just asking you to go home for the night, Aoi.”
“Why should I?” Aoi argued, “Because she’s upset? Who cares!”
“I care!” Shinsou snapped.
Aoi scoffed, “Oh yeah, since when? Last I checked you picked me over her!”
“I didn’t pick anyone over anyone,” Shinsou huffed.
“Really?” Aoi’s tone was dripping in sarcasm, “You haven’t paid her a second of attention since your little fight. I doubt you even noticed how she’s been working full-time instead of part-time. Why do you think that is? To get away from you! Not that I give a shit, but you have been treating her like dirt. So don’t even try and pretend you give a shit, I know you don’t. You only feel bad because she’s crying. Once she gets over it you’ll just come back to me in the end. So just let her sulk by herself, she’s a big girl.”
Shinsou was quiet after that. You were sure he wasn’t even going to respond but you continued to stand there and listen. The apartment was silent, you could even hear the ticking of the decorative clock Shinsou’s mother had given you both.
“She was right, huh?” he finally whispered.
“Huh?” Aoi replied, clearly annoyed.
“I really did let you turn me into someone else,” he sighed, “God, I’m so stupid.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Hitoshi?” she snapped, growing impatient over the argument.
“You should leave,” Shinsou said, voice strong once again, “You and I are done.”
“What?!” Aoi shrieked, stomping her foot, “You can’t dump me! Not for her!”
“Get out, Aoi,” Shinsou growled, yanking the front door open.
She scoffed, “Don’t come crawling back to me when you learn she isn’t worth it.”
The slam of the door signalled the end. Silence ensued and you slipped back into your room, letting your door shut silently.
Just as you expected, there were a few soft knocks on your door. You didn’t reply but he opened up anyway, peeking in to find you sitting on the bed with your head hung.
“I assume you heard all that,” he said, cupping the back of his neck nervously.
“Yeah, kind of hard to miss,” you mumbled, feeling awkward about sharing this moment with him.
You didn’t look up when he sat down beside you. With a sudden tug, you found yourself wrapped up in a sweet embrace.
“Why were you crying? Did something happen with that Kaminari dude? Did he hurt you?” his concern brought forth a new flood of tears that you let go.
“He dumped me,” you whined, clinging to the front of his shirt.
“Why?” he asked, petting your hair softly.
You scoffed, shame building up inside you, “Because I didn’t want to have sex with him.”
Immediately he pushed you back by your shoulders to look at your face, “He dumped you ‘cause you wouldn’t fuck him?”
“Yeah,” you mumbled, avoiding his gaze, “He said he had needs and he wasn’t willing to wait for me to put out.”
“Jesus,” Shinsou scoffed, shaking his head, “What a prick,” he pulled you into his chest again with a sigh, “It’s good you didn’t sleep with him then. He wouldn’t have been worth it.”
“Yeah, I would have regretted it,” you nodded, “I’m not even sad he broke up with me. I just feel like shit that it was over sex. He was my first boyfriend and I got dumped because I wasn’t ready...that sort of feels shitty, you know?”
Shinsou nodded, resting his cheek atop your head, “I understand. It’s like a blow to your self-esteem, yeah?”
“Exactly,” you sniffled, your tears finally coming to a stop as he held you and let you talk, “I didn’t like him enough to sleep with him anyway. Even if I was ready.”
Shinsou chuckled, “Well, I’m glad you’re not heartbroken over it.”
You were quiet for a long moment before you pulled away from him, “How are you? I know you liked Aoi.”
Shinsou frowned, looking at his hands in his lap before shrugging, “I actually don’t really feel anything.”
“Really?” you asked, surprised. Usually he would be in tears by now. But he was right, there wasn’t even an ounce of sadness in his eyes.
He nodded, “All I really cared about was you. I guess realizing what she really was wiped out anything I felt for her. Truthfully, it was probably going to be over soon anyway.”
“Why do you say that?” you asked.
“We just didn’t have good chemistry, I suppose. The sex was great but beyond that we didn’t really share any common interests,” he explained, leaning back on his hands with a sigh.
You cringed at the mention of sex -- remembering the night you sobbed as you were forced to listen to them go at it. Shinsou seemed to notice your discomfort, leaning up straight once more to take your hands in his.
“I’m sorry, ______,” he breathed, making you look up at him, “I was such a fuckin’ asshole to you. You didn’t deserve that and if you chose to never forgive me I would understand. But I promise I will never let a girl come first again. You’re my best friend, you’re the entire world to me and you will always be here when all the girls leave, I know that. No one can ever replace you.”
His words caused a flood of tears to flood down your cheeks again. You threw your arms around his shoulders, tugging him into a desperate hug. He wrapped his arms around your waist, fisting the back of your shirt with his face buried in your neck.
“I will always be here, Toshi,” you hiccuped, “I really will. It doesn’t matter if you choose the next 50 girls over me, I would never let you go. I would rather live with you ignoring me and making me cry over not having you at all.”
He sighed, tears of his own falling from his eyes and wetting your skin but you didn’t mind, “I would never ask that of you.”
“You don’t have to,” you whispered, voice trembling. You couldn’t stop the next words from coming, you didn’t even try, “That’s how strong my love is for you, Toshi. I would do anything for your happiness. I’ll let you cry on my shoulder when girl after girl breaks your heart, even though it hurts so damn much because I know I would never, ever let you down like that. I’ll sit with you in the living room while another girl is wrapped in your arms, desperately wishing it was me, because you want me and her to be friends. You don’t even know it but you have every bit of me,” your voice broke as you let out a sob, taking a stuttering breath before continuing, “I never dated because I only ever loved you. You’re the only one I ever want to love. I don’t even care if you don’t feel the same, Toshi, I just needed you to know...I have loved you since we were kids. Whenever your mom joked that we would get married, I used to go to sleep hoping it would come true one day. You’re it for me, you know?”
Shinsou was still, every muscle in his body tense against you. You remained relaxed, relishing in being held in his arms even though it very well may be the last time you would ever experience it. His tears had stopped and you could feel his hands trembling against your back from where he was still holding your shirt in tight fists.
Finally, slowly, he pulled away. You avoided his gaze, scared of what you may find there. With trembling fingers, he lifted your chin until you were finally forced to meet his gaze.
“______…” he whispered, your voice like honey on his lips, “Is that true? Since we were kids?”
You chuckled through your still falling tears, “Remember that time at the summer festival when I wandered off and you had to chase me? And I got scared because I couldn’t find our parents? When you let me hold onto you and you kept reassuring me that everything was okay…” you shrugged, your voice cracking as you uttered, “I knew I loved you then. And I love you to this day.”
His wide eyes were glassy as he stared at you, mouth agape in his shock. It was so much for him to take in.
Before you knew what was happening, he was leaning in and pressing his lips against yours. Your vision went white for a second in shock at the feeling.
His lips were soft and as you began to kiss back, you tasted coffee on his lips. Typical of Shinsou, it was late at night and he was still drinking coffee. The thought made you smile and you wrapped your arms around his neck to deepen the kiss. He cupped the back of your head, a soft sigh escaping him as he moved his lips expertly until you were breathless.
After a long moment, he pulled away. The both of you were panting, eyes lidded as you processed what just happened.
“Toshi…” you whispered, feeling euphoric after kissing him, “I don’t understand.”
He shook his head, cupping your cheek, “All you need to know...is that I love you too.”
You gaped at those words coming from his lips. Surging forward, you pressed your lips against his again. He smiled into the kiss, leaning further against you until you were forced to lay back against the mattress. His body was hovering above yours, held up by his elbows on either side of your head.
He wasted no time in touching your body, years of desperation finally culminating into this one moment. His hand slid beneath your shirt, pushing the hem up to expose the soft skin of your belly. He paused at your ribs, unsure if you were okay with him going any further. But when you gripped his wrist and urged his hand up to cup your breast, he threw away those inhibitions.
Thumbing your sensitive nipple, you keened as they hardened beneath his touch. He leaned down a bit more to press his lips against yours.
You lost yourself against his lips, whimpering and grinding against nothing. Just the fact the man you’d loved for so long was there touching you after years of craving it had your panties soaked.
“You’re so pretty,” he whispered, breaking from the kiss to kiss down your body.
You trembled beneath him, watching him with rapt attention as he kissed the exposed skin of your stomach and ribs. Sighing, you let him push your shirt over your head to discard off the side of the bed. He leaned forward, enveloping one of the pert buds in his hot mouth, tonguing at it until you were whining and begging him to give attention to the other one. He did so eagerly, providing a stimulating suck before finally pulling away. His lips were swollen and his cheeks were flushed, the very fact you made him that way was dizzying.
“Wanna taste that perfect cunt too, baby,” he growled, voice losing the soft, sweetness it once held.
“O-Okay,” you agreed easily, raising your hips so he could tug the last remaining articles off of your body.
The second you were bare, his hands were pinning your thighs open. His eyes examined every inch of your pussy -- taking in the juices dripping from your clenching hole.
“You’re so fucking wet,” he groaned, using his thumbs to spread your folds apart, “so pretty too, god. Look at you...you’re perfect. Bet you’re so sweet…”
“Please Toshi…” you whimper, reaching down to tangle your fingers into his hair.
His eyes fluttered at the feeling, allowing you to pull him to your pussy where he eagerly ran his tongue flat between your spread folds. You gasped, eyes slamming shut as he paused to wrap his lips around your clit for just a split second. The teasing touch was addictive and you suddenly wanted more.
Shinsou understood what it is you wanted and quickly dove back in for more. Circling his tongue around your clit, your back arched. You wanted to close your thighs against the stimulation but his strong hands kept your legs pinned open.
He swirled his tongue quickly, moaning before enveloping the bud in his hot mouth. You tugged his hair, crying out his name as you felt a high approaching rapidly. He looked so good between your thighs, eating your cunt like you’d dreamed of for ages.
Suddenly, he pulled away, licking his lips before sitting up.
“Fuck, tell me babygirl,” he breathed, “You gonna let me fuck this pretty cunt?” you nodded, reaching to push his shit up but he stopped you, looking you in the eyes, “Use your words. Tell me.”
“Yes, please fuck me Shinsou!” you begged.
He grinned, pressing a kiss against your lips before stripping himself of his clothes.
You almost gasped at the sight of his cock. He was big; long and thick. Subconsciously, you clenched your thighs together in anticipation.
“You ready?” he asked, scooting to sit between your spread legs.
You tensed up as he prodded your entrance with the fat head of his cock. He realized how tense you were and ran his hand along your thigh to soothe you, “You good? You can back out anytime, darlin’.”
You swallowed thickly, feeling your cheeks heat up as you looked at him through your lashes, “I-It’s just...go slow?”
He frowned, brows drawn together before he backed away from you a bit, “Is this your first time, sweetheart?”
Licking your lips, you hesitated before nodding. Shinsou sighed, hanging his head to rest against your collarbone. You frowned, “I-Is that bad?” you asked.
Truth was, you never wanted anyone but him. You never had a desire to have sex with anyone but him. You knew he was the one person you’d never regret being with.
“No!” he sat up, eyes wide before wrapping his hand around the nape of his neck nervously, “I just wish you would have told me sooner...that was almost bad.”
“Why?” you asked,making him chuckle. He shook his head and pressed a kiss to your forehead.
“Well…” clearing his throat, he looked off to the side bashfully, “My dick’s not exactly the smallest around and since you’re a virgin you could do with...a lot more preparation, you know?”
Your cheeks were ablaze from the bluntness of his words. He didn’t waste another second in bringing his hand to your still wet pussy.
He sighed, a smile lingering on his lips as he worked his middle finger into your tight hole. Humming, he bit his lip as he slipped his ring finger alongside it. You sighed, eyes fluttering at the mild stretch that came along with it.
“Feel okay?” he asked softly, working the two fingers in and out of your hole.
You nodded, “Feels good,” you breathed.
Your eyes fell closed as he crooked his fingers upwards to touch that sweet spot on top. Your hips jumped at the sensation, ripping a moan from your swollen lips. He smirked, burying the digits deep, licking his lips at the way your juices gushed out from around them.
With his other hand, he found your clit, circling the bud with his thumb as he worked his index finger into the mix. The added stimulation to your clit made your wall clench tightly and he grunted, imagining what it would feel like around his cock.
“Please Toshi,” you begged, “I want you already.”
“Thank you’re ready?” he asked, although he already knew the answer.
And he was right when you whimpered out a pathetic little, “Yes!”
He resumed the position from earlier, his tip pressed against your entrance. It was opened a bit from his three fingers but he knew it was still going to be a tight fit.
He took your hand in his, lacing your fingers together as he began to sink into your cunt. You whimpered as your walls stretched around him, squeezing his hand. He bottomed out quickly, stilling to let you adjust to being stuffed so full of his thick cock.
“Does it hurt?” he asked, pressing a kiss to your lips.
“N-No…” you mumbled, “Just...feels weird.”
He chuckled, kissing your lips again. He could feel you squeezing around him, your cunt unused to having such a big cock inside. The fact he was your first, the one taking your virginity -- tainting your pure body was turning him on more than he ever thought it would.
He couldn’t even lie and say he’d never taken a cherry before but with you it was different. He felt a sense of pride and possessiveness wash over him; you were his completely. You had given him your heart and your body.
Burying his face in your neck, he pressed kisses against the sweet spot he easily found there. Grinding his hips against yours, he stirred your insides with his thick length until you were arching your hips to get more of the addictive pleasure only he could bring you.
He pulled out halfway, slowly sinking his cock back inside with a groan.
“That’s a good girl,” he praised, eyes glued to where your cunt was stretched around him, “Taking me so well, look at that.”
“Feels so good,” you whimpered, clutching the sheets beneath you in your fists.
“Yeah?” he grinned, pulling out so the tip remained only to surge forward and sink his cock into you in one long thrust. Immediately, your back arched and you let out an erotic moan that had his cock throbbing against your walls, “Fuck, my cocks almost too much for you but you’re bein’ such a good girl for me, aren’t you? Taking what I give you...fuck…”
His praise and dirty words went straight to your core. He set a steady pace, making sure to angle his hips up so he could hit your g-spot. The pleasure had your eyes rolling back and you cried out his name every so often, making his heart race.
“Sound so pretty sayin’ my name…” he groaned, cupping your breasts in his hands as he fucked you, “Pussy’s so tight and wet...I can feel you dripping, you know that? Who would have thought such a pretty cunt could get so messy. But you only get this messy for me, right darlin’?”
“Only you!” you babbled, wrapping your arms around his neck to press your lips against his. He moaned into your mouth, reaching between your bodies to circle your clit, “Fuck! Toshi, y-you’re gonna make me cum!”
“Fuck,” he groaned, “Do it then, sweetheart. Go on, cum on my fucking cock.”
A few more thrusts and circles over your swollen bud had you falling over the edge. Your body trembled and arched beneath him, cunt spasming around him as he worked you dutifully through your orgasm.
Once you came down, he pulled his hand from your clit and pulled out. You were panting, body limp and relaxed as you let him move you onto your hands and knees. Keeping your face buried in the pillow, you allowed him to maneuver you into the proper position.
He pressed his hand down on the small of your back, “Arch your back for me, good girl.”
“Th-This is embarrassing, Toshi…” you whispered into the pillow.
He hummed, gripping his cock to direct himself back into the sweet vice of your cunt, “No reason to be embarrassed, kitten. It’s just me...you can trust me.”
“I-I know...but still…” you whimpered, eyes fluttering as he sunk his cock deep inside. The position allowed him to reach a new depth.
“Do you want to stop?” he asked softly, running his hand along your spin.
You hesitated for a second, focusing on the pleasurable sensation of being filled so completely before shaking your head. He grinned, leaning down to kiss your shoulder blade, “Good girl.”
The praise went to your head and you suddenly had a desire to receive more. You wanted to be good for him -- be his good girl.
You lifted your head from the pillow and cried out his name, fucking yourself back against his cock. He grinned, slapping your ass lighter than he usually would do it -- he wasn’t sure how you would take to it. When he felt you clench around him in response, he grinned. That was something worth looking into it seemed.
“Toshi…” you whined, reaching back to grip at his hip.
He hummed, slowing ever so slightly, “What is it, kitten?”
“Please…” you whined, feeling your cheeks flush with embarrassment over what you desperately wanted to ask him.
“Please what?” he whispered, kissing your shoulder blade again, “Tell me what you need, baby.”
“C-Call me...y-your goog girl again…” you whispered, immediately burying your face in your pillow.
He paused, eyes wide before another grin grew across his face. Wrapping his arm around your waist, he pulled you up until your back was pressed against his chest. You cried out, his cock stilling inside you as he pressed his lips against your ear.
“You like being praised huh?” he asked, chuckling when you nodded, leaning your head back to rest on his shoulder. He enjoyed the fucked out look on your face, “Like being my good girl, hm? Such a pretty, sweet girl for me…”
You whimpered, walls clenching around his still cock, “I-I love you Toshi…”
He hummed, reaching down to find your clit. Circling over the bud, you keened, eyes fluttering as your cunt clenched tight around him, “I know you do, sweetheart.”
Suddenly, your walls squeezed, clamping down tight. He groaned, cursing under his breath as he felt your body seize up in your orgasm, trembling and gushing around his cock. He pressed his lips against your shoulder, looking down to where his length was buried completely inside.
You began to rock yourself along his cock, your orgasm flying to new heights as he never stopped playing with your sensitive bud.
Suddenly, he watched with wide eyes as your cum squirted out, soaking the bed and your thighs.
“Shit,” he growled, providing a few quick slaps against your clit, making you squirt just a few more times, “What a good fucking girl you are. Look at the mess you made. You’re so perfect, I love you so much.”
Those words had you clenching once again. That finally sent him over the edge himself. He rocked into you, holding you tight against him. His cock throbbed, spitting hot cum into your sensitive cunt.
He cupped your breasts, groaning in the throes of his orgasm as he pressed kisses against your shoulder, neck, and cheek.
When he finally came down, he gently laid you on the bed, pulling his cock out. His cum gushed from your hole without his length to stop it. You cringed, the feeling unpleasant to say the least.
He got out of bed to go to the bathroom intending to get a cloth to clean you with.
When he was gone, you found yourself thinking about what just happened. One particular thought was on your mind and when he returned, you didn’t hesitate to voice it.
“W-We didn’t use a condom…” you mumbled.
He hummed, “Were we supposed to? I thought you were on birth control.”
“I am...it’s just…” you frowned, clearing your throat as you watched him wiped your thighs and sensitive folds free of your mixed cum.
“What?” he sat beside you, fixing you with a steady gaze, urging you to confess your thoughts to him.
“You were just...dating, you know...Aoi and…” you sighed, averting your gaze from him, “Other girls before.”
He chuckled, laying beside you, “What, you’re concerned I have something?”
“Well no...not necessarily…” you frowned as he cupped your cheek, making you look at him.
“If you must know…” he shrugged before continuing, “I always used a condom with them.”
“Really?” he nodded at your question, “Then...why with me?”
“Because you’re you,” he smiled, kissing your lips, pulling you to lay against his chest, “You’re the one for me, kitten. That’s all you need to worry about.”
Yes, Hitoshi Shinsou fell in love easily. But he never gave those girls his heart. He cried because he thought he could never have you. The truth was, you had always owned his heart. It had always been in your hands.
#bnha x reader#shinsou x reader#bnha smut#shinsou smut#hitoshi shinsou x reader#shinsou hitoshi x reader#mha x reader#bnha imagines#mha imagines#mha smut#afton.writes
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My Immortal is the quintessential piece of bad fanfiction, a story so notorious that the very concept of badfic immediately brings up mention of it in virtually any circle. Much like a discussion about bad movies inevitably breaks down into someone screaming quotes from The Room into the middle distance in a terrible impression of an even worse accent, My Immortal is a guarantee whenever bad fanfiction comes up. It’s risen above the entry-level masterworks like My Inner Life and “the Goku/Anne Frank” fic, and with its sheer fame completely obscured the deep cuts of a 4 AM fanfiction.net binge where you learn things about yourself that you were much better off not knowing. Regardless of a person’s fandom or even how into fanfic they are, they understand the story to be the utter distillation of everything terrible about fanfic. There is something for everyone, whether the dark specter of a writer’s own teenage shames or something to cackle quotes from and spiral off into dramatic readings of. No fanfic has ever united people across barriers of fandom so easily.
And it’s all a lie.
Several months ago, I wrote a rather long-winded explanation of how My Immortal is not the creation of a teenage girl embodying the very worst in fanfic writers, but in fact the most masterfully-constructed piece of troll fiction ever conceived, which has, for going on nine years, managed to fool the internet at large into believing it completely genuine. But I was left unsatisfied with the initial result, which didn’t delve as deep as I would have liked into the points it raised, and missed quite a few important parts. So I’m making a second pass on the, hopefully concisely enough that I don’t need to make a third, because after writing a second essay about My Immortal, heaven knows I’m miserable now.
Special thanks to oisiflaneur for proofreading this 14,000+ word monster.
Preamble: People Who Are Young And Alive
For the purposes of best understanding everything I’m about to talk about, I suggest going and reading My Immortal first. ‘Context’ might not be the best way to explain what you’ll get by knowing what I’m referring to, but familiarity with the source material will make this a much easier read. Due to it having been long-since purged from fanfiction.net, you can find it reposted across the internet, in particular here. It is quite a read and I greatly reccomend it, although I do so as somebody who has read through countless times and liked it enough to write thousands upon thousands of words about it.
However, it’s certainly not an easy read for some people due to its clusterfuck of misspellings and incomprehensibility, so in addition to the quotes and excerpts I will provide to illustrate my points, I will briefly give a quick rundown of the major players in our tale.
Our heroine, Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way’s own words sum up her existence better than I ever could:
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.
This paragraph is the first of the story, and it is also the longest of the story, saying so much and yet so little about our protagonist. We know almost nothing of the personality that she is alleged to possess, but we do know that she wishes to be familially related to Gerard Way because she finds him attractive, and presumably has an incest kink that will never be touched upon again in the story. The rest of this thesis will touch on all of the other woeful elements of this monstrous violation of ‘show, don’t tell’, but now you have the definitive look at who and what Ebony is.
Ebony is in love with Draco Malfoy, who save for a few minor elements remains largely unchanged in My Immortal. The same cannot be said for Harry “Vampire” Potter;
In the Great Hall, I ate some Count Chocula cereal with blood instead of milk, and a glass of red blood. Suddenly someone bumped into me. All the blood spilled over my top.
“Bastard!” I shouted angrily. I regretted saying it when I looked up cause I was looking into the pale white face of a gothic boy with spiky black hair with red streaks in it. He was wearing so much eyeliner that I was going down his face and he was wearing black lipstick. He didn’t have glasses anymore and now he was wearing red contact lenses just like Draco’s and there was no scar on his forhead anymore. He had a manly stubble on his chin. He had a sexy English accent. He looked exactly like Joel Madden. 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.
If nothing else, it’s certainly a nice change from the usual traits about his mother’s eyes and taped-up glasses. In this story, Harry goes by ‘Vampire’; he used to date Draco Malfoy and they got tattoos with each others’ names, he is gothic and now part of Slytherin for reasons never elaborated upon – these two traits go hand-in-hand for every character in the story– and resembles the lead singer of Good Charlotte for some reason. Thankfully, our author also notes that the character who was born, raised, and lives his entire life in Great Britain happens to have a “sexy English accent”.
“Satan” is the name that Tom Riddle went by when he was a Hogwarts student. In the 1980s. And gothic. We’ll touch on him a little later. There’s a lot of trainwreck going on here, in case you haven’t noticed.
The two meta players to what is one of the greatest internet performance art pieces ever created are our author Tara Gilesbie, and her best friend/beta reader Raven, noted in the story by her own self-insert Willow. I have a lot to say about these two, who are characters in their own ways and who the understanding of is vital to seeing My Immortal as something greater than it appears to be. Tara is a budding teenage writer, Harry Potter, and goth, who doesn’t like that people keep ‘flassing’ her story and threatens self-mutilation as retribution for it, because if there is one thing the mid-2000s internet was, it was caring and serious about such issues. She plays it rather loose with things like literary devices or the English language, as we shall see.
Part 1: Bigmouth Strikes Again – Matters of “Da Story and Spelling”
Upon reading My Immortal for the first time, one of the most egregious and clear issues with the story lies within the spelling and grammar: they’re fucking abysmal. You can see it in the author’s notes right away, and it slowly trickles into the story itself. It starts with ridiculous run-on sentences that seem more like lists than the placement of words into a coherent and complete thought, delivered in a halting and completely jarring cadence. Allegedly, Tara’s friend Raven is editing the story until chapter 15 – more on her later – but even under her tenure as beta, little slips become more frequent. The job of trying to edit something so terrible would certainly be taxing and likely require intensive rewrites of whole chapters at a time, and it’s understandable that perhaps someone would simply be past the point of being able to handle this, and would get sloppier in their job. Chapter eleven, where the author’s note explicitly stated Raven helped, contains of the most infamous and brilliant mistakes in the entire work; ‘Loopin’ 'masticating’.
Once Raven leaves as Tara’s editor, the story nosedives even further into a death spiral of spelling and grammar. Typos become common and any lip service paid to writing words out fully is discarded. Without a beta, we see the depths of Tara’s unfettered lack of shits given for her story to come off as anything resembling presentable. And it needs to be this way, because one of the hallmarks of bad fanfiction is being incomprehensible. Not quite as much as it once was in the days before My Immortal shook the scene up, but it’s a clear indicator of the writer being unprincipled and very young, which are all vital to the character of Tara. The story needs to be poorly written, because if it isn’t, a site like fanfiction.net which, let’s be honest, doesn’t have very high standards–or really any at all–won’t react with all the venom and vitriol the story is meant to induce. It would merely fly under the radar as another mediocre story in the ever-swelling Harry Potter section, which even years after the fandom has cooled off, still moves faster than any person can possibly read through completely. That’s why the author’s notes are so terribly formatted; the very first thing a reader will see upon opening the story is, “Special fangz (get it, coz Im goffik)”.
And it is that word 'goffik’, my darlings, that marks the first place in My Immortal where Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
Everyone who types regularly can see certain little flubs and bad habits develop in their words; muscle memory kicking them in the ass and accidentally writing an incredibly similar word, or having some consistent errors that come through very clearly. And she does have a few, such as “jacket” as “jackson” (chapters 26, 37, 41, 42) and “converse” as “congress shoes” (chapters 24, 39, 41, 42), but they are few and far between in a dizzying array of random misspellings as chaotic as the story itself. They’re just layered beneath what is already a no-shits-given typing style that was back then incredibly commonplace within the subculture presented in the story, but they can be made out clearly if looked for beyond using Z in place of S or 'da’ for 'the’.
The easiest case to make in this regard is with names. Nobody has their names consistently spelled correctly, but they aren’t even consistent in their incorrectness. Our main character, Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, is referred to as Enoby, Enony, Egogy, TaEbory, Ebony, and Evony, among others. Hagrid’s name is spelled correctly a grand total of zero times, but can be noticed as Hargrid, Hairgird, HAHRID, Hargirid, etc. Is her boyfriend Draco, or is he Drako, Darko, or Drago? Voldemort has almost as many misspellings as he does appearances; Volfemort, Vlodemort, Volxemort, Voldemint, Volremot, and Darth Valer, to name a few. Sirius Black becomes Serifs, Series, Sodomize, Socrates, and my personal favorite, Spartacus. Professor Slutgorn, Cornelia Fuck, Dumblewhore, Preacher McGongal are also highlights.
But there’s perhaps too much convenience in how words become other words so easily. From Loopin’s mastication and the pointing of his womb, to being sent not to Azkaban but to Azerbaijan, to recording a sex tape on a caramel, to Dracon being hung like a Stallone, the story is littered with mistakes that seem almost too good to be true. Not all of this can be explained away as just a stray finger. Some of them defy keyboard logic in how they came to be, and somebody who could be that sloppy with a keyboard would be incapable of making sentences that could even be pieced together by someone intent on understanding what was meant by them, which as it stands is already how much of My Immortal is written. Sort of like Finnegan’s Wake, except the analysis of it is performed by significantly sadder people.
Matters like Azerbaijan and caramel might be explained away by spellcheck, if there was even the slightest evidence that Tara spellchecked any of this. It’s very, very apparent that she didn’t, because these passages are surrounded by misspellings that have gone unedited and unfixed, which means that she had to type out these words to the full extent manually.
Could it be some kind of celestial alignment that leads to there being so many absolutely perfect typos? It could be. But I believe that the typos not in fact the meanderings of someone who doesn’t care, but in fact a labour of love from someone who cares far, far too much. Poor typing habits and a lack of care for what’s being put down are hallmarks of bad writing, and My Immortal strives to push it to heights that become almost impossible for an actual human being to accidentally make. Words are put into the story that aren’t even in the same neighborhood as the ones they’re supposed to be, and names steadily spin out of control in ever-escalating insanity like a Fibonacci sequence from hell.
In the chapter 4 author’s note, Tara notes “her name is ENOBY nut mary su ok!” In chapter 12, hot off the heels of Loopin masticating is the line, “Who MASTABATED (c is dat speld rong) to it he added silently.” What are the odds that she misspells the words on the two occasions where it matters most? In particular the latter one, where you’d think she would bother looking the word back over first to make sure it wasn’t, in fact, misspelled. Raven doesn’t pick up on it either, even though as we’ll see later she is most certainly capable of spelling words properly. It highlights the character of Tara’s hubris and incompetence, that she points out that she spelled a word correctly when she in fact had not. Someone who cares enough to show up the haters mid-story, but not enough to make sure they’re actually doing so.
Accompanying the more clearly intentional mistakes is the steady clumsiness that grows with the word count. Misspellings become more prevalent and less attention is put into trying to look like words, and while the tipping point is certainly Raven rescinding her service as an editor, it’s also a measured and slow degradation. We’ll go over this in more detail in part eight, but it is rather damning that the story doesn’t just plummet right through the floor once Raven isn’t working on making it presentable, as it reasonably should. Instead, it s a careful and measured breakdown. For comparison’s sake, let’s take the opening of chapter 15, which is the final Raven-edited chapter before the breakup:
“Ebony Ebony!” shouted Draco sadly. “No, please, come back!”
But I was too mad.
“Whatever! Now u can go anh have sex with Vampire!” I shouted. I stormed into my room and closed my black door with my blood-red key. It had a picture of Marylin Manson on it. He looked so sexy in a way that reminded me of Draco and Vampire. I started to cry and weep. I took a razor and started to slit my wrists. I drank the blood all depressed. Then I looked at my black GC watch and noticed it was time to go to Biology class.
And chapter 16, where their relationship reaches its peak and Raven has left as editor:
We ran happily to Hogsmede. There we saw the stage where GC had played. We ran in happly. MCR were there playing ‘Helena’. I was so fucking happy! Gerard looked even sexier than he did in da pictures. Even Draco thought so, I could totally see him getting an erection but it didn’t matter cuz I knew know that we were da only true ones for eachother. I was wearing a black leather minidress and black leather platinum boots with red ripped fishnets. Draco was wearing a black baggy MCR t-shirt and black baggy pants. Anyway, we stated moshing to Helena. We frenched. We ran up 2 the front of the band to stage-dive. Suddenly, Gerard pulled off his mask. So did the others. We gasped. It wasn’t them at all. It was.,……………………….. Volsemort and da Death Dealers
There are certainly a few more typos in this sample, and we see 'da’ and 'cuz’ slip through without Raven’s guidance, but overall they don’t seem too far apart. 'Volsemort’ is the only thing that is clearly down to a typo rather than laziness. But let’s jump into Morty McFli’s “tim machine” and see how chapter 26 opens:
A few mutates later Vampire came 2 da tree. He was wearing a blak leather jackson, black leather pants and a Good Chralotte t-shirt.
“Hi Vampire.” I said flirtily as I started to sob. Draco hugged me sexily tryont to comfrot me. I started to cry tears of blood and then told them what happened.
“Oh fuck it!” Vampire shouted angrily. He4 started to cry sadly. “What fucking dick did that!”
“I don’t know.” I said. “Now come on we have 2 tell Dumbledor.”
We ran out of the tree and in2 da castle. Dumblydor was sitting in his office.
“Sire are dads have been shot!” Draco said while we wipped sum tears from his white face. “Enoby had a vision in a dreem.”
Dubleodre started to cockle. “Hahahaha! And How due u aspect me to know Ebony’s not divisional?
It’s night and fucking day. Raven’s presence was clearly not the only thing keeping Tara’s spelling in check, because she started off just fine without her, but somewhere along the next ten chapters clearly lost her way. But hey, just for comparison’s sake, let’s see if ten more chapters supports my claim. 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.
It’s almost difficult to believe they’re from the same story we saw twenty chapters ago, and it’s sure as hell not because Tara has improved her craft. Within the confines of the story itself, it seems so gradual that you might not even realize it, but laid out in chunks like that, can you really say it’s not someone trying their best to destroy as many words as they possibly can?
Part 2: It’s Gruesome That Someone So Handsome Should Care – Matters of Identity and “Goffikness”
At the very core of My Immortal is what Tara believes being a goth to be. From the very first sentence of the first author’s note we learn this fact, and the first paragraph in the story, which is also the longest, is devoted to showing that Ebony is as well. Whether or not one is a goth becomes the most important character trait for the entire cast and defines their relationships with one another. Throughout the story, we are regaled with all the evidence of band fandom and other ultimately superficial traits that assure us that these characters are indeed true goths. The only things that receive anything approaching description are the clothes Ebony wears, all black and leather and band t-shirts. Nothing matters more than being a goth.
In this strange world, Ebony’s lifestyle is supported in ways that are beyond belief. Merchandising is so invasively ever-present that you can buy just about anything branded with her interests. In chapter 38, Satan smokes a Nightmare Before Christmas cigar (over a decade before The Nightmare Before Christmas came out), capes can bear Avril Lavigne’s face on them without anyone raising an eyebrow, and cars have pentagram decals all over them. Although band t-shirts are perfectly normal – and if I’m anything to go by, having pretty much nothing but band shirts isn’t unheard of – Ebony also has a wide range of band-branded everything, like skirts that have 'Simple Plan’ written across her ass.
Ebony looks like Amy Lee, and any boy she thinks is attractive will invariably be compared to the lead members of bands she likes, because those positive associations are marks of her dedication.
In the world of My Immortal, being a goth or a prep is not down to musical choices and circles of friends, but instead a sweeping statement about where you fall in matters of good and evil. Everyone she approves of fits her lifestyle whether it makes sense for the character to or not, radically changing their personalities to fall into the box she wants them to. The Golden Trio, alongside Ginny and Neville all goth up and convert to Slytherin, because as the 'dark’ house it is the only logical place for goths to go be. She does not have any friends who aren’t goths, because to not be a goth is to a prep, and preps are evil. Preps have middle fingers put up at them when they do nothing wrong, because on mere principle they must be hated and despised.
Which forms one of the many problems with the plot, but one that is not specific to the madness of Tara Gilesbie. At almost no point do characters coded as preps actually do anything wrong. Britney is consistently insulted and called a 'fucking prep’ in every appearance she has as though 'prep’ is an earth-shattering slur. Her presence consists entirely of being in a room, sometimes with middle fingers put up at her, and in one case, singled out by Professor Trevolry to do extra homework, because Trevolry is a goff teacher, which means she punishes preps for being preps. The only time Britney does anything wrong is in the final chapter, when it’s revealed that she released Snap and Loopin from Azerbaijan.
Britney is also the only actually preppy character in the story. We know this because she wears pink and little else, due to the lack of dialogue or character shown. But other people are referred to as preps constantly, including Snoop, Lumpkin, and Valmont. As are everyone who criticizes the story. We receive no indication for these, and often they are completely baffling for how decidedly un-preppy these characters truly are, but it’s vital to the narrative and the division of the cast that everyone Ebony does not approve of is a prep.
It’s not an uncommon attitude among teenagers, especially those with interest or belonging to subcultures out of the approved mainstream, to draw lines and assume everyone who falls into divisions other than them are inherently opposed to them. The idea that anyone who isn’t different must assume that difference is bad is so pervasive that it often comes to define works of fiction taking place in high school, even when written by grown-ass adults, because it provides cheap and easy conflict. Most teenagers grow fairly quickly out of this, but because of its convenience as a device, it persists. Tara is far from the only person to ever believe this, but the degree to which she takes it is a little further than most do, lumping the world into only two categories, but defining 'them’ as a one-dimensional army of preps even when they’re the opposite of preppy.
Which makes it an incredibly mockable and therefore desirable angle to write her plot through, doesn’t it?
Once again setting herself up for incredible failure is the fact that she’s completely off the fucking mark about what a goth is. With favorite bands ranging from My Chemical Romance, Evanessence, and Linkin Park, to a bizarre interest in pop punk through Simple Plan and Good Charlotte, her taste in goth music is a lot like her taste in klezmer; it doesn’t fucking exist. This is not the musical taste of a broody, dark goth, it’s the stock standard taste of a teenaged rock fan in 2006, which is exactly what it’s supposed to be. To believe this is all to be pure, gothic music is to be so disconnected from the entire concept of the goth subculture that Tara would have to have not even given it a cursory Googling to discover what sort of music goths listened to.
This 2006; 'emo’ was already a word so pervasive that it was insufferable, but had TaEbory identified as emo, she would have lost one vital piece of the puzzle. Merely being wrong or incredibly forward about one’s identity isn’t enough; she had to be both simultaneously. Her fervid defense of what it is to be a goth, paired with being so off the mark, turns her into a hypocrite and a fool, a strawman whose every word is only making worse her whole case. It makes her stand out as a special and egregious case, an author so wrong about everything and whose self-insert only looks worse off for it. And this is how My Immortal rose to the top of an ocean of mediocre, bad, and downright terrible fanfiction.
Dubious musical categorizations aside, another element of the gothicness that pervades the story is authenticity. Among the more snobbish and elitist of any subculture since the beginning of time, the desire to be seen as authentic and real is an incredibly pervasive element that My Immortal predictably lingers on quite heavily. “Poser” is a word loaded with as much venom as prep is, because in the false dichotomy Tara instills upon the world, to have airs of goffikness while not truly being a goff is just as evil as wearing pink is. Perhaps even more so, because these fakers are infiltrating her circles. When Tara and Raven cease being friends, Raven’s stand-in Willow is referred to as a poser. When Draco feels betrayed upon discovering that Voldemort has tasked Ebony with killing Vampire, he refers to her as a “poser muggle bitch”.
While we can’t hold My Immortal to a rigid understanding of proper Harry Potter canon, it does explain a lot about Tara’s worldview. Draco Malfoy has spent his whole life of privilege being taught about the importance of blood purity by his parents, who — we’re all adults here, right? We can accept this? — are fucking wizard nazis. A lot of his early character is specifically centered around his beliefs on blood purity and his use of slurs like 'mudblood’ toward Hermione and dismissals of families like the Weasleys as blood traitors. Such traits are so surface level and blatant that even someone like Tara could pick up on them, which makes the inclusion of 'poser’ in his insult, a triple threat along with fantastical racism and straight-up sexism, into something very telling about just how important it is in her version of the Harry Potter universe to be seen as genuine.
You can’t simply become a goth, you have to already be one. You have to shop at the 'real goth stores’, which are known only to goths. Any attempt to learn of them is met with derision, because goffikness is not something you can attain, except for all the characters who are noted in their new backstories to have become goffs in their transfers over to Slytherin.
Simmering underneath this obsession with being seen as authentic, with a narrative that constantly asserts with very insecure undertones just how much Tara wants to be seen as a real goth, is how shallow her interests really are. She prattles off lists of the clothing she and her friends wear like she’s Patrick Bateman, a laundry list whose obsessive detail forms the only proper description anything in the story receives. And much like in American Psycho, the narrator’s obsession with clothes comes off as remarkably phony, a desire to fit in with a group they desire to be a part of through a series of checklist points, although while Patrick Bateman is deranged within the narrative, you must go one level of abstraction away from the character’s portrayal in the universe, to look on a metafictional level into the delusions of Tara to see where she gets it all so wrong.
We’re told in the narrative that Ebony is depressed and suicidal time and again, but despite slitting her wrists in lieu of an afternoon snack, we never truly see actual depression. She uses 'depressed’ in ways that don’t really make sense, such as to describe the movie Corpse Bride, coloured contact lenses, and makeout sessions. Chapter three even contains the passage, “'Hi Draco!’ I said in a depressed voice.” Given how wonderfully the entire world caters to Ebony and the fact Tara seems to not really understand what it means, it comes off not like Ebony is a character that actually has depression, but instead that since depression is gothic, she must therefore possess it. She isn’t somebody who wears black on the outside because black is how she feels on the inside, she just says she’s depressed because it’s all a part of the goth package.
As is Satanism, which Ebony is apparently an adherent of. Much like being depressed, a vampire, listening to Simple Plan, and being a Slytherin, it is vital to the gothic identity that you are a Satanist, even if you don’t know what Satanism is. That you sometimes refuse to acknowledge the words 'cross’ and 'god’. It’s so casually mentioned and without even the slightest bit of conviction that it feels thrown in by someone who doesn’t really care, but, once again, wants to fit in.
The end result is an all-encompassing, story ruining obsession with ensuring the reader know and believe that Ebony–and by extension the author she is an avatar of–is the most true and devout goth in the world. Setting herself up to be so very, very wrong on this account is an easy way to discredit Tara and add another layer of pure mockability to the story. She is truly the greatest poser of all, and her entire worldview comes crumbling down around her under the slightest scrutiny, all by design.
Part 3: Just a Miserable Lie – The Impossible Mistakes
This news may shock and surprise you, so make sure you are very securely strapped your seat.
My Immortal is not entirely consistent.
Certain little things creep out of the woodwork in both the narrative and off to the side, hidden amid all of the craziness around them, that I believe are little winks at the camera on the part of the author. Hints meant to clue you in as to the fact that this whole thing is, in fact, one big joke. A lot of them have gone rather unnoticed, it seems, but let’s start with the most noticeable of all.
In chapter 31, we meet Tom Bombadil. I’m not fucking with you, here, it really does happen.
Suddenly I was in fornt of teh School. In front of me wuz one of da sexiest goth guyz I had ever seen. He was wering long blak hair, kinda like Mikey Way only black. He had gren eyes like Billie Joe Amstrung and pale whit skin. He wuz wearing a blak ripped up suit wif Vans. It was…………………….Tom Bombodil!1
Now, some of you may be asking who the balls Tom Bombadil is, and that is my point entirely. Deep in the first half of Fellowship of the Ring is god of the forest and walking filler arc Tom Bombadil, whose three-chapter appearance leaves most readers wishing for a violent end to existence for how long it all drags. For the express reason that his appearance is so incredibly pointless, he appears in no major adaptations of the series, which means for Tara to know about him, she’d have to read Fellowship of the Ring, a book that is done no favours by Tolkein’s incredibly dry and long writing style, not to mention an entire chapter chronicling the genealogy of Hobbiton.
To be a teenager at a reading level high enough to tackle Tolkein precludes you from being capable of doing something like My Immortal genuinely. Tara would know how words are spelled and that, hey, stories are considerably better when you give a quarter of a crap about typing them properly. The levels of literacy involved in Tom Bombadil and writing My Immortal are so far removed that these two traits are mutually exclusive, impossible for Tara to possess if she’s genuine. After all,
I dntn red all da boox! dis is frum da movie ok so itz nut my folt if dumbeldor swers!
But wait.
Among the many baffling changes Tara makes to the canon, one of the weirdest and most damning to me is Professor Sinister/Trevolry/Sinatra/Siniater/Relory. This bizarre composite of professors Sinistra and Trelawny is a half-vampire, half-Japanese goff, and the only teacher in the school Ebony likes, because she dresses like her and assigns the preps extra homework, complete with a pun about doing an 'exorcise’ in the book. Her presence is bizarre, for being the only positive authority figure in the story, and for the utter perplexity involved in picking the two professors as a composite goth character at the expense of more conventional fanfic fodder like Snape and Lupin, who are both obviously villainous preps in this story.
Professor Trelawny is a strange choice whose incongruity I feel is another one of those expectation-defying twists meant to seem strange as an indicator to the audience where a more mainstream and believable choice would have been to romanticize Snape as so much of the fandom has, but the real headscratcher is Professor Sinistra. Her presence in the canon is entirely off-screen, mentioned by Hermione as a teacher for a course that Ron and Harry don’t take; she has no lines or purpose anywhere, and even in the movies is only a background character identified by virtue of there being an actress credited as her. Her absolute lack of lines makes her presence here troubling, because if Ebony’s reference base for this is the movies, where this dialogueless character coming from?
Of course, there’s also the aspect of how fluidly she switches between names bastardized off of the two professors which, unlike the matter of Hagrid being Cedric but not really, is so consistent and ever-present that it again seems like a level of sloppiness entirely beyond human capability. Two completely disparate names that are way too far removed to be keyboard fuckery, with bastardizations of both used in each scene she appears as though there is a quota on how many of each get used in a chapter for full effect. Because there absolutely is; here’s the introduction of the professor in chapter 24:
Well we had Deviation next so I got to ask Proffessor Trevolry about the visions.
“Konnichiwa everybody come in.” said Proffesor Sinister in Japanese. She smelled at me with her gothic black lipstick. She’s da coolest fucking teacher ever. She had long dead black hair with blood red tips and red eyes. (hr mom woz a vampire. She’s also haf Japanese so she speaks it and everyfing. she n b’loody mry get along grate) She’s really young for a teacher. 2day she was wearing a black leather top with red lace and a long goffik black ripped dress. We went inside the black classroom with pastors of Emily the Strong. I raced my hand. I was wearing some black naie Polish with red pentagrams on it.
In the tweet-sized morcel from “well” to “Japanese”, Tara has already methodically sank this character’s introduction, making someone paying even the slightest attention to what’s in front of them look back up to that previous line to see if they lost something somewhere. Trevolry is used to refer to her next, and then Sinister again, which are the only four mentions of this character in the chapter. Tara’s handle on the chaos of her own story is perfect, and the entire existence of the professor in this chapter serves as a massive wink to the camera.
Also a strange decision is to note that Professor Sinister and B'loody Mary “get along grate”. They don’t interact, as is expected from a narrative that marginalizes everybody except for Ebony and her love interests, relegating all of the friends to satellite roles where they interact only with her, but it’s perplexing for the way it’s made note of out of nowhere. I feel it goes beyond a strange decision to include more female friendships in the background of her story, and serves as a one-two punch of running afoul of “show, don’t tell” and of the canon itself, as in the original series the teacher that Hermione clashes with the most, to the point of dropping the class altogether, is Professor Trelawny. And yet here they are, besties in gothhood. Another subtle note that indicates how carefully woven this entire mess is.
For someone with the reading comprehension of a microwave-made baked potato though, she has an oddly prescient view on the series endgame in chapter 42’s author’s note.
AN: omg da new book iz kumming out rlly soon I kant wait!!!1111. I fink dat snap will be really the same person as Volximort koz dey are both haff-blood so dat will explain y he kild dumblydore and he hated hairy!!!!!1111 nd den hairy wil have 2 kommit suicide so voldimort will die koz he will rilly be a horcrox!!!!!111
On one hand, the idea that Snap and Volximort are the same person is so unfounded and bizarre that you kind of dismiss what comes next, but despite retaining nothing beyond the most surface-level details about the canon, she somehow managed to make the connection of Harry’s abilities and scar as evidence of him being a horcrux. It’s not a massive leap, and many in the fandom saw it coming, but for someone whose grasp on the canon simply doesn’t exist, it’s suspect.
I’ve unfortunately already blown the “big deal of a revelation that is fairly obvious” joke, so I won’t bother setting it up again, but this revelation is genuinely a noteworthy one. Contained within My Immortal is one reference that is unambiguously and inarguably gothic. Not one of the borderline cases like Marilyn Manson where it depends on who you ask, but a genuine reference to a piece of gothic music. From chapter 28,
We went in2 a blak room. The wallz were blak with portraits of gothic bands lik MCR, GC and Marlin Mason all over them. A big black coffin was in the middle. Red vevlet lined da blak box. There were three chairs made of bones with real skullz in dem. I wuz wearing a blak corset bar wif purple stuff on it, fishnet suckings and a blak leather thong underneath.
It’s so subtle and unexpected a reference that even if you know what it’s from, you may not pick it up. “Red velvet lines the black box” is a lyric from Bauhau’s 1979 song Bela Lugosi’s Dead, which is generally considered to be the very first gothic rock song ever written, thus making it the only genuinely gothic sentence in this entire tale. However, devoid of teenage angst or guyliner, it makes no sense that such a reference would be in the repertoire of somebody who believes that Marilyn Manson was a band from the '80s. In fact, it is impossible to believe that a Tara taken at face value would have ever so much as encountered the song, because the collision of matter and anti-matter annihilates both. However, it would be the fodder of somebody who, baffled at how easily people have accepted their work as a genuine offering, got bored and decided to throw a wink to the camera that couldn’t have possibly slipped under the radar.
Littered among the litany of showy, “look at how goffik” I am references to things, as though My Immortal were a PSA about the goth cred of Tara Gilesbie, are a few rather suspect notes. Tara is somebody who can’t mention certain names without indicating her undying hatred toward them, and yet,
“I love you!” I said and then we started to kiss just like Hilary Duff (i fukin h8 dat bitch) and CMM in a Cinderella Story.
We are apparently to believe that Tara, somebody who is so slavishly devoted to her identity and to a dichotomy that has coloured the entirety of a fictional universe, not only watched A Cinderella Story in spite of her hatred of Hilary Duff, but then drew a comparison to it in how she and Draco kissed? Drawing comparisons to things the author is interested in is a rather frequent amateur move for young fanfic writers who merely draw the blunt comparison to something rather than learning to describe the individual features themselves. Tara is not a good enough writer to describe the facial features of her favorite band leads, so she just mentions that people look like Gerard to indicate that the absolute pinnacle of human attractiveness is this.
The only comparisons she ever draws are to her favorite things, because it’s a way to prove that her life is so goffik that everything around her draws its existence from her interests. And yet she cites a Hilary Duff movie that she quite frankly should not have even seen, if she is so diametrically opposed to being perceived as a prep, which veering so far off of the beaten goff path and into would most certainly indicate. Something doesn’t add up about this.
On what I believe to be the intentional cliffhanger that chapter 42 ends on, we hear another mention of goffik cinema right before the very end of the story.
“Save us Ebony!” Dumbledark cried.
I cried sexily I just wanted 2 go 2 the commen room and slit my wrists with mi friends while we watched Shark Attak 3 and Saw 2 and do it with Draco but I knew I had 2 do somefing more impotent.
“ABRA KEDABRA!!!!!!!!!!!11111” I shooted.
For those not in the know, Shark Attack 3: Megalodon is a phenomenally bad direct-to-video monster movie whose sole claim to fame is in being so laughably bad that it’s found an audience in bad movie circles. And while one could make the fairly weak argument that on the basis of some super edgy “I love watching people dying” attitude, a movie like Shark Attack might appeal to Tara the same way slashers and gorn like Saw and “Hoes of Wax” appeal to her, it’s so bizarre in its sudden presence at the very end that I believe it yet another wink, but this time a more final one. The second-to-last sentence in the story makes mention to a notorious bad movie to draw the connection to the story, a final and overt declaration of a joke that you’re supposed to be in on. The last punchline before the music hits and Porky Pig bursts from out of the big drum to say, “That’s all folks.”
Part 4. What Difference Does it Make? - The Desecration of Canon
Calling out My Immortal for distorting and twisting the Harry Potter universe into something unrecognizable and monstrous is like calling out a bear for shitting in the woods, but it’s impossible to explain how carefully crafted a piece of perfect trollfic it is without examining just how many 'liberties’ Tara took with the canon.
All of the characters that Tara seeks to lionize convert to Slytherin, because apparently people can just do that if they decide they really like black lipstick. But that’s not enough to make them more 'like her’. Backstories are revised to include a quite frankly startling volume of sexual abuse backstories and characters secretly adopted by abusive parents. Vampirism is not a trait anybody received through the narrative, but instead a species inherited by birth that somehow, people don’t know they have, showing no signs or hunger, until they learn about their parentage. Characters all receive new, gothic nicknames like B'loody Mary, Vampire, and Diabolo.
What Tara has done is remove everything about the characters one may think noticeable about them in the slightest. Everyone now resembles Tara’s favorite artists. Harry’s iconic lightning bolt scar, a symbol of the series, has been changed by makeup and magic to instead be a pentagram, because that is a design change of her choice, visually reclaiming the character from Rowling. The only character whose visual traits at all line up with the canon is Voldemort.
Then all of a suddenly, an horrible man with red eyes and no nose and everything started flying towards me on a broomstick! He didn’t have a nose (basically like Voldemort in the movie) and he was wearing all black but it was obvious he wasn’t gothic.
But then it gets stranger. Hagrid becomes a member of Ebony’s band Bloody Gothic Rose 666 and a “little Hogwarts student” (chapter 11). Although she appears to retcon that in chapter 12 with,
AN: stop f,aing ok hargrid is a pedo 2 a lot of ppl in amerikan skoolz r lik dat I wunted 2 adres da ishu! how du u no snap iant kristian plus hargrid isn’t really in luv wif ebony dat was sedric ok!
Although she seems to take a strange “whatever I want” approach to her own retcons like the most hackish of comic book writers, since we get in that very chapter,
Anyway I was in the school nurse’s office now recovering from my slit wrists. Snap and Loopin and HAHRID were there too. They were going to St. Mango’s after they recovered cause they were pedofiles and you can’t have those fucking pervs teaching in a school with lots of hot gurlz. Dumbledore had constipated the cideo camera they took of me naked. I put up my middle finger at them.
Anyway Hargrid came into my hospital bed holding a bouquet of pink roses.
“Enoby I need to tell u somethnig.” he said in a v. serious voice, giving me the roses.
“Fuck off.” I told him. “You know I fucking hate the color pink anyway, and I don’t like fucked up preps like you.” I snapped. Hargrid had been mean to me before for being gottik.
Hagrid is in this canon simultaneously a pedophile and presumably grown-ass adult, but also a Hogwarts student who may or may not be Cedric Diggory, who not only survived the events of Goblet of Fire, but also managed to fail two years at Hogwarts to join Harry as a seventh-year. He is also a poser who is mean to Ebony for being 'gottik’, but is also in her gothic rock band which sounds like “a cross between GC, Slipknot and MCR”, which as we all know would make it the most authentic gothic rock band since Mungo Jerry.
Except in chapter 14 a Death Eater is referred to as “the fat guy who killed Cedric” so maybe HAHrid really is Hagrid after all?
Then there is the odd decision to align Lupin and Snape as pedophilic voyeurs in the service of Voldemort while bizarrely championing Professor Trelawny, in stark contrast to a fandom that especially in the golden days of Harry Potter fandom, where people would dick ride Severus Snape all the way to the moon on the weight of how 'misunderstood’ he was. A pale man who seems conventionally 'dark’ in his interests and mannerisms is the perfect place to begin projecting on when you’re telling a story about how you’re the exact same things, but it seems almost too obvious a decision. Like the rest of Professor Siniater’s composite existence, she’s so odd a choice that it startles you, and I believe within that shock value is the decision to buck expectations.
A trip to the past begins to paint an even more bizarre picture, as apparently the parents of our heroes all went to school in the 1980s, alongside Voldemort and Hedwig. They were also all Slytherin goffs who at some point seem to have just turned into poser preps whose children had to re-convert out of Gryffindor and into gothhood. This timeline yet again causes a great many headscratching tears in the fabric of space and time, but the most vital and important of all is Hedwig.
In the canon, Hedwig is Harry’s owl, female and not much of a doer, speaker, or goth. But in the horrible alternate universe that My Immortal takes place in, Hedwig is a bisexual human male who is very much a goth, the ex-boyfriend of Tom Riddle, whose dumping of the boy starts his descent into becoming Volxemort. It is a change that is so wrong, so removed from not only the canon but from the possibility of anything ever being accurate to the canon, that it can’t be accidental. One cannot fuck up that badly by accident.
Voldemort himself is a great many things. In the past, he is Tom Riddle, gothic musician at Hogwarts and love interest to Ebony, but also Tom Bombadil, the master of wood, water, and hill. But in the present time, he is both the Bark Lord, as one may expect, but also potentially a young, thoroughly goffik employee at a “punkgoff” store in Hogsmeade, Tom Rid. Tom Rid is described as “OMG HOTTER THAN GERARD EXCEPT NOT CAUSE THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE“ and, like every other guy in the story, is “bisezual”. Tom Rid is never the setup for Voldemort’s secret infiltration of the goth subculture, but nonetheless seems to be a template earlier in the story for the later time travel storyline and Tom Riddle as a love interest. It’s another nonsensical “mistake” thatjust doesn’t mesh with any fathomable stupidity. It would be like introducing a character called Harry Pot and having him be completely disconnected from Harry Potter in any way.
Littered with iPods and anachronistic pop culture that manages to miss its mark in two different time periods, the only reason we know that this is the same world and not just one with suspiciously similar names is the fact that it’s fanfiction. Not a deep AU that interestingly adapts elements into a different world to see how they work out, or which shows characters and how they might develop under different circumstances. This is a mangled mess where muggle bands play concerts in Hogsmeade, seemingly well aware of wizards’ existence. There must be panic on the streets of London.
The big question is “why”. Why would somebody do this bad a number of canon, accidental or not? And the reason is simple.
Part 5. Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want – Wish Fulfillment
By changing the context of everything except for the most basic connections of who the characters are 'supposed’ to be, they cease to be J.K. Rowling’s. They instead become Tara’s playthings. The canon is so distorted that it may as well not be fanfiction for how few things that remain intact, and yet it is vital that the world be the world of Harry Potter, at least nominally. Tara needs to turn a world that she loves, as off the mark as she may be, into a wonderland in which to self-insert, to mold into a countercultural paradise that centers completely around her.
We can’t speculate on the life of Tara – who this entire paper of course serves as a document meant to disprove the very existence of – but we can very clearly see the desires of this alleged person. Ebony is the single most important person in My Immortal, supplanting Harry as the only one who can kill Voldemort, whom every attractive character and even many unattractive ones profess their love to and fight for without provocation. Her interests are catered to on an unrealistic level and divine karmic justice makes those who sit culturally opposed to her suffer undeserved retribution solely for existing.
Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way is, even by those who see her as an entirely genuine creation, often held up as the ultimate self-insert. On top of very clearly existing as an author avatar who holds the exact same interests as her creator, her very presence distorts and twists the canon around her like an eldritch abomination tearing the very fabric of the reality she occupies. One of the more criticized elements of self-inserts in fanfiction is of course the ease with which a narrative becomes wish fulfillment for the author, and My Immortal has this in droves. Ebony is the most important character in the world not because she’s the protagonist or the narrator, but because she has supplanted Harry as the only person who can stop Voldemort, and whom everybody’s 'motivations’ center around.
Ebony is loud, angry, and has access to a time machine. When Ebony isn’t on-screen, all of the other characters ask, “Where’s Ebony?”
The love triangle between Ebony, Draco, and Vampire begins with Vampire solely wanting to reconnect with his ex-boyfriend Draco, but as the story goes on that element is lost and replaced with him instead lusting after Ebony, as evidenced by the time they had sex right in the middle of Hair of Magical Creatures. One of the only connections that two different characters had with each other is slowly replaced with an attraction to Ebony that they fight over, because everyone in My Immortal is defined by how Ebony perceives them. Their own attractions to one another take a backseat to their lust for Ebony, save for occasions where she permits them to have sex for her enjoyment, at which point it is presented as titillation for her.
Also among the characters with stated romantic interest in Ebony are Tom Rid, Hairgird, Snope, Lumpin, Tom Riddle, and Snaketail.
Everybody who has things in common with Ebony is Ebony, essentially. Every character is so interchangeable due to the pre-packaged identity she assumes is the only authentic way to be gothic that nobody feels like an actual character. Willow and B'loody Mary both occupy the role of female best friend for Ebony, save for a brief period where Willow is killed and Lupin has sex with her corpse before her resurrection one chapter later. In fact, the only time a character Ebony isn’t sexually attracted to is complimented is when she tries to lay on really thick her attempt to suck up to Raven in the hopes she’ll return to editing. The only difference between Vampire and Draco is how many times Ebony has sex with them, and that’s not getting into the masses of other goff guys who may as well be nameless, such as Diabolo (Ron), “Crab”, Goyle, and “Dracola” (Navel). In the past, Tom “Satan” Riddle proves to be just as generic a love interest as the other two, and then more faceless characters in Hades (“Serious Blak”), Lucian Malfoy, James “Samoro” Potter, and Hedwig.
Nobody has any character, save for Ebony, because they’re not meant to be characters, they’re meant to be imaginary friends for Ebony to play with, to fawn over her and have everything in common with her. If we buy into the belief that Tara is a rather lonely teenage girl who has apparently pushed away her only friend over a My Chemical Romance poster, then her decision to basically strip away everything that makes the Harry Potter world what it is so that she could rebuild it from the ground up into her gothic paradise makes a lot of sense.
Of course, she isn’t that at all, but first we need to look at all the other things that Tara is and isn’t.
Part 6. Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before – Raven
Fifteen-year-old Eternity Demen'tia Johnson warily took a seat on the Hogwarts Express. As she did so, she heard many giggles in the air. Ugh. Stupid preps. Eternity had hoped she wouldn’t see any when she came to Hogwarts. They had made her life in Los Angeles High School miserable. Now she was supposed to put up with them here? She sighed sadly, and stared out of the window. In her mistery, she took her iPod out of her Emily the Strange bag and blared on some My Chemical Romance (A/N: Don’t they rock?). Oh great. Now even more preps were giving her dirty looks. Eternity tried her best to ignore them. It wasn’t because Eternity was dirty or deformed or anything. Maybe it was something to do with her black leather corset, or her ripped black miniskirt or her black combat boots or the metal music she was listening to. Eternity hated how people judged her like that just because she was a goth.
The above is a snippet from I’m Not Okay, written by Tara’s friend Raven. And in it, you can see a lot of the same themes present in My Immortal. Anachronistic technology, a misunderstanding of what the goth subculture is, preps hating her on mere principle, authors notes spliced in mid-sentence to herald the glory of her taste, and more description offered up for her clothes than for anything else. Throughout I’m Not Okay, we see Draco Malfoy as the gothic love interest, comparisons of characters to members of bands the author likes, and canon Harry Potter characters becoming gothic and taking on nicknames like Dracula, Sea, and Darren.
Good sense and suburban decency run screaming at the sight of a dark name like “Darren”.
Rather than shit all over preps of her own design, Luna Lovegood and Hermione Granger, two characters so far removed from the stereotype of an American high school “popular kid” that it’s almost infuriating, are turned into the superpreps to be hated. Slytherin is still so gothic a house that their common room password is “bleeding kisses” and the portrait is a woman described as the “splitting image” of the lead singer of Sisters of Mercy, an actual goth band whose frontman Andrew Eldritch is most certainly not a woman and not even particularly androgynous.
The same out-of-place theme of sexually abusive adopted parents that plagues My Immortal’s side characters returns in Eternity’s backstory. She sticks her middle finger up at preps unprovoked and veers off course to call out the shittiness of preps. Really, Eternity is in every imaginable way just Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way with a marginally better writer, as is to be expected from the editor of Tara’s disasterpiece.
The authenticity of Raven’s works isn’t in doubt, in my mind. It predates the memetic nature of My Immortal by a great deal, they co-wrote a story entitled Ghost of You that, again, features the exact same terrible tropes and bad ideas, albeit this time with Hermione Granger as the parentally abused goth hated by preps and now in love with Draco Malfoy, And, the fifth and final chapter of I’m Not Okay has,
a/n: TARA IS DA BIGGEST FUCKING BITCH EVERY AND BY THE WAY I’M A BIGGER MCR FAN AND GERARD IS MINE 4EVA SO FUCK U
Eternity was so happy. She went to class with the other fifth-years, Sea, Draco, Shadow, Darren, and Satan. That fucking retard Elvira (whose real name was Lindsay like that fucking ho Lindsay Loan) had gone all the way back to first-year and they put her in Gryffindor where all the retarde4d preps were because she couldn’t even write properly and she had to get her friends 2 do it for her.
Hot damn. That’s a far more scorching burn than being the offscreen victim of Lumpkin the necphilak.
Raven’s stories being the template for My Immortal is no coincidence. Tara aped everything she saw with gusto, imitating her friend who, while not a very good writer, could write sentences properly and gave description to things. Hell, as far as fifteen-year-old fanfic writers go, Raven is actually pretty decent, just entrenched in some terrible themes–again, pretty typical for teenagers–and does things like describe Eternity 'sadly putting her hair up’. On some level, Tara is trying to be as good a writer as Raven is. She looks up to her and, immediately after in a fit of anger killing off the character meant to be Raven, brings her back and guiltily sucks up to her with as many compliments as she can give.
Whether she is the same person as 'Tara’ or a friend in on the joke, I believe that Raven exists as sort of a proto-Tara, a precursor to the real juicy fun. Her story isn’t very good and she writes the exact same things Tara does with marginally more writing ability. They’re identical in every possible way, with the same interests, attitudes, and bizarre writing sensibilities. Almost no differences in the presented persona emerge, but as much as their obsessions with clothing and iconography bordering on disingenuous poserliness would imply that the pre-packaged nature of their identities is to blame, I believe it was all meant to deepen the character, provide a more grounded contrast to her and help make her seem more real.
Rather than existing as a nebulous beta reader who also has no prior internet history, existing solely through the character of Willow and authors notes that let their ongoing drama spill through into the story for us to see in what I feel is a brilliant piece of meta performance art, she has her own stories that make her very much a real presence in the extended saga of My Immortal. I believe that in the long term, she was meant to continue onward as a developing foil for Tara, someone whose existence helped back up her own. But, as evidenced by the way I’m Not Okay stops at chapter 5, which on the timeline of My Immortal would place it somewhere around chapter 16, this didn’t go as planned.
If “Raven” were a co-conspirator to “Tara”, it’s possible they got bored, didn’t have the insane devotion to a multi-layered and quite frankly absurdly deep prank. If Raven and Tara are one and the same, then perhaps the pressure of developing two 'different’ personas proved too much work, and decided to focus on the big one. After all, Raven’s stories are only notable through her association to Tara, the Art Garfunkel to Tara’s Paul Simon. Mediocre but ultimately harmless stories that by and large flew under the radar and aren’t even well known by people who know My Immortal. I’m Not Okay was never going to draw the same level of interest or vitriol that My Immortal did, thus making it a joke with far less payoff, even if by virtue of not being as poorly written, it was likely easier to write. This is helped by the immense disparity in productivity between the two; whether the primary actor or personality, Tara is more prolific, something that ties directly into the return on investment when it comes to how people reacted to either story.
And as it turned out, she wasn’t needed. The My Immortal Extended Universe has long since been forgotten, and yet people fell for the joke without it. People bought very easily into My Immortal as a genuine piece of work, or at least were so willing to enjoy it as a mockable distraction that nobody ever really asked. Raven became a redundant cog in the machine, and removing her freed up the effort to focus full time on making My Immortal something even more incredible than it began as.
More evidence of this lies in the fact that even once Raven allegedly returns to her role as editor, the spelling only gets increasingly worse; she’s credited as helping in many chapters, but her former sensibilities are gone, and no edits are ever made, as illustrated in the snippets detailing the degeneration in part one. It’s possible that this was meant to convey that Raven wasn’t actually helping; that she quit writing fanfic due to her fallout with Tara, and Tara merely went on pretending she still had a friend in Raven as she sank deeper and deeper into her wish fulfillment paradise. Raven never managed to gain the established foothold that Tara did, so nobody ever questioned it, and everyone was too busy having a good time to wonder how the chapters ever qualified as being 'edited’.
Curious is the fact that even though they made up, Raven never came back. She didn’t continue writing her own stories, the drama between them never resurged, and aside from her supposed beta services to Tara, is absent from the bulk of the saga in its entirety. This is in spite of the fact that in all apparent ways, Raven is not only the more skilled writer, but the one with a clearer passion for it. Her prose may be nothing special, but the bar should not be set too high for what is allegedly a teenage girl writing Harry Potter fanfic. She falls into a lot of the common holes, but her style is that of someone who loves stories and wants to write their own, and for her to so quickly vanish and never return is, to me, evidence that she was always a character too, and that her place in the 'real life’ layer of My Immortal was simply deemed irrelevant.
Part 7. Girlfriend in a Coma – That Time Tara Got Hacked
In chapter 38, a time-displaced Tara opens for Marilyn Manson in Hogsment, which is what Hogsmeade was called before they changed it in 2000. In Hogsmint, a store called Hot Ishoo will change its name to Hot Topic in the year 1998. Tom Riddle possesses future knowledge of both of these events, as well as the certainty that because amnesia potions haven’t been invented yet, he will not be affected by the one being used on his cigar branded with a movie that hasn’t come out yet, which is a shame because he wanted to use the potion on Ebony so that the time-traveling girl he loves will forget about her old life and her romantic entanglements in her own timeline with the sons of two of his bandmates sothat only her love for him will remain. His prescient, almost accepting knowledge of seemingly everything about his future up until his fall is almost tragic; he must know that Ebony’s involvement in his life is going to ruin it
On top of being the Dark Lord and Tom Bombadil, Tom Riddle may also be Doctor Manhattan. But that’s not the point of this part.
After xBlakXTearX performs its first big gig, the band immediately falls apart as, due to Lucian Malfoy playing the wrong song by mistake, Samaro Potter decides to shoot his arm off with a knife. Those of you attempting to follow the bizarre, Ebony-centric take on the universe may be surprised to learn that she is not the Yoko Ono of the band in what may be the only important conflict in the story that isn’t about her. However, since everything has to be about our goffik darling, Ebony jumps in front of the bullet–that, again, has been shot from a knife, like this is the second-worst Final Fantasy game ever made–and enters a coma.
Bear in mind, she does this knowing that Lucian survives this attack, going on to find love, have Draco, and despite two stints as a wizard nazi manages to avoid jail time and lead a life of incredible luxury and comfort. This also requires her to ignore her very important mission to prevent Tom from ever becoming Voldemort and the insane repercussions of dying in a timeline that isn’t her own, leaving behind all of her possessions that are even more anachronistic in the 80s, including a time machine that anyone could suddenly begin misusing.
All in all, an incredibly stupid decision with no purpose other than to insert Ebony and her useless ass selfless heart into conflicts that she has nothing to do with, because she’s the 'hero’ of our story.
Before we could see the resolution of that nail-biting cliffhanger, Tara’s account was allegedly hacked by a 'guest writer’, who claimed to have been able to crack her password with incredible ease. While there, the password cracker gives her own take on My Immortal, involving the death of Ebony, which undoes all of Tara’s damage upon the universe and returns everybody to their proper states, while sentencing Ebony to a terrifying ironic hell where she is doomed to an eternity of wearing infinite layers of preppy clothing brands.
While there, the hacker also shares with us the real chapter 39 as an act of kindness to those of us who were clinging onto the saga for dear life and wanted to know how Ebony was going to survive jumping in front of the knife-propelled bullet. Allegedly, this chapter was already written and waiting to be posted in the document area. It ends up being such a bizarre element of time travel that even the Terminator franchise never went there.
“What the fuk happened?” I asked dem. “Oh my satan!11 Am I lik dead now?” I gosped.
“Enoby u were almost shot!11” said Serious. “But da ballet could not kill u since u were form anodder time.”
“But fangz anyway!1” said Lucian holding oot his arm. I gasped. He had two arms!
Which opens up a lot of questions, then shoves them aside so I could wonder for a second if Lucius Malfoy was missing an arm in the canon. He wasn’t, making this another perplexing note of Tara’s that rewards a familiarity with the source material by highlighting all the ways in which it’s wrong. But then, after being told that Snap was Death Dealer, despite being the classmate of a Tom Riddle who hadn’t yet gone dark, Ebony comes across Snape raping Draco, and is so distraught by her boyfriend’s betrayal in this act that she runs to her room, takes out a steak, and uses it to slit her wrists.
Neither steaks nor stakes work like that.
The next chapter begins with her “back in Tim” due to her suicide, but the endgame plot batshit of My Immortal isn’t something we can even tackle in full yet.
There is a lot about the hacker that’s peculiar, and that’s because I believe that the hacker is Tara herself. A lot of minor elements of the breach of her account actually betray this secret, and it’s one of the few things in My Immortal I’m unsure about in regards to its intent.
The way that fanfiction.net handles posting a story involves uploading the story file to a document area, and then from the story menu selecting the relevant document. I always found it kind of clumsy personally, but what stands out about it is the fact that the chapter was allegedly written and left online for an indeterminate amount of time. There aren’t many reasons to upload a completed chapter to the website and then not post it. For someone like Tara, who does no editing and is clearly no longer sending the story off to Raven to be edited, there seems to be absolutely no reason for the story to be sitting idly in the documents area. I imagine Tara finished each chapter and immediately shoved it online in a frantic hurry to get it out there, as opposed to leaving it online to age like a fine vintage of toilet moonshine.
The original posting of the chapter was actually from the original document being copy/pasted into the one that contained the fake chapter nine. However, chapter 40 is then posted some time later as, “Chapter 40. LOL! Someone has taken my account over” by what seems to be the hacker. Which is odd, since they already pasted it into chapter 39, and posting it again from the document area seems rather pointless. It even includes an addition of, “THE IDIOT’S NOTE: Well… this was in the doc area… might as well let the whole world see what the real Tara wanted to show us… Have a nice day!” that the chapter 39 version lacks, meaning this hacker allegedly went into the doc, copy/pasted it into a new file with her chapter and Tara’s, but then edited the original document and posted it too. It’s an odd thing to do, like someone went in with very little idea of what the plan actually was and stumbled redundantly over ideas as they went.
But particularly odd about this whole thing is that Tara does nothing about it. She doesn’t delete the insulting notes or remove the fake chapter, she leaves them both there even though the author’s note of chapter 41 makes it clear that she’s very aware of her account being compromised, not only letting the mockery of herself remain, but even letting it effect the numbering of subsequent chapters. Which may seem like just Tara not caring enough and going with the chapter numbers listed by fanfiction.net, until you look back at chapter 10.
Chapter 10 was posted twice, and Tara never removed the second, identical version of it. It remained on the site up until the day the story was purged by site moderators. And yet, Tara always remained consistent in her renumbering of the chapters, always subtracting one from the chapter count when she posted it; what the site claimed was chapter 12 was really chapter 11. For a story with only the barest minimum of shits given, to properly compensate for this numbering accident for almost thirty chapters is a surprising amount of misplaced effort, but it establishes that she does care about the chapter numbers, and makes the sudden slip a lot more suspect. Why only go halfway in on her effort by continuing to count her double-posted chapter, but not this fake one that she’s allowed to remain as a part of the saga?
Part 8. That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore – Bringing it all together
I’ve prattled on for well over ten thousand words now about a myriad of My Immortal’s issues, but you could look at each individual flaw of the story and say that on their own, they hardly form evidence of trollery afoot, even if some of the more glaring issues are harder to explain away. But surely I’m going to show how they connected to form the cohesive peak of my argument, right? “How soon are you going to get to that?” you shout into your screen, not knowing how computers work.
Well how soon is now?
Tara Gilesbie wrote a story that set her up as the ultimate caricature of a teenaged fanfic writer who is just the worst in all of the best ways. All of the elements of bad writing on every level came into a perfect storm that only grew more powerful over time as it sank further and further into its own madness until it didn’t even resemble what it had started out as. From the self-inserted wish fulfillment to a startlingly creative use of the English language, it hits every hallmark of a bad fanfic one would think to roll up into one neat and tidy little ball, save for perhaps a massive panfandom crossover of everything the author has ever liked.
There is a clear story arc in My Immortal, but it isn’t Ebony’s tale of romance and destiny, it’s Tara’s slow descent into gibbering madness, like the story she had created was an eldritch being that she was unable to comprehend the sight of. As I went over in part one, the writing style breaks down steadily over time, becoming more typo-ridden, filled with more and more casual abbreviations and chatspeak until it’s become apparent that she simply doesn’t care, and while the decline in writing 'quality’ certainly begins with Raven’s absence, it is a steady drop for many chapters afterward. Tara’s character is not one that seems like she has a grasp on subtlety or moving slowly, but that’s the pace with which the boundaries are pushed.
Let’s look at the plot in a rather brief rundown. The story starts out fairly simply, with Ebony and Draco falling in love and having poorly written sex in the forest. Vampire comes in to complicate things in a love triangle that is surprising for leading to attraction angst in all possible directions. Voldemort’s introduction adds to the melodrama of the story, and it weaves in and out of slice of life romance angst and the Voldemort subplot rather strangely. Then, in chapter 17, my favorite part of the story occurs, and it signifies the moment where My Immortal jumps the shark in a way nobody would have ever dreamt of.
Gerard was da sexiest guy eva! He locked even sexier den he did in pix. He had long raven blak hair n piercing blue eyes. He wuz really skinny and he had n amazing ethnic voice. We moshed 2 Helena and sum odder songz. Sudenly Gerard polled of his mask. So did the other membez. I gasped. It wasn’t Gerard at all! It was an ugly preppy man wif no nose and red eyes… Every1 ran away but me and Draco. Draco and I came. It was…….Vlodemort and da Death Deelers!
“U moronic idiots!” he shooted angstily. “Enoby, I told u to kill Vampire. Thou have failed. And now……….I shall kill thou and Draco!”
“No no please!” We begged sadly but he took out his knife.
Sudenly a gothic old man flu in on his broomstick. He had lung black hair and a looong black bread. He wus werring a blak robe dat sed ‘avril lavigne’ on da back. He shotted a spel and Vlodemort ran away. It was…………………………………DUMBLYDORE
It’s important here to note that this is very soon after Raven left the story. and remember that this is around when the story began to stop caring about spelling and typing. After this point, everything in the plot goes off the rails. The melodrama ramps up, Ebony is revealed as the only one who can stop Voldemort, time travel is introduced, despite supplanting Harry as the chosen one who can defeat the Dark Lord she instead tries to seduce a teenaged Tom Riddle… Everything goes completely off the rails.
And that’s the plan all along. The angle of Raven and Tara’s feud never went anywhere, probably because nobody really cared much about two teenagers yelling at each other on the internet. At least, not until 2015 when some asshole would examine the shit out of it for very little discernable reason or gain. I believe that when it was scrapped, the brain trust behind My Immortal decided to go in a different direction. Readers may not have took the bait of their public dispute, but they were buying the troll hook, line, and sinker. People genuinely believe, or at least want to believe, that the story was written in earnest. Even a lot of the people who have doubts about it have them on the grounds that they don’t want to accept that someone could write a story so terrible. The unexpected appeal of the trainwreck that was My Immortal itself, rather than the meta saga of Tara Gilesbie, terrible writer and object of mockery, drove the project into a different direction.
The story and spelling both degrade at the same time, steadily creeping further and further into the most ludicrous things the author thinks they can get away with. As the readers continue to accept what they see as genuine, the author pushes further, which is why we see new elements constantly introduced into the story where they make no sense. It’s not Tara throwing the kitchen sink into her story in a misguided belief that a lot of everything will make her story good, it’s Tara setting the narrative on a trajectory of the most ludicrous thing she can think of, and watching as people believe it. Because they do, completely.
Sex is introduced into the story, because of course it is, through the most unappealing of ways possible. Genitalia are referred to by 'thingy’ as though using the word penis is too embarrassing for her to handle, even though later she refers to Snap’s 'clook’ without issue. To further the wish fulfillment, she must be having sex with her love interests, and it must be terrible.
We went on the bed and started making out naked and then he put his boy’s thingy in mine and we HAD SEX. (c is dat stupid?)
I believe they call that docking.
I’ve already explained how I believe Tara Gilesbie to be just as much a fictional character as Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, and what I feel that character is meant to be is the most mockable and stereotypical fanfic writer one could ever dream of. A teenage emo girl delusionally believing she’s a goth, who’s into boys kissing but has no problem throwing homophobic slurs around, who violates the Harry Potter canon in every way possible for the sake of creating her world of wish fulfillment where everything centers around her. Every bad writing trope wrapped up into sensibilities that set themselves up for mockery. Throw on a tragic lack of self-awareness that opens her up to be laughed at as she smugly highlights her mistakes, and all the pieces fall into place.
Tara Gislebie is a parody of fanfic writers.
Before My Immortal hit the scene, bad fanfiction was not as popular a fandom passtime as it is now, owing largely to new forms of media allowing us to better share the stories and our mockery of them than we had access to in mid-2006, but also because it was always rather contained within fandoms or specific LJ groups meant to deride them. But My Immortal crossed boundaries and spread far outside the reaches of the Harry Potter fandom, to become more than just a story. It was a sensation, a fic so notorious that even people who weren’t around back then have still at least heard of it, even if they haven’t gone out looking for it. While bad writers are nothing new to fandom, My Immortal set off a slew of imitators and tributes, fake sequels, adaptations using its basic setups in different fandoms to produce interesting results, and with more attention suddenly on badfic with the intent to mock it, troll writers came out in droves to try and reproduce the magic.
Some succeeded. Many failed, and I believe one of the main reasons is that people continue to take My Immortal at its word. They just whip some typo-heavy dreck up in their word processor, and ignore all of the subtler elements of My Immortal. It gets so much wrong from the very beginning, but it had to slowly stew in its own crazy long enough to become the poorly written train wreck we’ve come to love. For a story so over the top, that combines all of the elements of a bad story into one perfect package, it does it cleverly enough that it continues to fool people almost ten years later.
You may believe that this is all way too much work for anyone to put into a stupid fanfic. That if it’s meant to be a joke, that it’s a long way to go. Developping characters, faked account compromises, and an active effort put into writing as terribly as possible. And it is a lot of effort, which is meant to throw you off, because it’s the greatest trick the devil ever pulled.
Haha. Wondering why this post isn’t where it’s normally found?
Well, my friends, ask no more!
On a dark lonely evening, sweat drips through your hair
Warm smell of your butthurt, rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance, see the laptop’s blue light
Your head grows heavy and your sight grows dim
Gotta stop for the night
There my posts on the display
Rang the warning bell
And you were thinking to your self
Give it a week and I’d surely quell
Then I flamed all the posters and I showed you her name
There were voices ringing in your head
Swear you’d heard them say
Welcome to the Hotel Tarafornia
Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place)
Such a normal place
Plenty of room at the Hotel Tarafornia
Any time of year (Any of time of year)
I can smell your fear
Her mind is Tumblr-addicted
She got them means behind ends
She got a lotta commie, commie kids
That she calls friends
How they dance in the Discord
Sweet doxxing rush
Some post to remember
Some troll to forget
So I called up the admin
“Please bring my ban”
And he said
We haven’t had that spirit here since GC toured Japan
And still those voices are ringing from far away
But still those posts are comin’ from far away
Wake you up in the middle of the night
Just to hear me say
Welcome to the Hotel Tarafornia
Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place)
Such a horrid face
Living it up in the Hotel Tarafornia
What an awful lie (What an awful lie)
What an alibi
Mirrors behind mirrors
Men behind the man
And she said: “We are all just copycats here
Of a copy of a fake
Among the moderators
They gathered for a feast
They stab it with their steely knives
But they just can’t kill the beast
Last thing you remember, you were
Grasping for your mouse
You had to find the permaban
To restore what was before
“Relax”, said your bete-noire
“I am
Programmed to deceive
You can ban me any time you like,
But I will never leave!”
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do that character thing for luna and nyx respectively because REASONS.
aye aye
NYX
favorite thing about them: boy’s ready to sacrifice himself at every fucking turnleast favorite thing about them: boy’s ready to sacrifice himself at every fucking turnfavorite line: “Where do I sign?” UGHbrOTP: nyx & crowe; nyx & libertusOTP: l u n y x; nyx/being alivenOTP: nyx/n0ctrandom headcanon: the glaive don’t get paid much but nyx scrapes by on next to nothing because he sends most of his wages home to his (blind) motherunpopular opinion: I know canonically he was noct’s driver that one time but I really don’t think he knew or kept up with the chocobros beyond the vague sense that one day (if he survived) he’d be a member of noct’s kingsglaive instead of regis’song i associate with them: uhhhhhhhfavorite picture of them: don’t want to repost art but anything drawn by @annaoi
LUNA
favorite thing about them: woman burdened with glorious purpose shouldering the weight of her own destiny with a steady willingness to see it throughleast favorite thing about them: SHE! DESERVED!! BETTER!!!!!favorite line: "my duty is my destiny”brOTP: luna & noctisOTP: lunyx ¯\_(ツ)_/¯nOTP: can’t think of anything atmrandom headcanon: she planted sylleblossoms in her room as a girl, and the nifs let her because what was a child going to do with a bed of flowers? but they have always been her first, smallest, most constant act of defianceunpopular opinion: I don’t think it’s unpopular but kingsglaive!luna had so much more spine and character and I wish we’d gotten that in ffxvsong i associate with them: I got nothin’favorite picture of them: it’s not a picture but whatever she looks so good and sassy
[gif by kibasdaydreams]
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You know something, I don't think I'll ever understand those posts about rebloging. I'm an artist/Animator so I get paid to do art and I do post thing on sites like this but I just don't get the rebloging art thing. Like from my understanding when you reblog on tumblr any comments and likes go back to artist - they're basically spreading the artist name around. I was encouraged to do this in art school. 1/2
I remember one student asked our teacher (an old Disney animator) about asking for permission to reblog or spread around art and he said it was ridiculous. He told us that if people don’t take notice and share it then you (the artist) won’t get noticed at all! Maybe it’s because of my age (I’m assuming I’m much older then most of you) and I’ve been in this business for a long time but this sounds pretty petty and pathetic…2/2
Hello, anon! I assume you read the post I just reblogged and wanted to talk about that. If so, I have to say I just skimmed it, but it seemed to have the same message as every other post about this issue. I can’t remember if the reblog vs repost words got messed up, but I assume the poster meant this: there is a difference between reblogging art and reposting. Reblogging, is hitting the “reblog” button and thus spreading the original post - while reposting, is saving the art file, hitting the “make new post” button, and re-uploading the picture, making your post a new original source. This way, you can appear as the artist of the piece - especially if, as a considerable amount of people are prone to do, you remove captions added to the original post, or erase watermarks etc. This is in essence theft of credit, something which can be detrimental to aspiring artists, as creative development hinges for many on positive feedback and a feeling of validation in what they do. If people repost instead of reblog, the notes and likes do not get back to the artist (unless they are made aware of the re-upload and see the likes that it garnered in addition to the original posts’ number).
And it’s not necessarily that artists don’t want help to spread their art to get a name, but if their art is being taken and dropped off elsewhere (reposting instead og reblogging), they want to be asked if it’s ok first. Because art is personal to them, and they want to have some overview over how and where - context - of this new spread.
I am of the unpopular mindset that I actually feel flattered if I find out my art has been reposted, because I don’t see my art as good enough for anyone to find it worth the time to save and re-upload. Thus, when I find out someone on instagram has “stolen” my art, I feel flattered, and find a sense of encouragement in that. However, because this is not very respectful practice (and can hurt other artists who do not share my way of viewing it) I do not encourage it, and ask that I am being asked for permission before anyone essentially takes my art and does what they want with it. It was my understanding that the author of the post I reblogged, also wanted to be asked permission before people use their art without their knowledge - whether it be re-uploading or using it as an icon for their blog. I have to agree that it would feel a bit strange to me if I suddenly see my art, something that is still quite personal to me, suddenly associated with a blog/person I did not even know existed. Had they merely asked beforehand, not only would that establish between the two that art is fine to share with respect, but also make the artist feel like they had a connection to the blog that was going to bear their art. I do not feel that this is petty to wish for - especially not if the artist is young, due to emotional maturity and how tightly woven art and emotion is (since we’re using age as arguments here).
If the author of that post, on the other hand, meant that they did not want people to reblog their original art post, then that’s a particular mindset that I don’t think most artists share, and if so, I misread and do not agree either; if you want to post art but do not want to get notifications/validation via reblogs, that’s something you should clarify on your blog so people don’t accidentally disrespect you when they were merely trying to show enthusiasm and respect for the artwork. Although, I do not think this was the message of the author since they seemed to feel like they could speak for an entire fandom/art community’s code of honor.
I hope I was able to clarify/give input, anon.
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Problematic and Proud: Instagram Artist Beebosloth
Alright, I tried posting this to Reddit but that whole website is fucked so. Tumblr is crazy toxic and I want absolutely nothing to do with this website lmao, I just know if it’s posted here, it will show up in google search results.
Alright, so there's this artist on Instagram. Nothing new and unique there. In fact, there isn't really anything special about this particular prick at all. Rather, he more-so represents a larger cancerous growth within Instagram; entitlement, and toxicity.
I know, I know, "Hey dumbass, that's the entirety of the internet." Yeah, you're damn right it is. Does that make it any less gross? Any less pathetic? These humans are still humans, they know what they're doing.
So what exactly is Beebosloth? Unless you've come here from googling the name followed by some key-word synonyms of "problematic," you're probably unfamiliar with his presence on earth. @Beebosloth (Stan Osipov) is a pretty general artist on Instagram, pumping out at least one sketch a day; his works are namely skeletal, usually black and white, usually accompanied with an odd little strip of slogan text which rarely fits the image subject. People have gotten his works tattooed, he's almost up to 300k followers now, etc etc, he's doing alright for himself.
If there's one thing that millennials and gen-Z kids' insane internet vigilante rampages have taught us, it's that successful people can be, and often are, problematic as all hell. Beebosloth is no exception.
I had been following the artist for close to 3 years, giving him general support through likes on his posts, but also going an extra mile in standing up for him for 2 problems he had been facing repeatedly as an artist. First, due to the general popular aesthetic of his art, his works were getting reposted a lot, often without credit. There would even be imitation accounts which would post nothing but his art, essentially pretending to be him. I repeatedly took it upon myself to give them the ol' trollish finger wag, in an unlikely hope they'd better their behavior or at least let passersby know who the real artist was.
Another problem he was facing was Instagram support; (Ooh what a surprise, when has that ever happened to anyone)? The way he went on about it had us all believing that Instagram would never punish those who committed these unethical acts. And that was the entirety of the problem at first; not punishing other people who had done him wrong. He made several posts and stories complaining about this, usually enticing his followers to go out and do his bidding in this regard. Then . . there was an incident, and the first instance that really alerted me to Beebosloth's behavior.
This is a man who spends half his posts whining because he refuses to learn how internet-related copyright laws work. Even though with the sheer amount of trials and failures he's experienced, he should be an expert on them by now. A dude who claims every 5 seconds that he's getting his work stolen . . . which is why this next part is such a kicker.
I wish I could remember the time exactly, (but unfortunately I'm not pursuing a degree in problematic Instagram artists, and these details have just really just slipped my mind). It was March; I believe of this year. I scrolled through Instagram like normal, came upon a new post by beebosloth, and noticed that this one had about twice the typical amount of attention attached to it. Osipov had posted a doodle of a skeleton arm, holding up a ticket which read "1 WAY TICKET TO HELL." Pretty simple, pretty basic. And the next picture on the slide was the exact same thing, only this time, it wasn't in his style. I believe he also included screenshots of an incredibly petty argument between him and the other artist, in which she accused him of stealing the design from her. - In the caption he's ranting, he's raving, Instagram copyrighted his version and removed it. He does something else too . . . .
Now, these images are the exact damn same, I wish I could find her original work but it has really just disappeared. After what Stan Osipov does next, it wouldn't really surprise me if she deleted her Instagram to cut out the toxicity of this whole situation. And here's the most important part to consider of all of this; not beeblosloth's cruel, immature, reaction, not his history of sending his followers to spend their own personal time being terrible to other users on his behalf, this-
The artist who claimed Osipov had stolen her work- posted it first. Actually I believe she posted it a few weeks before beeblosloth ever did. And keep in mind- the only feasible difference between these two photos is the art style. They are exact same in every possible detail. Now, unfortunately, at the time I was a member of beebosloth's cult following. I really made up any possible excuse to believe that somehow, regardless of how impossible and ridiculous it would be, this girl was lying about beebosloth just ripping her off majorly. Even though- she kept the matter private, between themselves. Beebosloth was the one who posted their screenshots, made this a "let's get everyone involved and invoke the wrath of my followers" thing.
In the caption, (or maybe in a new post), Beebosloth then goes on to beckon everyone to draw this image, he starts a #drawthisinyourstyle challenge. He also, of course, incites his followers to go send hate the the original artist. I will admit I stupidly wanted to believe beebosloth was the original artist, and maybe there was some justification to him posting the screenshots, but that part, I didn't like. That was totally unnecessary, even if he was somehow telling the truth.Can we just step back and assess how insane this situation is?
Osipov casually rips off another artist
He gets caught, called out in private, and the image is removed
He reposts his imitation image, as well as the original one, the original artist's details, the screenshots from their private conversation; he tells his followers to go send hate to the original artist because she hurt his feelings by calling him out.
He starts a competition encouraging everyone to rip off her image in their own style. In turn getting dozens of results, making a considerable chunk of the Instagram art scene focus all negative attention on the original artist. "Well if I can't have it, I guess everyone can." (It's almost impossible to find left over images of the challenge, but I remember there being dozens upon dozens of submissions. I will post one I managed to find, as well as the original rip-off by beebosloth.)
And me and his other followers were totally blind to this insane, ridiculous, behavior. I find that all of my red flags that make me dislike people and their actions boil down to a very simple act: Being shitty to another human when they're not doing anything harmful. That's exactly what Osipov was doing here, and I just kind of let him convince me she was the perpetrator.
-- The remainder is an explanation of why I personally snapped out of this and realized he is just a really sleezy dude, it gets a bit petty, read at your own discretion. --
I kept following him after this for months, sending likes to those stolen general commercial T-shirt slogans slapped on a sketch of skeletons doing basic little things. And then one day a few weeks ago, an image crawled across my feed whose incredibly vague message just didn't sit right with me. The image, as you should be able to see here (if I've successfully posted it), contains a scene of someone trying to post something on instagram, and there is an error message which reads "Oops, nobody gives a shit about you or your selfies. Post anyways?"
First reaction: YIKES, who has Stanny got a vendetta against today? The username of the poster was "dumb bitch" to boot. I honestly couldn't tell if he was attempting to shame someone specific, people who just enjoy posting their selfies, women on Instagram, the message was so unclear and the caption wasn't a help to say the least. Actually the caption was . . . The only possible relation the caption could have had to the art itself, was . . . no actually I really can't find a damn thing to relate the two. It had the same weird aggressive energy as the image, but it was essentially an uncomfortable and unwanted pep-talk? No . . . what in the fresh hell would you call that caption?
Anyways, I just assumed the caption didn't really have a direct relation to the art image, as that was something he'd done before and is pretty typical on Instagram. But I still had a problem with the message of the image itself; essentially teaching people to feel bad about posting their selfies, and holding some sense of superiority to those who dare share an image of their face every so often. How incredibly boring, and my reaction posted in the images explains why this personally pissed me off. And if there I talk like someone complaining in an Instagram comment section, well . . . I wonder why.
His reaction - Oh man his reaction, you could not have killed someone's loyalty to you faster if you used their pet in your omelet. I mentioned how I was confused at the caption in the end of what I was saying, and I guess that's the part that offended him?! I haven't a clue how, but he starts in: "The fact that you don't understand leads me to believe that you are still very lost."
. . . . WHAT?! bahahaha! Where the hell did that come from?! My mouth fell agape. First of all, I didn't understand his caption for the shear fact that it was vague and unrelated to the image. Secondly, beebolsoth, where in the shit did I say anything about being lost and remind me when I paid you to be my psychiatrist. He goes on in this ridiculous narcissistic tone, making totally wild claims as if he's known me my whole life and can speak to my personal character, and my mental state. What a creep. Is he playing The Rewired Soul here? I didn't know, I didn't particularly care. The mild entertainment I received from viewing his images wasn't worth being talked to like I've just told freaking Sigmund Freud I don't like the taste of lima beans. After receiving some darling, and for some reason, racist hate from his cult followers, I unfollowed him.
But really, isn't that just one of the cringiest feelings out there? Realizing you've been doing back-flips for someone who would treat you like absolute dirt just for the fun of it? Well, now this experience is documented. Hopefully the true original artist of the "One way ticket to hell" piece is doing alright. And the next time Osipov does something weird and horrible, people can come here, and know it definitely wasn't the first time.
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Found this online and thought it’d be fun. Won’t tag others, but would love to see reposts with your answers!
1. Who is your favorite male anime character? it’s always a toss-up but for today will say Spike Spiegel
2. Who is your favorite female character? Lucy, Elfen Lied
3. What is your favorite anime soundtrack? Soul Eater
4. What is your favorite anime opening + animation? I’ve always thought the OP to Star Driver was really great - the art and graphic design is totally unique and the lyrics to the song (Gravity 0 - Aqua Timez) fit the show SO WELL, but the opening was made to fit the song, too. I still think it’s fantastic.
5. What is your favorite anime ending song + animation? Soul Eater again, what everybody calls the “3rd ending” (Bakusou Yumeuta - Diggy Mo). Soul Eater’s soundtrack has everything from quirky indie to old school punk, but this hip-hopish track just fit the attitudes of the characters and their fighting styles perfectly. (Seki-kun is a very, very close second!)
6. What is your favorite anime scene? Yeah, right. Like I could answer that one.
7. If you could meet an anime character who would it be? I wish I could answer this seriously, but every time I think about a 2D character coming into this world, all I can picture is Kreiger’s Mitsuko Miyazumi and it makes me laugh uncontrollably.
8. What anime character is most similar to you in terms of personality? I usually say Ichika Orimura, just because he’s full of good intention but really dense when it comes to women and misses signals all the time. I should probably come up with a new line of thought, though, because that’s not exactly a flattering response lol
9. What is your favorite thing about anime? The imagination, the creativity, the fact that it’s drawn and anything at all is possible without a ginormous budget, so you get all these original stories colored well outside the lines of convention and safety standards that the entertainment industry is bound by.
10. What is your least favorite thing about anime? It took me a while to get used to the fanservice that is prevalent in even the most tame of anime, and there are times when an excess of it contributes to the story, but I have a hard time with it when an anime is overly-ecchi “just because”. It tends to really creep me out.
11. Who are your favorite anime couple? Kazuma and Ayano. They crack me up so much because they are cuckoo for cocoa puffs about each other but are too stubborn to ever admit it.
12. Who is your favorite anime animal? Will have to think about this one and come back to it.
13. What anime would make a good game? Another one have talked about at length, I would kill to see a full-fledged PvP MMORPG of the Fate/Stay series, where you choose which master you want to play as, develop skills and spells, eventually call your servant. The two of you quest together until endgame level, at which point you enter the Holy Grail war against other endgamers. I’d be all over that one.
14. What game would make a good anime? It was a God of War knockoff and they already made a bad movie about it, but always thought Heavenly Sword could be an anime. They’d have to add quite a bit of content to get 12-13 episodes, though.
15. What was the first anime you ever watched? Robotech
16. Do you think you’ll ever stop watching anime? No, but no way I’ll watch nearly as much - I do at some point plan on becoming a real adult again, and don’t expect to have the time I do now.
17. What is your favorite genre of anime? It used to be mecha anime, and I’m still really into it, but the fantasy/adventure series that are set in medieval-esque worlds have gotten the most of my love the last 2-3 years. .
18. What is your least favorite genre of anime? Horror
19. Are you open about watching anime with people you know? I was when I was younger, but now I think there’s a stigmata that is attached to it because of my age. Like “oh, you’re one of those guys”. Somehow being past like teens/early 20s and still into anime means you’re a creeper who is weird af and probably does bizarre things behind closed doors. I have to get to know someone before more than just a casual conversation about it.
20. Have you ever been to Japan? Yup, lived there for a little while in the Navy
21. What anime was the biggest let down for you? Death Parade. It had all the makings of one of those devastatingly memorable endings that would have rocketed it into history, but instead Chiyuki smiles, Decim says nothing, everybody gets off scot-free, and the show ends. WHAT THE F***.
22. What anime was better then expected? Charlotte. Every time my answer will be Charlotte. That one blew me away the first time.
23. What is the best anime fight scene? This one always comes up, and I never have an answer. There have been a few that made me want to cheer, though lol
24. Who is your anime waifu? Takao, Ars Nova/Arpeggio of Blue Steel, but the idea of a waifu or envisioning yourself in a relationship with an anime character - male or female - is something I’ve never really gotten.
25. What was your favorite video game as a child? Perfect Dark. It sooo needs a reboot
Questions about me
26. Most Embarrassing moment? When I was 13, I passed out during the prayer at a large outdoor service at a country church we were visiting, but fell straight down into my chair so only a few people knew about it. Someone called EMS, but the squad was unavailable, so this 38ft hook and ladder with lights and sirens going pulls in and everybody was like wtf
27a. Can you drive? I’ve driven on three continents
27b. Do you own a car? It barely qualifies as a car, but it is paid for so until I make more than $11/hr it’ll have to do
28. Are you mature? Depends
29. Are you mature? I’m going to be mature here and not make a big deal about asking the same question twice. In a row.
30. Do you prefer cats or dogs? I miss my dog all the time, but have nothing against cats unless they are total assholes.
31. Describe yourself physically? 6′2, dirty blonde/brown hair, not fat but not exactly Ryan Gosling either
32. What would you name your first child? I don’t know, depends on the wife, I guess. Nothing too out there, though - I don’t want a boxer or a stripper for a kid because they got scarred from everyone making fun of their name.
33. What is the worst injury you have ever had? Ruptured L4/L5 in my spine that popped out and pinched my sciatic nerve, then while I was rehabbing that slipped on ice and broke my elbow. NOTHING worked for a while.
34. What is your worse habit? I wall myself off when I need others most. I’m actually really good at it.
35. Do you drink or smoke? I used to, and still do sometimes, but not nearly as often as I used to. It’s just too expensive to go out all the time, and I hate being out of breath from one flight of stairs.
36. Do you have a tattoo? I have 3, want more
37. Are you a morning person or a night person? I wake early every morning for work, so even on my days off I’m awake at like 6:30 now. Being an adult can really suck sometimes lol
38. Have you ever slept past midday? Not for a long time, but sure
39. Do you regret anything? Have you ever met anyone who doesn’t?
40. Can you count the number of friends you have on one hand? Yes. I know lots of people and am friendly with them, but not what I’d call a friend.
41. Do you wear glasses? No
42. Are you a picky eater? I loathe onions and the texture of stewed tomatoes will make me hurl, but just about everything else works.
43. Would you die for someone? Depends on the person and situation
44. If you could have any superpower, what would it be? Telekinesis, maybe? Not sure.
45. Do you believe in the supernatural? Not really. There’s plenty out there that we don’t understand or know about, though. It wouldn’t surprise me, but I don’t really believe in it.
46. Would you rather be rich or famous? Rich, I couldn’t handle people going through my garbage to see what brand of ice cream I prefer
47. Have you ever committed a crime? Is it a crime if you didn’t get caught? lol
48. Pirates or ninjas? Ninjas, it requires precision, years of training, and incredible athleticism. Pirating requires you drink a lot and rob people.
49. Does someone have a crush on you? Would be nice to find out that I did, but would kind of suck for them
50. Are you in a relationship? I’m not really in relationship mode right now
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Library Services at Elsewhere University: A Guide and Compendium; Appendix A: About the Librarians
Reposting because, um. I may have gone back and annotated with links. Crossposted to AO3.
Disclaimer: I Know Too Much about how libraries and librarians work. This resulted in complicated headcanons about job roles and org charts, trying to figure out how the behind-the-scenes of all the accumulating bits of canon and fanon would work.
Appendix A: About the Librarians
Libraries contain vast amounts of information that create possibilities, and stories, that have an immense amount of narrative weight and power. They are basically one giant liminal space, but one that exists for the people that use it. And it's the people that work in the library that create that connection.
The Fair Folk have opinions about librarians. There's a certain amount of idealism involved that would make them vulnerable, but so much of what they know and do is dangerous. They are accorded a certain not-inconsiderable amount of respect and caution, let's say, and leave it at that.
There are two kinds of librarians at Elsewhere University, two sides to the same coin. There are the librarians who have an employee ID number, and a title on their nametag. They have lunch breaks, vacation time, and salt and iron in their pockets and stashed in odd corners in their desk drawers and offices, just like the rest of the staff and faculty. And then there are The Other Librarians. The other librarians can be found on floors ten through twenty-three. Officially, there are nine floors to the library. (This does not include the rooftop garden that is not accessible by stairwell or elevator.) The sub-basements are officially recognized. The tunnels are not.
The other librarians also have officially-issued library nametags. All they say is "librarian." Some of the other librarians may have been human once. They may have officially retired. They may have learned too much, or willingly given up something that held them tethered to mundane cares outside of The Library, or made a bargain for something the library needed.
There are stories of a cataloguer, best of his generation, who reached a point where he could recite chapter and verse of the standards, never misjudged a subject heading or used the wrong cutter number. The arcanest of arcane inscriptions held still for him while he captured the true author and all relevant cross-references. There was not a text he could not read, or element of biliographic control that he could not master. The years went by, and the standards changed, Anglo American Cataloging Rules superceded the Rules for Descriptive Cataloging, ISBNs were introduced, AACR became AACR2, and a switch from cards to computer records loomed large. He knew so much, but was afraid so little of it would still be relevant. He made a deal.
He wasn't the first. There are still cards appearing in the card catalogue today written in copperplate Library Hand script, as proscribed by Melville Dewey, with a pen and an inkwell.
There are still memories on the lower floors of a reference librarian who could find anything. There are people on staff who worked side-by-side with her on late night reference desk shifts, and tell stories of how she had an infinite command of Boolean logic to wring every penny out of the paid-by-the-second online search services. There was not an annotated bibliography or index that she didn't have at her fingertips, and she could walk a student though the reference interview from "I need a book, I guess" to "help me find three print sources for my introduction to pre-confederate Canadian literature mid-term paper" in twenty seconds with a smile. Rumour has it that she bargained away the memory of every childhood pet she ever had to get internet access in the library for undergraduates. Officially, she retired in the late nineties. But in the Deep Library, there are those who can coax the dial-up modem into connecting to a Dialog subscription that the university hasn't paid for in two decades, and bring back an answer in seconds every time.
There are fading echoes of the year that the entire cataloguing department and half the reference librarians vanished in the stacks in the early 1940's. The university was smaller then, and the protections that were needed to balance a tumultuous time in world history took a terrible toll. It was said that if you stood in certain parts of the stacks, you could hear the air raid sirens, and watch the collection grow as refugee books were taken in. There were dark whispers that some of the staff disappeared into the library in a trade for safety for family members or one of the other desperate bargains made in wartime, but some were promoted to the upper floors without warning because the library didn't want to lose their valuable talents to conscription or worse.
If the Library needs you, it will take you. If you are lucky, it will be on your terms, at a time of your choosing. In most cases, a masters' degree in library and information sciences from a nationally-certified graduate program is required, though in some rare cases, an equivalent combination of education and experience may be considered.
Most undergraduates and visitors (both the mundane kind that come from outside the campus, and the Visitors), and some university support staff, will leave with a vague impression of any of the librarians as an ominous yet helpful shape, and an overwhelming sense of sameness. This is a type of protective camouflage that the library generates, and it extends to cover all the librarians, the one that leave at the end of the day, and the ones that do not. They cannot all be the same. It is, of course, impossible to run a library without a wide and varied pool of skill sets and personalities, all of which contribute to the, shall we say, unique personalities, egos, interdepartmental rivalries, feuds, and alliances that are the lifeblood of an academic library.
This protection waxes and wanes depending on the year. During the spring and summer semesters following the Chemistry Majors' Revolt, anyone remotely associated with any of the science departments would find themselves on the doorstep of the library with a ringing in their ears like the sudden absence of a loud noise, holding the books or other information they'd gone to the library to find, with no memory of how it got there. An entire spring-semester introductory chemistry class knows the structure of an APA-style bibliography inside and out, but could not tell you when or where they learned it.
In more recent times, sufficiently motivated undergrads, graduate students, and faculty will have little trouble differentiating one librarian from another, if they are on floors one through nine. (They must, of course, be referred to by job title as they do not have names.)
There are operational needs that must be met. It's hard to plead your case as to why the library really should keep that critical music theory database for your graduate level seminar course that currently costs as much as all of the journal subscriptions for the art history department combined when you're not sure if you're talking to the subject liaison librarian for fine arts, the head of interlibrary loans, or an eldritch creature with no face but a really excellent recall for geopolitical boundaries in medieval Africa, and a working knowledge of twelve dead languages, seven of which were never spoken by a human tongue.
(Interlibrary Loans and Fine Arts--the subject librarian, not the department--have been in the midst of a prolonged feud for the past decade over a hiring committee disagreement regarding practicum student placements and a botched exorcism. It is rivalled only by the cold war between Interlibrary Loans and Cataloguing over supply budgets that's been running since the late nineties. Confusing one for the other would be unhelpful, to say the least.)
The Other Librarians generally do not encroach on their colleagues' responsibilities. They are still librarians with all of the professional ethics that entails, and are generally orderly and rule-abiding, unless a fundamental principle of librarianship is at risk. (Do not speak of internet filtering within the library walls if you wish to leave with all of your fingers intact.) The Deep Library should be approached with utmost caution, regardless. Some people in the profession say, your library should have something in it to offend everyone. EU's library would agree to that statement, with some extensive additions, explanatory footnotes, and cautionary appendices. Respect the Library.
Part One, Part Three (Parts Four to Seven forthcoming)
#elsewhere university#Library Services at Elsewhere University: A Guide and Compendium#my fanfic#library au#geek librarians#when librarians headcanon#unreal academic librarian problems#library love
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So Messed Up: An Interview with The Damned
The Damned. Photo: Dod Morrison
Growing up in the suburbs of Houston, having a solid record shop like Vinal Edge at my disposal was essential to discovering new music for me to listen to. One time with an armful of albums by The Jam and The Clash, the shop’s longtime employee Bob turned me onto the album Damned Damned Damned and introduced me to one of my favorite albums and bands of all time. The Damned were never ones to follow rules, and they definitely lived up to the ideology of punk while creating some of the best records of their time. Now, 40 years later, they’re touring the release of that record that changed my life, as well as changed the punk movement forever. Free Press Houston was more than giddy to interview founding member and guitarist Captain Sensible about the past, the present, and what they have in store for Houston when they bring the tour here in this month.
Free Press Houston: Does it feel like 40 years together as a band?
Captain Sensible: No, time has just flown by. When you’re enjoying yourself, etcetera. The weirdest thing is that Monty has been in the band 20 years, whereas our founder, the punk visionary Brian James was only with us for a couple of years. How mad is that? I don’t blame BJ for bailing out though. Me and Rat must’ve been a nightmare back then. A couple of right ****s.
FPH: Last year, you guys played at the prestigious Royal Albert Hall to mark the 40th year of the band. Was it surreal to perform there being a punk band, or did it feel right at home for you?
Sensible: We tried to book a gig there in the ’70s, but they banned us. That came out when the current management had a look in their archives and found the letter. Something like, “Not the sort of act we want at our venue.”
To mark our 40th anniversary the grand setting was perfect, now we are also a bit long in the tooth. And the stage is situated almost in the middle of the venue as well, which avoids us appearing like ants to those at the back of some halls I could mention.
FPH: The album, Damned Damned Damned is easily one of the landmark albums from the punk movement. Did you ever think that the band would get as big as you’ve gotten when you were recording it?
Sensible: Define “big.”
FPH: With the 40th anniversary edition of the album that was just released, the fact that “New Rose” was recently called the number one punk song of all time, is it strange to see something you did so long ago become so celebrated?
Sensible: We had no idea the record would be popular, let alone talked about 40 years on.
It’s a cliche, I know, but the whole thing’s been a roller coaster ride of massive highs and desperate lows. The high point was maybe the reception of the first album, it caused a bit of a sensation and suddenly we were on front pages. The record is manic and riff heavy. Nick Lowe did a great job of capturing the uncompromising nature of our 35 minute live set. This is the material the more recently arrived members of the band love to play and they totally nail it.
We were just making the music we wanted to hear ’cause there was precious little around at the time that had any get up and go. Glam rock had packed the sequins and gone — all we had left was country, disco and prog.
But mainly I was trying to change my own world ’cause for me as a teenager with little education to boast of, I had a life of drudge ahead of me at best. Or a vagabond of some sort. I was already known to the law and things could have gone from bad to worse. I was dossing in a Brighton squat, surrounded by junkies and ner-do-wells. Then punk rock showed up and saved me. Every band needs a chaos factor, and I became the Damned’s random unpredictable nutcase. My dream job.
During rehearsals I was sleeping on Brian’s floor, we spent our days traipsing around clubs attempting to blag support gigs, which paid peanuts so we were generally starving. When Stiff records offered us a record deal, the promise of a visit to a Wimpy Bar was the clincher.
FPH: The Damned were the first UK punk band to tour the US, correct? Did the tour go well and were there any nights that stand out in a positive or a negative way?
Sensible: The [Rolling] Stones had cakes and whisky sent to CBGB’s for us, along with some hookers if I remember correctly. We played some blistering sets, got drunk quite often and wrecked equipment. Meaning that by the time we reached Los Angeles, we didn’t have enough cash left for hotels let alone the airfare home. The Weirdos were kind enough to let us sleep on their floor, but to get home, we had to have a collection box at the venue for donations. Those were the days!
FPH: You guys never really called yourselves “punk,” but it was rather what the music press called you. With albums as diverse as The Black Album, what do you think the music of The Damned should be called?
Sensible: It’s punk. Mixed with goth, of course, a bit of psych, some melancholy, a smattering of garage, and a bunch of good old fashioned classic rock.
The critics slated our experimental departures from the two minute thrash format, but for me the first rule of punk is there are no rules. In fact punk is more an idea than anything to do with a bunch of famous bands. It says if you like something: music, art, sport, do it yourself. Be creative, everyone has a talent, the important thing is to turn off your TV and find it.
Punk was a reaction against the excessive rock star nonsense of the mid ’70s. The swaggering macho buffoons with a foot up on the monitors while boring audiences to death with long tedious guitar solos and lyrics about wizards and pixies. I’m happy to say we helped get rid of that. We’re just a bunch of wacky blokes who happen to make music, no pedestal required. For me that’s the punk way — don’t get up yourself.
Regrets? Well, I smashed a few fine guitars back in the day. I wish I hadn’t done that. But the way the band was, I’m talking about volatility and ego clashes here, it just seemed a better idea to trash the equipment that hit each other.
Studios especially could set things off. You’re ruining my song, well it’s a crock of *** anyway. That sort of thing. Rockfield, being on a Welsh farm, had a shotgun on the premises. I recall an occasion when Mr. Vanian, not best pleased with some irreverent backing vocals Rat and myself had contributed to his latest song, chased the pair of us across the fields blasting away. I didn’t look back to see whether he was aiming at us or — hopefully — the sky.
This tour and its across the board setlist is a celebration of not only 40 years of the Damned, but actually surviving a lot of extremely mad and debauched times in one piece, physically, if not quite mentally.
FPH: There are stories of you being set on fire, and the band lighting Elvis Costello on fire. Are those antics a thing of the past, or will we see a glimpse of Susie Lollipop?
Sensible: We were a bunch of absolute bastards. That’s the truth of it. People are always telling me appalling stories from back in the day. The “chaos years” I call them. Nowadays it’s like an eccentric old gentlemen’s club. Well, Mr. Vanian is single handedly attempting to resurrect the fashion for smoking a pipe. He has a collection of the things.
I’ve not got the right “figure” currently to bring Susie back. For some reason or other — large quantities of craft IPAs probably — I’m carrying a spare tire or two round my waist.
FPH: With this 40th anniversary tour, what should people expect to hear from the band when you perform in Houston this month?
Sensible: A special 40th anniversary career spanning setlist with no mix cheating, autotune, choreography or rehearsed chat between songs. We live for the live experience. A lot of stuff is unique for every gig. We thrive on having an element of danger to the proceedings, any other way is boring. Perfection is overrated, rock n’ roll needs all its rough edges left intact.
As it seems, the band has grown wiser in their latter years, and should be worth making it out for just to hear these songs performed live. You can catch The Damned on their 40th anniversary tour at House of Blues on Wednesday, May 17. The all ages show has sets from The Bellrays and Elhae, with doors at 7 pm and tickets for $20.
So Messed Up: An Interview with The Damned this is a repost
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