“The Gloriously Immortal Life of “My Immortal””
“The story, and the character of Ebony, is an example of “Mary Sue” fan fiction, i.e. a story where the author inserts a thinly veiled version of herself into the text and makes herself the hero. Most authors of fan fiction are women, and Mary Sue fanfic in particular is often written by teenage girls (and in keeping with the grand tradition of pouring scorn on things teenage girls like, it’s the target of a lot of bile). My Immortal may not be a good piece of work, but it is an important one: A young girl creating a piece of work where she is the hero is a radical act.
Like a lot of great literary epics, we don’t have a definitive version of the text. It’s like the writing of some ancient culture. In fact, the typos make it seem like it’s written in another language sometimes (“c dats basically nut swering and dis time he wuz relly upset n u wil c y”). But I think if My Immortal had genuinely been written as a joke and had reached this level of success and notoriety, the author would have come forward. Maybe I just want to believe. Because My Immortal is important to me…
Stories are most meaningful when we see ourselves in them. The majority of our most famous stories are about straight white men and a lot of fan fiction exists to try to subvert this in some small way. In My Immortal, Tara Gilesbie created a version of herself — Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way — and put her right in the centre of Hogwarts along with all the silly, brilliant, trivial things she cared about. And the fact that this story has come to be acknowledged as the worst, but also one of the most important pieces of fan fiction ever written is utterly heartwarming.”
Oh, the mid-2000s. I think I was perfectly positioned to enjoy that era of the internet: in middle school/early high school when I had the time and the extremely self-referential social groups to get really into things like fan fiction and those weird repetitive Flash-based pre-Youtube videos (like that one about potatoes and lord of the rings? the one with all the different muffins?) where you actually had to know specific urls, and the online quiz websites! There was a huge piece of the internet that was really teen girls talking to and creating for other teen girls, validating each other and feeling safe to build our own stuff and put ourselves out there.
It’s only reading this now that I realize how important those fanfic sites were, how much they really did encourage us to write our own stories and react to the ways media typically framed teenage girlhood (which was at an especially weird point in the mid-2000s, full of anorexia and long straight hair and the fetishization of trauma and that one specific shade of powder blue).
And that typo language! A major pastime was finding terrible fanfiction and reading it out loud in groups, doing our best to pronounce the misspellings, and there was so much communication about our expectations for our own lives in the ways that we laughed and critiqued and celebrated the behaviors of those characters.
My brothers had all sorts of action movies and classic adventure novels starring men that they could discuss with friends; imagining being those people, talking about different decisions they would have made, building themselves in reaction to those men. And I think that fanfiction and YA novels gave me that opportunity with my friends, to talk about the kind of people we wanted to be and to build our images of ourselves together.
Related: Love for Homestar Runner
