My Immortal (episode transcript)

Read the fic

Listen to the Internet Historian read the fic

Play our My Immortal drinking game

What's up, Pott-heads? Welcome to The Restricted Section. It's me, your girl, Christina. I'm fucking stoked to be here today presenting to you probably my favorite episode of this podcast of all time. I'm sorry that, until now, it's been on our Patreon bonus episode feed. I just had to share it with everyone because it is so fucking delightful (brag). Please get ready for . . . My Immortal! The legendary Harry Potter fanfiction by . . . someone. If you've never heard of this before, don't worry, because Haley does a great job of explaining it all. Just sit back, buckle up, and get ready for a fucking wild ride.
 
But before we do, huge shoutout to all of our Patreon supporters. They're the reason we're able to do—well, anything, first of all—but they're also the reason we do these really fun bonus episodes that cover a lot of the extra material in the Harry Potter universe. So huge shoutout to our Patreon supporters. Thank you so much for everything you do. Love you!
 
And last thing before we get started: just a content warning for pretty much everything (as user Alkeno says at that link: “everything, usually depression, suicide, self harm, drug use, depression, homophobia, transphobia, abuse of clothes from hot topic”). These subjects are discussed in a way that’s juvenile and it’s often quite funny, all framed in this very ridiculous context. You know us: we don't really get into it. But it's sort of hard to avoid all of the touchy subject matter. If you have any questions about the content before listening or reading, please feel free to reach out.
 
And now I present my favorite episode of anything ever: the Restricted Section’s take on what is widely regarded as the worst fanfic of all time, My Immortal.
 
Christina Kann  02:41
Welcome to a very special Restricted Section bonus episode--
 
Haley Simpkiss  02:54
AHEM! I'm Haley. And look at me. Look at me. Look at me. I am the host now. We're talking about My Immortal.
 
Christina Kann  03:06
God save us. There's some pretty ambient thunderstorms going on in the background, the doom and gloom. I think—oh my god, what is her name?
 
Haley Simpkiss  03:15
Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way? It's very goffick outside.
 
Christina Kann  03:22
Yes, it's gothic. I think Ebony would like it.
 
Brooke Matherly  03:25
It's Ebony, but it's not spelled correctly.
 
Christina Kann  03:28
Hey, wait, wait, stop. We have to introduce ourselves. That's Haley. She stole the show. Brooke, there you are. I'm glad you're here.
 
Brooke Matherly  03:38
I guess.
 
Christina Kann  03:41
Is this a punishment? Is this a blessing? We are also delighted to be joined today by Zach, one of the cohosts of My Cabbages! Hello, Zach.
 
Zach of Cabbs  03:50
How's it going? Let's get drunk and talk about goth wizards.
 
Christina Kann  03:55
Before we get started, I do have a lined piece of paper laying on my desk in my official podcasting notebook, which is a thing that I have. And at the top, it just says "My Immortal Drinking Game," but the list is completely empty. So as things progress, we'll add to this drinking game.
 
Brooke Matherly  04:16
How bad do we want that drinking game to put people in terms of like, "Wow, this is fun and we're drunk!" to "You died two chapters in"?
 
Zach of Cabbs  04:26
The gradient we're going for is: by the end of this show, any passage read should cause everyone to continue drinking.
 
Haley Simpkiss  04:33
Don't worry too much about us, Brooke, because there's a lot to unpack here. Anytime you talk about My Immortal—widely regarded as the worst fanfiction ever written—there are three things you have to discuss. You obviously have to discuss the fic itself, which is a nightmare. But there's also a lot of lore, about 15 years' worth.
 
Zach of Cabbs  04:58
The anime is better.
 
Haley Simpkiss  05:02
Anything would be better than this, presumably. My Immortal came out in 2006-2007. There's a longstanding mystery bordering on full-blown conspiracy theory surrounding the authorship of this fanfiction. And then, of course, you have to discuss the ultimate question: Was this funny on purpose, or is it just bad? I'm just going to start with initial impressions. Do we think this is a troll? Yes or no?
 
Christina Kann  05:39
No.
 
Zach of Cabbs  05:40
God, it's so hard. I feel like it's Tommy Wiseau’s career. It began in earnest, and once the person realized that writing bad was getting them attention, it became a troll as it went along. It's just so hard. I mean, I've never been a teen girl before, so maybe you all can shed some light on this.
 
Brooke Matherly  06:03
Harder than Draco's hypothetical cock.
 
Zach of Cabbs  06:08
His “boy thing.” Excuse you.
 
Brooke Matherly  06:10
Ugh. Haley, I have a question for you. You've read this multiple times, correct?
 
Haley Simpkiss  06:16
I will make a confession. I have trouble getting past Chapter 15 or 16 for reasons we'll discuss. At a certain point, it becomes physically difficult to read. I was made aware of My Immortal when it was still being updated back in the day, so I’ve been following this whole mystery surrounding it for this entire time. This fanfiction is my Lindbergh baby, and my soul will not rest until I know the truth.
 
Brooke Matherly  06:53
But in a perverted way, you would say you enjoy this? This fanfic?
 
Christina Kann  06:59
We do this all the time on Movie Night Crew. It's so bad that we had a good time. We were talking about Nicolas Cage before this started.
 
Brooke Matherly  07:05
No. No, no, no. The reason I'm asking Haley these questions is because you made me read this, and I don't want to ever fucking hear another word about Cats (2019) ever again in my goddamn life.
 
Haley Simpkiss  07:17
You consented, Brooke! You consented to do this bonus episode. I warned you.
 
Christina Kann  07:23
At some point, we have to stop talking about Cats (2019).
 
Haley Simpkiss  07:28
Again, I have never managed to read My Immortal all the way through. I just like that it exists. You guys didn't have to read it all the way through.
 
Christina Kann  07:37
I did read it all the way through.
 
Brooke Matherly  07:39
We will watch and listen to the first 10 songs of Cats (2019) on a semi-regular basis until you start enjoying it.
 
Haley Simpkiss  07:44
I'm just going to go ahead and read the first paragraph for you guys.
 
Christina Kann  07:48
Wait, I want to defend my impulsive “No.” This is not a troll. Two things. One: I've seen writing like this. I've seen actual people who wanted to become actual authors who write exactly like this, with this amount of care and attention.
 
Zach of Cabbs  08:02
Noooo!
 
Christina Kann  08:03
Absolutely. And two: I have been a teenage girl before, and while I don't fully understand the lengths to which these characters act, I could see something of myself in some of these choices. My 15-year-younger self.
 
Brooke Matherly  08:23
I don't think their writing style is too dissimilar for the age gap to the original 50 Shades of Grey when it was being posted online. Accounting for the supposed age of what I'm assuming is a late-middle-school girl versus a fully grown adult woman writing a Twilight fanfic, I think the writing style choices and gratuitous use of sex is completely the same between these two franchises.
 
Haley Simpkiss  08:54
Yep. So for the uninitiated, My Immortal is ostensibly a Harry Potter fanfiction.
 
Zach of Cabbs  09:03
There's a big quotation mark fingers around "Harry Potter fanfic."
 
Christina Kann  09:09
Wait, can I go ahead and make a rule? Let's drink every time we say “Harry Potter,” because I don't think it's gonna be a lot.
 
Haley Simpkiss  09:16
Well, his name is Vampire in this.
 
Christina Kann  09:18
Exactly. I think we should drink every time we say “Harry Potter.”
 
Zach of Cabbs  09:22
Thanks to Christina, I just had to take three drinks in a row.
 
Brooke Matherly  09:26
This felt like reading a teen version of Harriet Porber by Chuck Tingle for as much as it related to the actual Harry Potter series.
 
Christina Kann  09:33
Yeah, but that book was so well done.
 
Zach of Cabbs  09:35
There were so many times that I was reading a passage and felt like, if I was trying to write a purposefully bad thing for comedy, I would misspell this word this way, because I would find it funny. "Triumelephantly"? I mean, come on.
 
Christina Kann  09:50
Wait, Zack, that is so funny. I read literally all of this fanfic today, and every single error, I thought, "Someone could make this error," until I got to literally exactly the error you just read, and I was like "This is too good to be true."
 
Zach of Cabbs  10:05
“Triumelephantly.” There's no fucking possible way that it was was written in earnest
 
Christina Kann  10:09
Unless it was a very elaborate autocorrect failure, and the word "elephant" got in there somehow.
 
Zach of Cabbs  10:17
Are you saying Tara's spelling is just so awful that she's literally broken her spellchecker? Her spellchecker has been traumatized.
 
Brooke Matherly  10:25
I can also see it being somewhat intentional given the cutesy substitutions she makes in other aspects, where she'll say things like "fangs" instead of "thanks."
 
Haley Simpkiss  10:35
A lot of that is like leetspeak from back in the day.
 
Christina Kann  10:39
That kind of shit, like "fangs" instead of "thanks," is exactly something I would have done when I was younger. When I was in middle school, every time I wanted to say the word "and," I would drop two ampersands instead of saying "and." && it had to be two. That was my thing.
 
Brooke Matherly  10:51
I exclusively spelled "love" L-U-V for a very long time and contended it that was different from L-O-V-E, because L-O-V-E was romantic but L-U-V was for my friends and family.
 
Christina Kann  11:03
That's adorable.
 
Zach of Cabbs  11:05
For a few years of my life, every time I said "anybody," I would say "anypony." I don't want to talk about it; let's just move on.
 
Haley Simpkiss  11:14
Oh noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
 
Zach of Cabbs  11:20
Let that float down the River Styx where it belongs.
 
Haley Simpkiss  11:24
Let's discuss the plot of My Immortal insofar as there is any kind of a plot in My Immortal. The main character is Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way.
 
Zach of Cabbs  11:36
She's Klingon. That's my headcanon. That's why there's an apostrophe.
 
Haley Simpkiss  11:40
Oh no, she's a vampire, a Slytherin, and a goth, and she goes to Hogwarts, kind of. But everyone at Hogwarts is also a goth and/or a vampire, but some of them are also posers. Voldemort tells her to kill Vampire Potter—Harry has changed his name.
 
Christina Kann  12:03
We have to drink. You said "Harry" and "Potter."
 
Zach of Cabbs  12:05
In the same sentence, that counts.
 
Haley Simpkiss  12:07
Harry Potter has changed his name to Vampire Potter, and his scar is now a pentagram.
 
Christina Kann  12:13
I think we should drink every time we say "pentagram."
 
Zach of Cabbs  12:15
You're trying to kill us this early?
 
Brooke Matherly  12:18
I mean, if we're really trying to die, just how about every time we say the word "black"?
 
Zach of Cabbs  12:24
Or "lace."
 
Brooke Matherly  12:25
Oh, for sure at least a sip for every time someone's outfit is described.
 
Haley Simpkiss  12:32
Those are the most coherent parts!
 
Christina Kann  12:37
They were so lucid writing those outfit descriptions.
 
Brooke Matherly  12:39
It's a complete tonal change.
 
Haley Simpkiss  12:41
It’s true. The whole thing is completely impenetrable. There's time travel. Marty McFly turns up at one point. Nothing makes sense. All of the adults are pedophiles for some reason. But anytime she's describing her outfit, it is in lovingly crafted detail. If you have not read this somehow, I just want to give you guys a taste of what the style is. I'm just going to read the first paragraph.
 
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.
 
Haley Simpkiss  14:29
The whole thing is like that.
 
Christina Kann  14:31
When you said it was raining and there was no sun, thunder clapped outside.
 
Zach of Cabbs  14:38
Oh my god. There's definitely thunder rolling in my part of town right now.
 
Haley Simpkiss  14:47
We are obviously going to discuss the fic itself. We're gonna get into it, but it's going to get very chaotic very fast.
 
Christina Kann  15:06
Haley, you're so hot when you present a subject you're obsessed with. You're at your best right now.
 
Haley Simpkiss  15:14
Allow me to info dump. *pulls out many index cards*
 
Zach of Cabbs  15:15
*gasp* Those are note cards.
 
Haley Simpkiss  15:17
Yes, they are.
 
Zach of Cabbs  15:18
Folks, Haley has prepared a presentation that we are all about to be graced with.
 
Christina Kann  15:25
She's fanning her index cards.
 
Zach of Cabbs  15:27
I feel like Spongebob in the episode where he's eating his own arms when Squidward's describing the Hash-Slinging Slasher.
 
Haley Simpkiss  15:38
Let's just start with the facts. My Immortal was uploaded to fanfiction.net in 2006-2007. It was published by an author called xxxbloodyrists666xxx, aka Tara Gillespie. It is 22,700 words, insofar as we can call any of these words.
 
Zach of Cabbs  16:05
What do you count as a word?
 
Haley Simpkiss  16:08
Philosophical question. There are 44 chapters, but Chapter 39 was apparently written by a hacker. The fanfiction was deleted in 2008, and the account was likely hacked not long after in 2009. An attempt was made to "recover" the account, which may also have been a hacker. There is a supposed sequel called My Immortal 2: Wake Me Up Inside, which is another Evanescence reference.
 
Christina Kann  16:38
They're all Evanescence references.
 
Haley Simpkiss  16:39
This has since been proven to have been written by a troll who was assuming the original author’s identity.
 
Zach of Cabbs  16:46
But honestly, if you don't know who Amy Lee is, like, get the fuck out of here.
 
Haley Simpkiss  16:50
Get da hell out of here.
 
Brooke Matherly  16:51
I once did a rendition of "My Immortal" at a Girl Scout talent show.
 
Zach of Cabbs  16:59
Oh my god.
 
Brooke Matherly  17:00
Here's the problem. We're not talking about a presentation for friends and family. We're talking about Alex, the other 12 people in our Girl Scout troop, and me just soulfully belting out a bad rendition of "My Immortal," after which my troop leader took me to the side and asked me if I was okay.
 
Haley Simpkiss  17:23
That song was a big one for me after the divorce, I gotta say.
 
Christina Kann  17:27
Okay, we all have trauma memories from Girl Scout camp.
 
Zach of Cabbs  17:32
Yeah, that one time I accidentally went to Girl Scout camp was really traumatic for me too. I was like, "I'm not supposed to be here!"
 
Christina Kann  17:38
I personally fell off the zipline at Girl Scout camp and realized I was fat, and I also got my first period at Girl Scout camp!
 
Brooke Matherly  17:48
This was a weekend sleepover in a clubhouse next to a pool.
 
Zach of Cabbs  17:53
My Immortal would totally make a great campfire sketch, though.
 
Christina Kann  17:59
Did any of y'all listen to Evanescence earnestly when they were cool?
 
all  18:06
Yep.
 
Christina Kann  18:06
Yeah, my whole family was into Evanescence. My parents thought it was very dope.
 
Haley Simpkiss  18:10
It was very good for AMVs, I will say.
 
Zach of Cabbs  18:12
Peak aughts entertainment right there, Evanescence AMVs. Classic.
 
Christina Kann  18:17
What are you saying? AMVs?
 
Haley Simpkiss  18:18
Anime music videos. People would take animes and make music videos.
 
Zach of Cabbs  18:23
I used to do it on Windows Movie Maker. I remember those days.
 
Brooke Matherly  18:28
I thought I had a nerdy childhood, but every now and then I'm having a conversation with Haley, and I'm like, "Oh, no. There was a divide there."
 
Haley Simpkiss  18:43
Yeah there was! There was, Brooke!
 
Brooke Matherly  18:46
There's a degree of severity there.
 
Haley Simpkiss  18:49
You and me, we're not the same! We've matured, it's fine. Let's briefly discuss Tara Gillespie.
 
Zach of Cabbs  18:57
What we know so far.
 
Christina Kann  19:00
The accused author.
 
Zach of Cabbs  19:03
Order in the court!
 
Haley Simpkiss  19:05
First of all, this person had accounts and was active on them across multiple platforms at the time of writing. She had a Deviantart; I think she was on Gaia and shit. So this wasn't an isolated thing. If this was a troll, this was somebody who had really dedicated themselves to crafting this online identity.
 
Christina Kann  19:23
Honestly, drink every time we say "troll."
 
Zach of Cabbs  19:26
Are you adding all these things to the list as you're going?
 
Christina Kann  19:28
Yeah, right now we have to drink every time we say "Harry Potter," "pentagram," or "troll," or when there’s an outfit description.
 
Haley Simpkiss  19:38
She refers to Tom Riddle a couple times as Tom Bombadil.
 
Christina Kann  19:45
That was my favorite part, actually.
 
Zach of Cabbs  19:49
Is he hot?
 
Haley Simpkiss  19:53
Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Apparently when they go back in time he is. His name is Tom Satan Bombadil. But also, this doesn't seem like a kid who would be aware of Tom Bombadil's existence, what with him only being in the Lord of the Rings books. So the plot thickens.
 
Brooke Matherly  20:11
There was crossover nerd culture in that time period between Lord of the Rings and everything else that was going on.
 
Haley Simpkiss  20:25
But it was mostly the films, especially for the shallow teenage girl audience.
 
Brooke Matherly  20:30
Right, but for the angsty goth kids it was knowing the books over the films, so I do think that's where a specific reference that was not in the films would tie in with this, quite frankly.
 
Zach of Cabbs  20:44
How much of the misinterpretation of the characters are completely rewritten versus just the person being ignorant of it? A lot of the Slytherin changes were obvious, but Hagrid being a student was weird.
 
Haley Simpkiss  21:02
There are author's notes through the whole thing. This was a big thing on fanfictions at this time.
 
Christina Kann  21:12
Reading those was like watching Secret Window, where the writer finds out that it was himself all along or whatever. Spoiler alerts for Secret Window!
 
Haley Simpkiss  21:18
The author's notes are the fucking B plot, because that's what gave us the lore! That's where all of the clues we have come from!
 
Christina Kann  21:26
What's going on with Raven???
 
Haley Simpkiss  21:27
Yeah, what is going on with Raven???
 
Zach of Cabbs  21:30
It’s like the annotations in Lord of the Rings. People are like, "You didn't read the annotations? You didn't read the books!"
 
Haley Simpkiss  21:35
In the author's notes a couple times, she's like, "I didn't read da book! Stop telling me Hagrid's not a student!" She's just decided he is now.
 
Brooke Matherly  21:44
She makes a specific reference to finding the way that he interacts with them creepy, and she says she's making Hagrid a student to showcase how weird his interactions with these students are, which quite frankly, Tara, I stand behind.
 
Zach of Cabbs  22:00
All right, Tara. Tara, surprising little pocket of wokeness there.
 
Haley Simpkiss  22:06
And Dumbledore only called them "motherfukers" because he had a headache. I'm going to bring that up every time his character appears. She mentions being from somewhere called Dubya in the very last chapter. Theories as to what this might be include Dubai, Dublin, or just a state or town starting with the letter W.
 
Zach of Cabbs  22:31
She's from Western Texas or something.
 
Haley Simpkiss  22:34
I want to say Wisconsin; I feel in my soul that it's gotta be Wisconsin.
 
Brooke Matherly  22:39
Maybe it's just our general proximity, but I saw Dubya and thought Washington DC.
 
Haley Simpkiss  22:47
She claimed to have gone on vacation to Transylvania and seen the castle where Dracula was filmed. The castle where Dracula was filmed is in California, I believe. There's a castle in Transylvania that supposedly inspired Bram Stoker, but also, did she actually go to Transylvania? Who's to say?
 
Zach of Cabbs  23:05
Putting Transylvania in your author's note was the 2008 equivalent of photoshopping a vacation photo on Instagram.
 
Haley Simpkiss  23:13
One of the biggest mysteries is her co-author/beta reader, nicknamed Raven aka bloodytearz666. She is the character Willow in the series. She peaced out around Chapter 15 after Tara and Raven had a falling out over a sweater. The character of Willow was subsequently expelled and murdered, and her corpse was violated by "Loopin"—again, all of the characters are pedophiles, and apparently in this case, also necrophiliacs—and was later brought back with zero explanation. So I’m not sure what happened there. But that's around the point where the text becomes 100% unreadable, which is why I have trouble getting past Chapter 16. There's nothing even resembling a sense of coherency after there.
 
Haley Simpkiss  23:43
So that's what we know. I'm going to try real fast to get through the people who, over the years, have either been theorized to be Tara or have claimed to be Tara. The first are the Acid Bath Sisters. In 2009, a YouTube channel featuring two teenage mall goths called Tara and Raven blew up because it featured two cringey teenage girls singing along to MCR and talking about how much they hated preps.
 
Christina Kann  24:49
This is what I told you I was watching. I told Haley I was in too deep, and she literally was like, "Honestly bitch, you have no idea what ‘in too deep’ is."
 
Zach of Cabbs  24:57
There is an iceberg here. There's a My Immortal iceberg here.
 
Haley Simpkiss  25:03
Oh, we're diving deep, guys.
 
Zach of Cabbs  25:06
Here we go.
 
Christina Kann  25:07
These videos were, yes, very, very, can confirm, very cringey singalongs. A good time.
 
Haley Simpkiss  25:16
For years, people just assumed. "Well, it's gotta be them! It's Tara and Raven! They talk about preps all the time. They're goths! I still can't tell if it's a joke, but there's no way it's not them." But they never mentioned the fic. They never really talked about Harry Potter at all. That seemed kind of weird to people. Around 2014, Tara resurfaced on the internet. People recognize her, and subsequently she is interviewed and reveals that Raven in those videos was her sister. Their real names were Sarah and Rachel. They had been cringey mall goths in middle school. At the point where they were making the videos, they'd stopped being that way. So the videos were them making fun of their younger selves.
 
Brooke Matherly  26:09
Yeah, there are no middle-aged to elderly mall goths. That's a thing everybody grows out of. You're not allowed to grow old as a mall goth.
 
Christina Kann  26:20
I feel like you have to move from the mall to Costco or something, and it's not as good anymore.
 
Brooke Matherly  26:24
You have to find a place that still has a mall, and that mall has to have a Hot Topic. It's a high bar to clear.
 
Zach of Cabbs  26:31
Hi, folks, from the future. Malls don't really exist anymore. That's something that was never expected in 2005, huh?
 
Haley Simpkiss  26:40
It was 2009 when they were making these videos, so they would have still been in high school. In 2014, people recognized her and said, "Holy shit. It's that girl. Were you the My Immortal bitch?" And she was like, "No, we honestly didn't even know that My Immortal existed when we made those videos." So that was debunked.
 
Haley Simpkiss  26:59
This is the big one, the Rose Christo debacle. Rose Christo "confessed" to authorship quietly on Tumblr in early 2017, but she didn't have that much of a following. It didn't really gain any traction; no one noticed.
 
A couple months later, a book called The Handbook for Mortals, a self-published YA novel, somehow hits the New York Times bestseller list—which is weird, because no one seems to have read it. So this becomes a huge mystery. A couple people actually buy it to see what's going on, and the book is so flagrantly terrible that readers started speculating that maybe this was the author of My Immortal. The author of this book, Lani Sarem, might be Tara.
 
Brooke Matherly  27:43
Publisher nerd note: Who published that book?
 
Haley Simpkiss  27:46
She self-published it, and it made it onto the New York Times bestseller list. As it turned out, she was calling around to bookstores who report their sales to the Times and buying huge bulk orders of her own book from them. That's a thing you can do. It's gaming the system.
 
Christina Kann  28:05
Oh, that's brilliant!
 
Zach of Cabbs  28:08
You all are in books; I'm in games. A few years ago, Steam opened up its restrictions. You no longer have to get your game greenlit by the community; anybody can just publish on Steam. You just put in the paperwork and pay the money, and boom, you're on Steam. So there are hundreds, if not thousands, of garbage games released on the platform literally every day, and it's impossible to find anything decent. Is it like that at all in the book industry?
 
Haley Simpkiss  28:35
Well, self-publishing. Yeah.
 
Christina Kann  28:38
There are a lot of bad books, but I don't think it's ever hard to find the good ones.
 
Brooke Matherly  28:43
I think that's only true if you're just casting randomly through Amazon. If you type "books" into the Amazon search bar, you may end up in that scenario.
 
Zach of Cabbs  28:53
Don't sort books by New > All? Is that what you're saying?
 
Christina Kann  28:56
I'm going to take this opportunity to plug Storygraph again. I find out what books are good by turning to my peers and seeing what they have said.
 
Zach of Cabbs  29:10
Oh, dope.
 
*Zach’s power cuts off*
 
Christina Kann  29:11
Oh my god.
 
Zach of Cabbs  29:12
I lost power.
 
Haley Simpkiss  29:13
Oh, God.
 
Christina Kann  29:16
That's very dramatic.
 
Zach of Cabbs  29:18
It's not coming back!
 
Christina Kann  29:19
We might lose you. That would be very goffick.
 
*Zach’s power comes back*
 
Zach of Cabbs  29:22
Okay, it's back. It's back for now. It should be okay.
 
Christina Kann  29:28
So dramatic!
 
Brooke Matherly  29:30
Narrow miss.
 
Zach of Cabbs  29:31
I was about to light a candle and say, "Play me off like I'm on the Titanic!" But please continue. I'm riveted.
 
Haley Simpkiss  29:39
People start thinking Lani Sarem might be Tara Gillespie.
 
Christina Kann  29:43
Wait, who?
 
Haley Simpkiss  29:44
Lani Sarem is the person who wrote Handbook for Mortals, which made it onto the New York Times Bestseller list. It was so bad that people thought maybe this is Tara Gillespie.
 
At this point, Rose Christo, who is also a self-published YA author, comes forward and says, "No, it's not her. It's me!" Also, she announces in this refutation that her tell-all memoir is being published by Macmillan. She has provided evidence to them; she has a flash drive with the first 11 unedited chapters.
 
Brooke Matherly  30:20
Wait, wait, wait, that was a bombshell. There was editing done to this?
 
Haley Simpkiss  30:24
Yeah, that's what Raven was doing!
 
Zach of Cabbs  30:28
That's why the first 15 chapters are at all legible.
 
Christina Kann  30:31
That's the thing! There wasn't just one of these people. There were two of them making this happen.
 
Zach of Cabbs  30:38
This is like My Favorite Murder but for fanfiction.
 
Haley Simpkiss  30:42
That's what it feels like! The reason Rose Christo is writing this memoir about writing My Immortal is because she claims that she is a Native American Cree childhood sexual abuse survivor, who wrote My Immortal as part of an effort to find the younger brother who she’d lost in the foster care system. How, you might ask?
 
Christina Kann  31:09
How???
 
Brooke Matherly  31:10
Wait wait wait. She wrote My Immortal to find the brother, or she wrote her memoir to find him?
 
Haley Simpkiss  31:16
She wrote My Immortal looking for her brother.
 
Zach of Cabbs  31:19
There's that one part in Chapter 5 where she goes, "Hey, I have a brother. His name is Andrew. I really want to find him. Please dial this number if you've seen him!" I remember it like it was yesterday. It was only part of the book that made any sense.
 
Haley Simpkiss  31:31
You guys didn't catch that one line?
 
Zach of Cabbs  31:35
You gotta read between the lines. Subtext.
 
Haley Simpkiss  31:38
A couple of weeks later, someone contacts a Kiwi Farms forum that is dedicated to debunking stuff—admittedly, it's a pretty shady forum—claiming to be said brother. He apparently provided proof to the mods sufficient for them to believe that he was the brother. He claimed that not only had he and his sister never been in the foster care system, but they were white as hell.
 
Christina Kann  32:03
That's not surprising.
 
Haley Simpkiss  32:05
Yeah, because everything about that story sounded like it was specially crafted to gain as much unquestioning support from the user base of Tumblr in 2017 as humanly possible. She loses the book deal, obviously. Here's the thing, though: The brother did say that, as a teenager, she liked making fun of bad fanfiction, and she also liked to go by Tara. So she might have honestly been the author.
 
Zach of Cabbs  32:38
Booooo!
 
Brooke Matherly  32:38
But in that scenario, we would be assuming that she was doing this as a joke.
 
Haley Simpkiss  32:43
Yes.
 
Brooke Matherly  32:44
This would be a troll scenario. I said "troll"; you all drink.
 
Christina Kann  32:48
Oh, Brooke, no.
 
Brooke Matherly  32:51
I don't drink alcohol, for the listeners at home. So...
 
Christina Kann  32:54
I told her to have water ready.
 
Haley Simpkiss  32:56
Chaos!
 
Christina Kann  32:56
You're gonna be so hydrated, bitch.
 
Zach of Cabbs  32:58
You're gonna be like, "Tina I need a break! I need to pee!"
 
Haley Simpkiss  33:00
I am going to need a new drink soon. While the court documents she provided to Macmillan to prove the whole foster care story were proven indeed to be photoshopped, nothing could really be proven one way or the other about the flash drive. It was clearly a flash drive from 2006, but was the file on there legitimate? Who's to say? I actually looked on Rose Christo's Amazon page as part of the deep dive I did on this, and her bio has been updated, basically saying, "Hey, so a lot of people over the last few years have been asking me ‘What happened?’ And ‘Are you okay?’ And I'm just popping in here to say a couple years ago, I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which probably comes as no surprise to the people in my life, but now that I'm medicated, yeah, that makes sense. So I'm sorry about everything. And I am going to be keeping out of the public eye from now on." Here's the thing though: she doesn't confirm one way or the other whether she wrote it!!!
 
Brooke Matherly  34:05
Wait, wait, wait, hold on. If she was faking this, and she had 11 unedited chapters on a thumb drive, we are to assume that in pursuit of an elaborate ruse, she took the first 11 chapters of My Immortal, went in, and made it intentionally shittier?
 
Zach of Cabbs  34:27
Added passages about her clothing choices into the novel. "In addition to this, I was also wearing..."
 
Brooke Matherly  34:38
That was an outfit description, and you guys have to drink.
 
Zach of Cabbs  34:40
Oh, shit. Yeah, you're right, fuck!
 
Christina Kann  34:41
Thank you so much, Brooke. Love you, babe. I really appreciate it.
 
Brooke Matherly  34:44
I'm here for you.
 
Zach of Cabbs  34:46
I think you're onto something there, because that feels like an Occam's razor situation. It has to be the simpler thing. It doesn't even feel like she was a Harry Potter fan. She just watched Harry Potter and thought Daniel Radcliffe and Malfoy were hot, and she was like, "I'm gonna write a fanfic where I get to date both of them!"
 
Brooke Matherly  35:10
Here's how I know she was young: at no point was she like, "The obvious answer to this scenario is a threesome." She's like, "I guess I have to do both of them at the same time?"
 
Zach of Cabbs  35:21
"Well, they have to fight over me!"
 
Haley Simpkiss  35:23
Also everyone except her is bi, but also she's super homophobic. I am going to get another drink because the last one is an honorable mention, but it is weird.
 
Zach of Cabbs  35:34
The character says she's bi, anyway, at multiple points.
 
Brooke Matherly  35:40
I kept going, thinking, "Surely this ends in a threesome." They got so close with the sex tape scenario, and then it just didn't happen. You can take two dicks at once. It's nice. I highly recommend it.
 
Zach of Cabbs  35:55
It feels like the culmination of all of this would be that. You write the first 30 chapters so you can write the double dickin' scene, and that never happens. It's anticlimactic.
 
Christina Kann  36:08
Haley, what are you drinking?
 
Haley Simpkiss  36:09
What do you think?
 
Christina Kann  36:11
Wicked Grove!
 
Zach of Cabbs  36:14
I'm just drinking margarita mix and a lot of tequila.
 
Christina Kann  36:18
That's called a margarita, my man.
 
Zach of Cabbs  36:19
It is called a margarita, but it's in a very unsexy non-margarita mug.
 
Christina Kann  36:24
I'm drinking Winking Owl brand chardonnay. That's $2.74, I think, per bottle.
 
Zach of Cabbs  36:32
The size of the mug that this is in makes it look like I have a problem.
 
Brooke Matherly  36:37
You look like an alcoholic teacher right now.
 
Zach of Cabbs  36:41
Shut up! I got these papers to grade! I ain't got time for this shit.
 
Brooke Matherly  36:45
You look like you showed up to your class, kicked your feet up on the desk, and were like, "Look, kids, American history is bullshit."
 
Zach of Cabbs  36:52
I was like Jack Black in School of Rock, just like, "Oh god, who's got food?"
 
Haley Simpkiss  37:01
All right, last one.
 
Christina Kann  37:03
Where are we?
 
Haley Simpkiss  37:03
We are on our honorable mention.
 
Zach of Cabbs  37:07
The season three finale of the anime! Pay attention.
 
Haley Simpkiss  37:12
One of the resources I looked to during this was a YouTuber called Sarah Z, who a little over a year ago made a video talking about the whole Rose Christo thing and also the Acid Bath Sisters and the whole mystery.
 
Zach of Cabbs  37:26
Big shout out to Sarah Z. She has several videos on Homestuck that are incredibly cool.
 
Haley Simpkiss  37:35
I have never gotten into Homestuck, and I am scared.
 
Zach of Cabbs  37:44
Neither have I, but the people who tried to make the Homestuck game threatened her with legal action because of the journalism she did on the game. It's a crazy story. Anyway, check out Sarah Z. She's great.
 
Haley Simpkiss  37:52
Apparently this happens to her a lot, because not long after she posted that video, someone contacted her claiming to be the author and calling himself Todd Gillespie. He had some answers to some of her questions, but he consistently ducked a lot of timeline and account access questions. Sarah Z started looking deeper and got involved with another YouTuber, Red Bard. They got together and did some In True Blood shit. I won't get into the full details, but you guys can watch here if you have two free hours. Their digging revealed a whole mess involving Bible fanfiction—which is a thing—as well as over 20 sock puppet identities Todd had used to troll himself over the last couple of decades, plus a recurring character named Gareth Vandersweld.
 
Zach of Cabbs  37:56
Anybody who spends that much time fucking with people on the internet is trolling themselves. Let's be honest.
 
Haley Simpkiss  39:07
Every fandom community that he's in is like 90% just him.
 
Brooke Matherly  39:13
The thing that keeps coming up with all of these supposed authors is that mental illness has always existed, and one of the dark things about the internet is that it's become a form of entertainment, where we follow these people who are obviously not doing well, and they can garner attention and some sort of satisfaction by giving in completely to whatever it is that is ailing them instead of taking active steps to better their lives.
 
Christina Kann  39:47
Well said.
 
Haley Simpkiss  39:48
Yeah, you're absolutely right. That's kind of how that video ends, after she found out this was all the same dude. It's Todd all the way down.
 
Zach of Cabbs  39:59
Well, that's it for the podcast, everybody. We'll see you next time.
 
Brooke Matherly  40:03
Thank you for joining us for this very special episode.
 
Haley Simpkiss  40:06
He is definitely not the author, but he is probably the person who hacked the account in 2008 after it was deleted, and he might have even been the person to delete it. They found him; they did not give his information away, but they did find him. In real life, he is apparently a 28-year-old musician from New Zealand. A lot of people have claimed to be the author over the years; he's at least two of them.
 
Brooke Matherly  40:33
Whoa, wait, who was the second one?
 
Zach of Cabbs  40:36
Too late. We're moving on!
 
Haley Simpkiss  40:37
He claimed it in 2008 around the time of the account hacking, and I think he did it again in 2011, but nobody paid attention. Now people have started talking about My Immortal again, particularly Sarah Z and her video. It sounds like he's trying to hop on that bandwagon. So yeah, that's Todd.
 
Christina Kann  40:55
I see. That's so much lore, honestly.
 
Haley Simpkiss  40:59
Yeah, there's a lot!
 
Zach of Cabbs  41:00
Yeah, it's a dump. Like Haley was saying, the Sarah Z videos, which I highly recommend, are extremely informative. Even if you've never heard of this fanfic, by the end, you will be sitting there riveted, saying, "I need to know!"
 
Haley Simpkiss  41:14
Yep. That's an overview of the lore as short and sweet as I could possibly make it.
 
Christina Kann  41:21
And well done.
 
Haley Simpkiss  41:21
Thank you. I'm really sorry, guys. But now you know.
 
Christina Kann  41:24
Thank you for taking us on this ride.
 
Haley Simpkiss  41:27
You're very welcome. So let's talk the story. Insofar as there's a story.
 
Zach of Cabbs  41:33
There's a story? I'm sorry. You said a story?
 
Haley Simpkiss  41:36
Let's talk the string of events.
 
Zach of Cabbs  41:40
I want to start by saying that I have gotten a lot of unironic enjoyment out of this fanfic over the years. In college, I would gather a crowd of 8 to 10 people in the common room of my Hogwarts house, as it were, the common areas of the campus, just gathering a crowd doing a dramatic reading of My Immortal off my laptop. Very fun memories that I have from this truly awful, awful, awful fanfiction.
 
Christina Kann  42:08
Haley, you first presented this to me with a similar little story about reading it with Willow and Emma, right?
 
Haley Simpkiss  42:16
Yes, I think it was Willow who told me about it because she used to lovingly make fun of me for reading fanfiction.
 
Christina Kann  42:25
But this one has a character named Willow, so she had to check it out.
 
Brooke Matherly  42:28
Important distinction for the listeners: We're talking about Haley's sister, not the infamous character who gets written off unceremoniously.
 
Zach of Cabbs  42:37
I'm here to announce my new secret sleeper podcast, The Rejected Section, where we read one chapter of My Immortal each week until it is over.
 
Brooke Matherly  42:49
And then you start again, because it's fucking immortal.
 
Zach of Cabbs  42:53
That should be the title of the episode, The Rejected Section.
 
Brooke Matherly  42:58
No, seriously, what if you did that? You just kept doing it over and every time you got to the end, you just started back at the beginning and kept doing it until you went insane.
 
Haley Simpkiss  43:06
Brooke, that sounds exactly as pathological as Todd!
 
Zach of Cabbs  43:13
There's a podcast called The Worst Idea of All Time where they watched Grown Ups 2 over and over again every week for a year, and they slowly descend into madness because it's such a nothing movie.
 
Haley Simpkiss  43:32
To what end?
 
Brooke Matherly  43:33
Haley, Haley, Haley, Haley, excuse you. You just read roughly 45 minutes of My Immortal lore off notecards. You don't get to make that concerned face at the fact that someone made a decent podcast.
 
Christina Kann  43:45
Here's how I took notes for this episode: I put the text into a Google Doc and just started highlighting stuff. So I'm just gonna start scrolling on through. I highlighted some stuff that we've mentioned already. We've mentioned a lot of things.
 
Zach of Cabbs  43:58
The way I took notes was I had the fic open in a separate window, and I was listening to the Internet Historian do a dramatic reading of it.
 
Brooke Matherly  44:06
I did the same thing!
 
Zach of Cabbs  44:08
Every time he made me laugh, I would pause it and go to that section and copy and paste it into a notepad.
 
Brooke Matherly  44:14
I listened to the Internet Historian's dramatic reading of this "work" as well. It's worth a watch. I would say it's the preferred way to experience this. I couldn't make it far reading it. My brain wouldn't relax enough to just take the words in. When you're reading, you're not reading every word. You look at words, and your brain's like, "We got it." Although I have heard that’s not the way everybody reads. Sorry. That's like a fun psychology thing.
 
Christina Kann  44:56
We have been known to be a little elitist about reading here.
 
Brooke Matherly  45:01
No, there are two ways people process the concept of reading. Some people actually take in every single word, and then some people can visually scan a sentence and their brain just kind of downloads the information. I've read a couple of psychological studies about this. The way you read determines a lot about the way you speak and the way you take in information. It's not even an elitist thing. My husband, for example, is also a very avid reader, but he reads every single word when he's reading.
 
Zach of Cabbs  45:38
But y'all are in publication. So this is almost like Icarus flying too close to the sun for you. It's like, "I can't look directly at it, or I will hurt my eyes."
 
Brooke Matherly  45:50
I tried reading it, and my brain just couldn't get to the point where I stopped seeing every individual word. And when I was looking at every individual word, it made even less sense. It wasn't even coming together at all. I was just like, "Da—cuz—fangs. What is—fucking—black. Black, black, black, black."
 
Haley Simpkiss  46:13
The idea of a codified language where every word is spelled the same every single time you write it is kind of a new concept. If you read old medieval manuscripts, people just wrote shit out phonetically. Most people didn't read in their heads; most people read out loud, if they were going to read, or at least moved their lips. So you were following along anyway like this.
 
Brooke Matherly  46:41
But this is not phonetic. This does follow a codified language that existed on the internet in certain communities in the early 2000s.
 
Zach of Cabbs  46:50
Are you saying Tara was raised by wolves or something?
 
Brooke Matherly  46:55
I think Tara was born in the storeroom of a Hot Topic and then crawled out fully formed in a corset.
 
Haley Simpkiss  47:03
I think that Tara, whoever she was, was born into a relatively Christian, normie-ass household and really resented it. She wanted to be a cool, sexy goth and rebel against everything her family was doing, but she had no resources for it. So she was just like, "I'm just going to put everything that I think is cool in here. This is what goths do."
 
Brooke Matherly  47:31
The thing that really hits me about this entire thing is the outfit descriptions, which we've already touched on. I really want to break this down for a second. Haley, could you just do a brief reading of just an outfit? I know we kind of did at the beginning. But does anyone have one bookmarked?
 
Christina Kann  47:39
Drink.
 
Zach of Cabbs  47:51
After the fifth or sixth one, the Internet Historian just fast forwards through them. It's really funny.
 
Haley Simpkiss  47:55
I've got one from chapter two.
 
I got out of my coffin and took of my giant MCR t-shirt which I used for pajamas. Instead, I put on a black leather dress, a pentagram necklace, combat boots and black fishnets on. I put on four pairs of earrings in my pierced ears, and put my hair in a kind of messy bun.
 
Brooke Matherly  48:18
When I was first writing as a child, I was not into goth culture, but this is exactly what my descriptions of characters read like 100% of the time. The most important thing the reader needs to know is exactly what this dress looks like.
 
Zach of Cabbs  48:36
If they don't know, how will they picture my character? They'll have no clothes on! That's awkward.
 
Haley Simpkiss  48:40
That is something that's important to examine about My Immortal. Why is this considered the worst fanfiction ever? Obviously, that's hyperbole, but I've read a lot of pretty bad fanfiction, and the thing that makes this one stand out is that it's textbook. Every single thing that could ever make a fanfiction bad is in this.
 
Zach of Cabbs  49:03
Literally all the awful tropes are here.
 
Haley Simpkiss  49:05
For example, the fact that it has basically nothing to do with the original story and none of the characters have any resemblance to their actual characters.
 
Zach of Cabbs  49:15
I think deeper than that, it shows a profound disrespect for the source material. It simply does not care about the source material. It doesn't value it; it doesn't find any enjoyment in it. It needs to rearrange all of it to make it palatable to the author. That's the bad taste it puts in everyone's mouth.
 
Brooke Matherly  49:35
There’s also the outfit descriptions, especially the fact that every single person is wearing a band t-shirt almost always.
 
Christina Kann  49:43
It's one of my favorite things about this.
 
Zach of Cabbs  49:44
I love going to those Hogsmeade MCR concerts, hell yeah!
 
Brooke Matherly  49:48
This immediately flashed me back to when my very first girlfriend wanted a Cradle of Filth t-shirt for her birthday. This was my first significant other, and I was very, very hell-bent on getting this right. I got to Hot Topic—because of course—and there were three Cradle of Filth t-shirts. I had literally never listened to Cradle of Filth in my life. I didn't know metal music at all. This Hot Topic employee was asking me questions about my girlfriend, and I was trying to explain what was going on so I could select the correct one. In the end, I got the wrong album cover, and she let me know that. She still wore the t-shirt; she still thought it was really cool to have; whatever, she was still excited.
 
Zach of Cabbs  50:45
I 100% would have just gotten the one I thought looked the coolest.
 
Brooke Matherly  50:49
They all looked like garbage to me. They all looked like a baby puke with red lettering.
 
Zach of Cabbs  50:54
Oh, I can picture it. My mind went right to what you're talking about.
 
Haley Simpkiss  50:58
But also, Hot Topic employees do be that way. They will try to help you.
 
Brooke Matherly  51:04
They'll absolutely try to help you. The person who was talking to me was literally just like, "Okay, what albums does she have in the car? What do the covers look like? Does any of this imagery look familiar to you?" And I was looking at the Hot Topic wall of band t-shirts, and I was just like, "Everything's blank. Everything's blank."
 
Haley Simpkiss  51:23
"All of them look like barbed wire fences. I don't know!"
 
Zach of Cabbs  51:26
Every time I walked into a Hot Topic as a kid, I was like, "Am I gonna buy a t-shirt or are we gonna play laser tag? This is such a weird atmosphere. I don't understand it."
 
Haley Simpkiss  51:35
I miss old-school Hot Topic.
 
Brooke Matherly  51:37
I went in for—and this is another thing that got brought up in this fanfic—hair spray paint. You could temporarily change the color of your hair, and purple hair spray paint featured prominently in my young adult life. Now I'm old enough that I go pay $300 to get someone to permanently dye my hair purple, and that's the kind of character progression I've been on.
 
Zach of Cabbs  51:57
That's what they call an arc.
 
Christina Kann  52:04
I'm looking through my highlighted selections. I highlighted the first time the text casually mentioned, "And then I went and slit my wrists." I was like, "Woo, red alert!" but then you quickly get desensitized.
 
Brooke Matherly  52:16
There's a point where the author says, "I went to slit my wrist and party with Draco and Vampire in the common room." I thought, "Oh, wow, those things are not connected."
 
Christina Kann  52:31
Well, it's like the most goffick thing that you're a vampire, so you slit your wrists, and it doesn't even really do anything.
 
Brooke Matherly  52:41
There's a point where she does it and then she takes a straw and drinks from her own wrist.
 
Zach of Cabbs  52:46
Get it? Because vampires drink blood? That should be the way canonically a vampire turns into a zombie, by drinking their own blood.
 
Brooke Matherly  52:56
I like that and also I'm mad that this didn't feature at all in The Twilight Saga.
 
Haley Simpkiss  53:01
Apparently Tara, toward the end, was getting into Twilight.
 
Brooke Matherly  53:05
You can tell!
 
Haley Simpkiss  53:07
There's a similarly bad Twilight fanfiction out there that people think she might also have written.
 
Christina Kann  53:17
I seent it.
 
Haley Simpkiss  53:18
The three lines that my sisters and I still quote at each other to this day are:

• "What da hell are you doing you motherfukers?" spoken by Dumbledore
• "OMFG! NOOOOO! MY SCAR HURTS!” spoken by Vampire, and
• "I hath telekinesis,” spoken by Tom Bombadil.

 
Christina Kann  53:45
I can't stop laughing.
 
Zach of Cabbs  53:47
I would love to read three short paragraphs that I think encapsulate why so many people hate this fanfic so much. I think it is the perfect passage.
 
Haley Simpkiss  53:59
Go for it.
 
Zach of Cabbs  54:00
“Its so unfair!” I yielded. “Why can’t I just be ugly or plain like all da other girls and preps here except for B’loody Mary, because she’s not ugly or anything.”
 
“Why would you wanna be ugly? I don’t like the preps anyway. They are such fucking sluts.” answered Draco.
 
“Yeah but everyone is in love with me! Like Snape and Loopin took a video of me naked. Hargrid says he’s in love with me. Vampire likes me and now even Snaketail is in love with me! I just wanna be with you ok Draco! Why couldn’t Satan have made me less beautiful?” I shouted angrily. (an” don’t wory enoby isn’t a snob or anyfing but a lot of ppl hav told her shes pretty) “Im good at too many things! WHY CAN’T I JUST BE NORMAL? IT’S A FUCKING CURSE!” I shouted and then I ran away.
 
Christina Kann  54:54
Oh, dear.
 
Brooke Matherly  54:55
To me, that's an early Twilight bleed, quite frankly.
 
Christina Kann  54:59
Yes. You did highlight one thing I noted consistently throughout this. The dialogue tags are really, really, really hilarious.
 
Brooke Matherly  55:11
They read like someone who speaks English as a second language.
 
Christina Kann  55:15
And who has been told that stylistically you shouldn't use the word "said." Here's my next comment. They make a lot of fun of Hilary Duff in this. First of all, the book I'm reading right now was written by Hilary Duff, or at least conceptualized by Hilary Duff. Also, when I was 12 or 13 years old, my dad bought me Hilary Duff concert tickets for my birthday. It was right when I was just a little too edgy for that, Dad. But he got them for me, and he was really proud. So I took my friend Laney, who was even more goffick than me—I'm not even being funny, she really was. At the concert, Hilary Duff was wearing the same fishnet gloves that Laney was wearing, and Laney was like, "Fuck this!" and threw them down on the floor and stomped away.
 
Brooke Matherly  56:08
Guys, being a teenager is awful.
 
Haley Simpkiss  56:10
It really is. Zach read that whole thing, and that's the kind of line where you could very well hear that and think, "Okay, this is someone being ridiculous on purpose." But then you remember what being 13 was like, especially if you have the experience of being a 13-year-old girl. And it's not unbelievable.
 
Brooke Matherly  56:34
Especially being a 13-year-old girl during this phase in the culture. I dabbled on the edges of this entire aesthetic. I never went full in.
 
Zach of Cabbs  56:46
I was deep in the paint.
 
Brooke Matherly  56:49
Hold on. Did you do the just-back-of-the-head spiky? You know what I mean? Like the halo spike?
 
Haley Simpkiss  56:55
The Sasuke hair?
 
Christina Kann  56:56
That would look good on you, Zach!
 
Zach of Cabbs  56:57
Who, me? No. No, I was deep in the paint of nerdom, not gothicism.
 
Brooke Matherly  57:04
I was on the edge, the raw corners, of the mall goth aesthetic. I went to a lot of punk rock shows. I did a lot of mosh pits in my day. I went to Warped Tour.
 
Christina Kann  57:26
That is so cool.
 
Zach of Cabbs  57:28
I definitely was a post-hardcore brat, but I never really adopted the aesthetic myself. I was always a t-shirt and jeans guy.
 
Haley Simpkiss  57:37
I was always meant to be a t-shirt and jeans kind of person, but I did have a little bit of an emo phase in middle school/high school. My friends were all cooler and better at it and had parents who actually would buy them clothes from Hot Topic. It wasn't that my parents said, "Absolutely not. No, never." It was just expensive, and they didn't like going to the mall.
 
Brooke Matherly  58:04
I blame Hot Topic and this general time period for two things: Adult Twilight fans. The people who were adults at the time Twilight came out and were getting full back tattoos of Edward's eyes. Hot Topic went super hard on Twilight stuff when it first came out. And the other thing I blame it for is adult women who are way too into the Nightmare Before Christmas.
 
Christina Kann  58:30
Yeah. I'm with you on that one.
 
Brooke Matherly  58:33
There are a few things in this world that I consider to be true warning flag tattoos outside of your basic confederate flag bullshit. A full sleeve of Nightmare Before Christmas tells me exactly who you have been, who you are now, and where you are going.
 
Christina Kann  58:51
I feel like that's not even the first time you've brought this up on the show.
 
Brooke Matherly  58:54
It might not be. It's a deeply held belief of mine.
 
Haley Simpkiss  58:57
It is one of Enoby's favorite movies, right up there with Corpse Bride.
 
Brooke Matherly  59:03
Of course! Like, of course. Regarding the question of is it parody or is it real? Every last bit of this is stuff that makes you think, "Of course it's there. It makes sense that it's there. It makes sense that her favorite movie is Corpse Bride." That was 100% right for the time period. The My Chemical Romance t-shirts; even the fact that you would go and specifically get a really big one to sleep in. It was 100% a thing. All of this stuff is so perfectly fitted together with the actual way that it was that it either has to be a masterful troll--drink—or it has to be someone who was honestly doing this. I fall back every time on someone who was honestly doing this because I knew people who would have done this.
 
Zach of Cabbs  59:58
This is either someone who was briefly into this for a few years and did it in earnest, or an elaborate troll who has spent literally every day of the past decade fooling everyone into thinking that My Immortal is real.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:00:12
And I don't think it's worth that. You know what I mean? It would be different if there was any money involved, if there was any actual fame involved. If there was any way to spin it, I think someone would have spun it by now. Because if you can do this, there's a writing job on television for you somewhere. But I don't think that's what happened. I think this is genuine, and it was a very short-lived period in someone's life.
 
Christina Kann  1:00:38
I want to talk briefly about the way that sex is described in this.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:00:43
Please do.
 
Christina Kann  1:00:45
I have a selection highlighted.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:00:46
Please read it.
 
Christina Kann  1:00:46
Then he put his thingie into my you-know-what and we did it for the first time.
 
And I think that's her losing her virginity.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:00:47
Yeah. That's right before WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING YOU MOTHERFUKERS!
 
Christina Kann  1:00:54
Yeah, two lines in front of it. But that part, to me, makes it feel more authentic. I think that it was someone who was simply too young to be writing about sex but still was glorifying sex
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:01:13
A little bonus is that she forgot the second F so it sounds almost biblical.
 
He took of my clothes, and I took of my bra.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:01:26
Zach, since we were watching the same rendition of this, did you happen to highlight the part in the Internet Historian video of this where it's maybe the third time they have sex, when they're in Draco's car, and they're talking about his tool, and the Internet Historian does probably one of the funniest things that he does in this entire video. He has a drill going into a toolbox, and it just starts vibrating aggressively as the drill turns on.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:01:56
I was listening to it while I was working, so I don't think I caught a lot of the visuals.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:02:00
Same. The imagery that the text is using is something around like tools and then like spinning around. That was a particularly strong sex image to me that sounded like someone who had been told by—back to Haley's point—incredibly conservative Christian parents what sex is, so that that base is covered, and you can tell them never to do it. You know what I mean? "He's gonna take his 'tool' and you have a 'toolbox.'"
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:02:42
"Listen, dicks??? They spin at 60 RPMs and they will tear you up! Don't do it!"
 
Brooke Matherly  1:02:50
The language of "his thing in my you-know-what" is like exactly like an awkward Christian mom trying to explain just enough about sex so that you know what it is enough to not do it.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:03:02
"He put his hoo-ha and my heehee."
 
Christina Kann  1:03:05
Yes, the sex talk seemed very immature to me.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:03:08
Wait, one more note: my grandma the entire time we were growing up referred to them as "woozies" and "doozies."
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:03:14
Which was the woozy and which was the doozy?
 
Brooke Matherly  1:03:16
You know which one was the woozy and which one was the doozy. Think about it for a second.
 
Christina Kann  1:03:19
"Woo" for woman.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:03:19
And "doozy" for "dick"!
 
Christina Kann  1:03:25
I can't emphasize this enough: teach children what body parts are called.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:03:29
So important.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:03:30
BDE: big doozy energy.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:03:36
That's gonna be a t-shirt. We need to make that a t-shirt.
 
Christina Kann  1:03:40
Another thing I noticed throughout was the very funny disses that get thrown around.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:03:47
They're also good.
 
Christina Kann  1:03:48
Right in front of me I have highlighted "you ludicrous fools" and "you mediocre dunces!"
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:03:53
I love "you mediocre dunces."
 
Brooke Matherly  1:03:55
Dunderhead? Dunderhead comes up a lot.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:03:59
I'm surprised there wasn't some religion born out of "Let's decipher this fanfic and find out what the secret message is being told here."
 
Christina Kann  1:04:06
Is that not what we're doing right now?
 
Brooke Matherly  1:04:08
What if Tara was a prophet and this is the latest iteration of the Bible?
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:04:12
Oh god.
 
Christina Kann  1:04:15
Oh man. "We started frenching passively." I think it means passionately.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:04:22
I like the passively.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:04:25
Between this and the other author whose works are discussed on this podcast, this author is still the less hateable one.
 
Christina Kann  1:04:36
An interesting and earnest backstory. I also like this one: "We started to make out keenly." I feel like more makeouts should be super keen, you know?
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:04:44
Oh, super keen. I was keen on that makeout, okay?
 
Brooke Matherly  1:04:48
Also, on an intimate level, I connect to the idea of just having sex passively on occasion. Just like, "Hey, look like we're gonna make out. It's gonna be real passive."
 
Christina Kann  1:04:59
We've all been there.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:05:01
We're both on our phones.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:05:07
We've both realized that it's been too long and we're gonna do this, but we're aware that this is putting in some maintenance. This is an oil change in the relationship.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:05:18
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.
 
Christina Kann  1:05:29
Oh my god. I highlighted that because I think it was her first glaringly homophobic statement. I was like "Red alert!"
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:05:35
Can we discuss the dialogue tags on the following exchange?
 
“I’m so sorry.” he said in a shy voice.
“That’s all right. What’s your name?” I questioned.
“My name’s Harry Potter, although most people call me Vampire these days.” he grumbled.
“Why?” I exclaimed.
“Because I love the taste of human blood.” he giggled.
“Well, I am a vampire.” I confessed.
“Really?” he whimpered.
“Yeah.” I roared.
 
Christina Kann  1:06:05
"Whimpered" and "roared." Those are both such strong words that seem wildly inappropriate for the situation, both equally in different directions.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:06:15
Can we talk about the fact that Harry's pentagram isn't a real pentagram? He at one point admits to having just makeup'd over it, and then the scar comes shining back through.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:06:30
Who changed the star for him?
 
Brooke Matherly  1:06:32
Whatever Ron's analogous character is. It's a real left-field word. I forget what it is.
 
Christina Kann  1:06:41
I LOLed when it came time to describe Lord Voldemort.
 
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.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:06:58
Not the book, because books are lame, and I didn't read them.
 
Christina Kann  1:07:01
It was…… Voldemort!
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:07:04
It'd be like if I was doing my mythology retelling—which is so popular these days; everybody's gotta have a myth retelling—and I did Hercules and I was like, "He had a swirly leather skirt thing and a tank top, you know, like the Disney version of Hercules. It was Hercules!"
 
Christina Kann  1:07:29
That's a good parallel analogy example.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:07:35
Good job. These drinks are strong.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:07:38
She frequently uses "shot" or "shooted" as a dialogue tag.
 
Christina Kann  1:07:44
Yes, I love that. It's adorable.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:07:46
Also, people just keep shooting each other in this. Blade shows up at one point.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:07:50
Also there are a lot of guns.
 
Christina Kann  1:07:52
It gets very confusing.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:07:56
This was a very dramatic and extremely good moment from the internet historian version:
 
“Abra Kedavra!” he yelled at Snape and Loopin pointing his womb. I took my gun and shot Snape and Loopin a gazillion times and they both started screaming and the camera broke. Suddenly, Dumblydore ran in. “Ebony, it has been revealed that someone has - NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” he shouted looking at Snape and Loopin and then he waved his wand and suddenly…"
 
And that's when Hagrid shows up, and he's like, "I'm a student!" Being shot a gazillion times on their wands while they try to take pervy pictures of Ebony is just like--
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:08:39
Oh, while Lupin is outside the window masticating, you mean?
 
Brooke Matherly  1:08:47
And then she addresses it. She clearly got some feedback or comments, and the next time she says in her author's note, "See? I spelled it right this time."
 
Christina Kann  1:08:58
She didn't spell it right, though.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:09:00
Every time she gets snarky with the reader about a spelling error she made, she misspells the word again. It's almost never actually corrected.
 
Christina Kann  1:09:09
Some people just like really don't give a shit about spelling whatsoever. We have to acknowledge that they exist. You know what I mean?
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:09:20
They are so indignant about the fact. They're like, "Why would you care that I'm spelling this word wrong five different ways? Fuck you and your elitist need to spell things right."
 
Brooke Matherly  1:09:33
Haley, this is a thing I need your expertise on. She keeps referencing in her author's notes for people to stop "flaming."
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:09:45
Yep.
 
Christina Kann  1:09:45
I had to google it.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:09:47
What are we talking about here?
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:09:49
This is a fanfiction.net OG terminology here.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:09:53
Fanfiction still kind of has its own set of terms, but back in the aughts, "flaming" just meant reviews. Porn was "lemons." It was all shit like that.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:10:10
It was more than just criticism. It was like, you're angry. "I'm angry that I sat there and read this whole thing."
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:10:19
Yeah. There were people who made entire hobbies out of just going around and sending flames to people.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:10:28
You read this as it was coming out. Is that accurate? Were people engaging with this heavily?
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:10:36
Yes.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:10:37
I remember the OG posting of this. I didn't follow it as it was coming out, but I definitely remember going to the OG link on fanfiction.net to read it.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:10:46
Yep, I definitely read this on fanfic.net.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:10:49
Okay, so what kind of crowd reaction was this getting? Can you walk us through that?
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:10:55
Just similarly poorly spelled. Some people were telling her in good faith, "Hey, this isn't really how Harry Potter works." Drink. There was one dude who had a form flame he used for everybody that was just like, "Your parents must be inbred clowns." Shit like that. It was stupid. It was stupid then, and it's stupid now. But it was a whole cultural thing on fanfiction.net in the bad old days.
 
Christina Kann  1:11:36
When you say "flamers," I think of in Avatar: the Last Airbender when he says "Flameo, hotman!"
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:11:42
I think that might honestly be part of the reason we stopped using that term. It's too easy.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:11:49
She also notes that she will continue writing if she gets a certain number of reviews.
 
Christina Kann  1:11:55
So yeah, hold them hostage. Make them hold themselves hostage.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:11:59
I will only release the next chapter if I get 15 good reviows.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:12:05
I'm just imagining a Game of Thrones situation, where in order to get more of the story, you have to vow yourself to fight to the death in the rink against the flamers for this. For the honor of this fanfic.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:12:18
I want to cut together excerpts of this that fit into haikus. Haikus of My Immortal, copyright Zachary Urtes. That's my idea. That's mine.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:12:26
You need to establish a Twitter account now, before this episode comes out.
 
Christina Kann  1:12:30
Get it quickly.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:12:33
That's part of the tragedy of this fanfic being taken down: no one's quite sure if it was taken down by the mods or if it was by a hacker. In 2008 there was this thing called, I think, Critics United. It was just a bunch of conservative Christians who would go around reporting any story they didn't like for any reason—"This has gay stuff." "This kind of talked about sex." "This character was wearing a revealing outfit!"—and report them to the mods.
 
Christina Kann  1:13:00
Wow, this checks all the boxes.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:13:02
I mean, you joke, but also it mentions Satan. Almost every chapter talks about how much all the characters love Satan. So a Christian person would be rightly perturbed.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:13:14
Yeah, it could very well have been something like that. But that's why people don't really use fanfiction.net anymore, because that happened, and then all of the porn got kicked off. Tale as old as time; song as old as rhyme.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:13:28
The dying ashes of both Tumblr and OnlyFans would like to speak to you right now.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:13:37
OnlyFans was saved, as far as I know.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:13:39
OnlyFans backpedaled, but no one's gonna fucking trust them as a platform now. There's 15 other platforms that popped up in the past week that everyone's fleeing to right now. OnlyFans is dead. Anyway, I'm mad—not because I watched a lot of porn, but because I care about sex workers.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:13:56
Oh, see, I was actually assuming it was because your OnlyFans was getting shut down.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:13:59
That's right! My feet pics are not getting any more traction. It's terrible.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:14:03
I was mad about the porn getting taken down.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:14:07
Amateur porn is better than produced porn every single day.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:14:09
You're right. That's the thing: There's some really good fanfiction out there. A lot of it is erotic. I can't read published erotic fiction because I know how much better stuff is out there for free.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:14:23
I want my porn to be produced and profited off of by the person that's doing the fuckin. That person doing the fuckin? They should be the one controlling their content.
 
Christina Kann  1:14:34
I want to talk about the music choices in this just a little bit. They talk about Good Charlotte a lot. They mention Simple Plan and Evanescence, obviously. But My Chemical Romance, I think, is The One. The song they mention by far the most is "Helena" by My Chemical Romance. I think they mention that a good 10 times. I personally fucking love that song. It's one of my favorite songs of all time. It's so good and sexy, and in fact, I've been known to say that if I had a daughter I'd name her Helena. Was it partially because the song made it sound cute? Maybe.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:15:34
Also, the music video was pretty good. I'm not really that into music genres; I don't know a lot about music. But Tara—Ebony—Enoby—goes on and on and on about how much of a goth she is. But "goth" is a genre of music, and almost none of the bands she's referencing are technically goth. They're mostly punk rock or emo.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:16:04
What Haley just did there was a little bit of gatekeeping for the music choices in My Immortal.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:16:16
It's no Cats (2019), but come on.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:16:19
This is just something that I read. Again, I know nothing about that stuff, but it's just another layer of this being incorrect.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:16:26
So you did correct yourself just there, and I do think we need to talk about this: Is this character's name actually Ebony or is it Enoby?
 
Christina Kann  1:16:35
I think it's Enoby?
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:16:39
If you ran a word search for Ebony versus Enoby, I think Enoby would outnumber it. On the official My Immortal wiki, it's used interchangeably.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:16:51
God, is this like a Berenstain Bears situation? Our universes are split between Ebony and Enoby?
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:16:58
No, no, no, no, because the Berenstain/Berenstein thing is a memory situation, whereas with this, you can see the disparity between chapters.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:17:12
What if the writer has been traveling between these two dimensions and is getting confused?
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:17:20
She's just a walking thin spot between dimensions?
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:17:24
Yes, she's constantly shifting between the planes. That's my new headcanon.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:17:31
That's where she is. That's why we can't find her. She's in the other reality. She's in the Enoby universe.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:17:36
In the other universe, perfect grammar sounds like a cringy horrible teen that doesn't know anything about how to write proper sentences.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:17:45
And over there, it's Berenstein Bears and Nelson Mandela's alive. Or dead. Where are we? Which reality are we in?
 
Brooke Matherly  1:17:54
We're in the worst one. We're in the worst reality.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:17:57
We're in the darkest timeline.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:17:58
We're 19 months into a pandemic. Afghanistan just imploded as a country.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:18:03
I made you all paper goatees to put on. We're all on the evilest, darkest timeline.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:18:08
We have rampant inflation. For some reason, it's not fixing anything. Our world is--
 
Christina Kann  1:18:14
Brooke, the patrons pay for these episodes. They have to be fun.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:18:18
Literally the whole world is on fire. Okay, let's move on. We're back in Hogwarts with the gothic people.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:18:22
Our patrons know the world is chaos.
 
Christina Kann  1:18:25
I just came across a particular dialogue tag that I highlighted. "Gadgeted"? "He gadgeted uncomfortably"? So that's a fun one.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:18:37
What was that? supposed? to be?
 
Brooke Matherly  1:18:44
I actually think that was a moment where one of the characters turned into one of the cars from Cars (2006). Because it was a car from the Cars universe, they had to be gadgeted back into reality. You know, sometimes you fiddle with the radio, you’re gadgeting it.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:18:59
Wait, did this character turn into the DeLorean? Because that did turn up at one point.
 
Christina Kann  1:19:03
That literally turned up!
 
Brooke Matherly  1:19:05
It's either that or Tow Mater. So...
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:19:08
When I was a young tweenage boy, I wanted to be a writer. And I wrote several manuscripts. I thought, "Hey, look, Christopher Paolini did it with Eragon, so I can be a kid writer too! I'm gonna start writing a book." And I thought, "Well, what's going to make my writing interesting? Whatever I'm interested in right the fuck now, obviously! So I'm just gonna take everything I'm interested in on this particular day and jam it into this chapter. And it's not gonna have anything to do with anything else. But it's interesting to me. So it must be interesting to the people who are going to read it." And I see that all over the place in My Immortal with how things just come and go and interests pass and fade. You almost get a sense for who this teenage girl is as she's writing this fanfiction.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:20:07
In all fairness, Moby Dick is also exactly like that. Also, side note, if you're someone who, at any point, particularly at your old age, starts thinking, "Maybe I'm gonna write a children's book"—there's more to it than watching a nature documentary about an interesting animal and coming up with a story where it lives in your hometown for no reason. That's just a thing that I feel like everyone should be aware of.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:20:35
Does it change your opinion if I can find an alliterative title?
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:20:39
No.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:20:39
What if it's Toby the Turtle or Doreen the Dolphin?
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:20:44
Nope.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:20:44
No one wants to read my story about Lucy the Elephant Blogger?
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:20:50
No, and no one wants to edit it either.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:20:53
It would actually be Eleanor the Elephant Blogger. Those are the rules of children's books with animals. I can't explain it.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:21:02
It's triumphelephant, that book.
 
Christina Kann  1:21:04
Oh, my God, way to bring it full circle. I don't know why I was thinking about this question, but does this text—and perhaps even the lore around it—pass the Bechdel Test?
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:21:18
Very good question.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:21:19
No.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:21:20
At some point, Tara and Raven have to talk about what they're wearing. Right?
 
Christina Kann  1:21:23
I think it does pass.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:21:26
What? When?
 
Christina Kann  1:21:29
Raven and Tara are part of the canon.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:21:33
Raven and Ebony have to talk about what they're wearing at some point.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:21:39
They don't, though. The only interactions Ebony has with another ostensibly female character is B'loody Mary. Okay, this is a technicality thing. They do talk about how hot they are to each other. Do we consider that passing the Bechdel Test, as it is technically not about men? Or is it not passing the Bechdel Test because it is clearly done within the context of the male gaze?
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:22:08
That's the most depressing feminist question I've ever heard in my entire life.
 
Christina Kann  1:22:12
You're right about that. I just feel like the Raven-and-author back-and-forth is also part of the canon of this narrative. And to me, that is what passes the Bechdel Test, because they're talking about craft and art.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:22:26
And the sweater! They argue about the sweater.
 
Christina Kann  1:22:29
Men don't come up except that they're in this story that they're writing together. But like, men pop up everywhere, you know? They have to be in the story. To me, that's how this passes the Bechdel Test.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:22:41
The feud over the sweater.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:22:42
Tara is clearly not a Harry Potter fan at all, and I see some choices when she went, "You know what? Fuck it. I want them all to be from Slytherin because Slytherin is the only cool one," or whatever. But we see little things that have to just be, "I watched this movie absentmindedly once, and I don't actually know." Mr. Norris and Fletch or whatever? Fletch is the name of the cat, and Mr. Norris is the name of the janitor who goes through the halls.
 
Christina Kann  1:23:15
Isn't it Filth?
 
Brooke Matherly  1:23:17
It's Filth, which I like better. Mr. Norris and Filth is the correct choice.
 
Christina Kann  1:23:27
How about the drug use in this? I highlighted this one sentence: "We did pot, coke and crack," with no Oxford comma.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:23:38
"Everything that my mom said would make me go to hell, I'm just gonna put it in here!"
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:23:44
"And then I masticated and my hands got hairy. Oh no!"
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:23:47
"And I went blind!"
 
Christina Kann  1:23:50
The next thing I highlighted was, "We had you-know-what to a Linkin Park Song."
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:23:55
Oh yeah, there are a couple of times where she's mad at Draco and then he just  drops to his knees and starts singing Good Charlotte at her until she forgives him.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:24:05
Here's the thing: if that had happened to me while I was in middle school in the middle of the hallway in between classes, I would have been like, "Yep, this is perfect. Life has peaked."
 
Christina Kann  1:24:16
I feel like I've been slowly laughing to the point of weeping this whole episode. I've been giggling so steadily.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:24:25
Are you guys aware of the "Again, weird, but not technically a sin" meme? Someone will talk about something very weird they did that's not morally wrong but definitely strange, and then someone will respond as a priest that this is being confessed to, "That's weird, but once again, that is not a sin." That was how I felt watching the Sarah Z videos about this just for two hours straight alone.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:25:06
There's this part here where Snake, who is referred to--
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:25:10
Or Snoop, or Snap?
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:25:14
Snake and Loopin were in da middle of da empty hall, doin it, and Dobby was watching!1
 
Brooke Matherly  1:25:23
Once again, this should have been a threesome.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:25:26
That scene got me to a half-mast. I'm not gonna lie. It was described so sexily that I couldn't help but become aroused.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:25:34
Why are Snape and Lupin always hanging out in this? It's like they're besties.
 
Christina Kann  1:25:38
I know! Here's the next thing I highlighted: "if ur a homophone den fuk of!" Okay, all homophones get out!
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:25:50
What is a homophone?
 
Brooke Matherly  1:25:51
It's two words that sound like each other.
 
Christina Kann  1:25:54
Like "sofa king" and "so fucking."
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:25:56
Oh, gotcha, gotcha. Interesting. So fucking fuck off.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:26:03
At some point, we must cut ourselves off.
 
Christina Kann  1:26:07
Yeah, it's time to wrap it up.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:26:10
You mean we're not gonna keep going for five more hours? I have more notes.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:26:14
This could be a separate level of Patreon content, where we just go through line by line. We would have two years' worth of content.
 
Christina Kann  1:26:23
There's so many layers here.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:26:24
No! Do not give the listeners ideas, Brooke. Don't give them ideas! They'll ask us to do it!
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:26:30
In college, I would read this fic until I’d have to go, "Okay, stop." And then I would rant about some particular thing. And then I would get back to reading, and then I would say, "Stop," and I would rant. And by two hours in, I would only be on chapter five.
 
Christina Kann  1:26:45
Okay, we're gonna wrap this up. But before we go, I want everyone to read one line that they like. Can we do that?
 
Brooke Matherly  1:26:53
I don't have the text in front of me.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:26:55
Hold on. I'm looking. I'm scanning through my favorites.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:27:02
There was a point where she was describing a dress with red lace all over it. And the problem was that I read that and thought, "Oh yeah, I know what you're talking about" immediately. I was like, "I know that goth dress."
 
Christina Kann  1:27:15
Yeah, that's the thing that I would give the award to in this: costume description. Really excellent; I could envision all of them very well.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:27:25
I am shocked that no one has done a Drunk-History-style, live action retelling of this. I have a passage to read.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:27:36
This passage comes from . . . Are you gonna give us our chapter and verse?
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:27:39
“Crookshanks!” I shouted at him. Voldemort fell of his broom and started to scream. I felt bad for him even though I’m a sadist so I stopped.
 
Christina Kann  1:27:56
Well done.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:27:57
I grabbed a steak and almost stuck it into my heart to commit suicide. I was so fucking depressed! I got out of the bathtub and put on a black low-cut dress with lace all over it sandly. I put on black high heels with pink metal stuff on the ends and six pairs of skull earrings. I couldn’t fucking believe it. Then I looked out the window and screamed… Snap was spying on me and he was taking a video tape of me! And Loopin was masticating to it! They were sitting on their broomsticks.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:28:39
So good. I feel inspired. I'm gonna go write. I'm gonna go work on my manuscript.
 
Christina Kann  1:28:46
Wait, I have to compose myself so I can read mine.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:28:50
Don't laugh or you lose. If Christina laughs, we all drink.
 
Christina Kann  1:28:54
*cackling and weeping constantly*
 
“Oh my fucking god, where’s Draco!!!!111 How did Snap get back here!!! I tohot he wuz in Azerbaijan.” I asked sadly.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:29:25
Christina. Christina. Focus. What was the last thing I said in our last chapter of Prisoner of Azkaban?
 
Brooke Matherly (flashback clip)  1:29:34
I just want to say that I've been waiting this whole book to try to see if there's a way I could naturally make a "Prisoner of Azerbaijan" reference, and it never came up, so I'm just gonna leave it here.
 
Christina Kann  1:29:45
We got there!
 
Brooke Matherly  1:29:47
That is meant to be Azkaban, I guarantee it. That is spell correct being like, "Azerbaijan???"
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:29:55
"I don't fucking know."
 
Brooke Matherly  1:29:59
I understood you, Tara.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:30:04
So are we still of the opinion that this is a completely earnest effort?
 
Brooke Matherly  1:30:09
Yes.
 
Christina Kann  1:30:10
I think it was! That's the craziest part of this whole thing: I think it was earnest.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:30:15
It's gotta be.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:30:16
I think it began in earnest, and at some point late into the making of it, maybe it became a little more self-aware. But for the most part, I think it was earnest, yeah. It began in earnest.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:30:26
I still don't know. I still simply do not know.
 
Christina Kann  1:30:33
Haley, thank you so much for taking us on this journey.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:30:36
Thank you for coming with me. I'm glad that we all got to share this bonding experience. I'd say I'm sorry, but you guys tricked me into watching Cats (2019). Zach, I'm sorry, but you'd already read it. You guys tricked me into watching Cats (2019), so this is just vengeance.
 
Christina Kann  1:30:48
We're square!
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:30:50
We're square now.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:30:52
I'm gonna go read My Immortal again for fun even though we're done recording.
 
Brooke Matherly  1:30:56
Are you okay?
 
Christina Kann  1:30:58
It was great fun.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:31:00
Really quick, I want to plug a another terrible fanfic you can find a very famous video of on YouTube called Half-Life Full-Life Consequences. Worth a watch.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:31:10
Oh, you just unlocked a very deep memory.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:31:14
Very, very good Half-Life fanfic from someone who is not only a child, but clearly not a native English speaker. It's rough but very funny.
 
Christina Kann  1:31:24
Haley, thank you so much for leading us. Brooke, thank you for being here. As always, this is your burden. Zach, you're a special guest. Thank you for what I assume was a pleasure to you. I don't know.
 
Zach of Cabbs  1:31:42
I had a great time.
 
Christina Kann  1:31:43
And that's My Immortal.
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:31:44
Yep.
 
all  1:31:45
Bye!
 
Haley Simpkiss  1:31:47
Preps!
 
And finally, please enjoy this owl mail from our best good buddy, Mats:
 
Hello there!
After relistening to y'all's bonus episode on the absolute magnum opus of literature that is My Immortal, I have a theory.
[Sounds of people gasping in shock]
Tara Gilesbie is actually Tara Reid, renowned actress known from critically acclaimed movies such as the Sharknado franchise.
That's my thesis statement.
My theory is that Tara Reid loved writing fanfiction when she was younger (usually under the pseudonym "Tara Gilesbie"), and after many failed attempts, she had finally something worthy of being remembered for. After finishing it, she turned the story she wrote into a horcrux by placing a fragment of her soul—a memory of Tara Gilesbie—inside of it, to preserve the story as well as her secret identity. It will now be remembered until the end of time. Kind of adds another layer to the title, doesn't it?
And that is who wrote this masterpiece of a fanfiction, and how it's been able to live in our brains for so long.
Anyway, I hope you all have a lovely day! Love you all!
I have the honor to be your obedient servant,
M dot Fur
PS. I'm sorry you had to read this piece of utter nonsense. Hopefully it didn't break your brain.
PPS. Do you think that ~80 years from now, they will release a My Immortal 100-year anniversary leatherbound edition? Because if so, I'm totally buying it.

PLEASE tell us what you think of this fanfic, its lore, and/or this episode in the comments.