WMG / My Immortal

Avoid using first-person pronouns please. Anyone who uses first-person pronouns is a prep.

The Story

My Immortal is a Stealth Parody.

This is pretty much the definitive WMG for this particular work. Was it written sincerely, an earnest yet embarrassing expression of fandom gone far Beyond the Impossible? Or was it a massive Troll job, designed to prod one of the Internet's biggest fandoms into incoherent rage? There's a lot of evidence to suggest the latter:

• Some of the mistakes seem tailor-made to annoy the fandom. For instance, the Americanizations bother Harry Potter fans because they suggest a fan so shallow that they don't realize that it's a British series. The random sex is a way to launch shipping wars. And Tara's claim to have not read the books is a great way to prove you're... well, for lack of a better term, a "poser".
• But there's evidence, despite the spelling, that Tara can read. She references some concepts that only appear in the books, like Arithmancy. She also appears to reference characters from later books like Umbridge who hadn't yet appeared in film when the fic was written. And one of her random Shout Outs, to The Lord of the Rings, references Tom Bombadil, a character who also didn't appear in the film adaptations.
• There's even evidence that she's a genuine Goth, who is making fun of "posers" by lampooning the kind of people who want people to think they're gothic. For instance, in Chapter 28, there's the line "Red vevlet lined da blak box", almost a direct quote from Bauhaus's "Bela Lugosi's Dead" — which didn't come with her trademark "geddit", suggesting it was a stealth Shout-Out to any genuine goths who might be reading.

My Immortal is an experiment of some sort.

Pretty much any experiment that could produce My Immortal would have to be aiming for some kind of strong reaction from its readers. Among the possibilities:

• It's a study of the Internet and its denizens, trying to see how a particular fandom would react if it were fed the worst possible Canon Defilement.
• It's an attempt at a Brown Note. It appears to work — reading it probably causes your IQ to drop 20 points. It's part of the grander experiment of Mystery Science Theater 3000 — Pearl Forrester, unsuccessful at finding a movie that could drive people insane, commissioned a fanfic to do the job. It's entirely possible that she herself was consumed by the fic, leading her to believe that she was "Tara Gilesbie", wannabe Goth fangirl who can't spell (but the Internet is made of tougher stuff and can go all-out on it).
• It's the product of Monkeys on a Typewriter. Some scientists actually tried to teach a thousand monkeys to write Shakespeare. However, the animal rights activists were on their case, so it had to be done in secret. To their astonishment, the monkeys did write something resembling a story, but it had more to do with Harry Potter than Shakespeare. They released their data on the Internet, disguised as a Harry Potter fanfic, to get outside feedback. Initially, they cleaned it up somewhat to cover their tracks, including fixing the spelling, but as time went on, they wanted to show off what they were teaching the monkeys, and the newer chapters were unedited — and far below the "human" standard of literacy. They might not have been monkeys, even — they could be Clever Crows (or ravens), who would have a hard time typing with their beaks and like darkness and stuff.
• It was a military experiment in psychological warfare. They're always looking for creative weaponry, and much like the search for the lethal joke, they're looking for a string of letters that could bring the world to its knees. It was less effective than they hoped, and only beta-tested on a single website before someone realized what the budget was being wasted on.
• It's an experiment with Internet access in a mental hospital — just a way to give the patients a creative outlet. Tara is a patient, and Raven is a caretaker at the facility who helps Tara with the spelling and grammar. The experiment seems to be working; Tara has an outlet for her self-harming tendencies, and her frequent interaction with Raven makes her feel better. But then, for unrelated reasons, Raven is fired from the facility. Without Raven, Tara's fic devolves into incoherence, and her only sounding board for the work is made up of Internet trolls. Poor Raven is booted from the fic; she comes back one last time to pick up her paycheck and visits Tara, which briefly convinces her that she's returned, but when Tara realizes the truth, she just deteriorates further.

My Immortal was not initially a parody, but it became one as it progressed.

Tara earnestly started writing a Harry Potter fanfic, but her young age and limited writing ability lead to it being festooned with spelling errors, grammar errors, and canon errors, tied together by a Mary Sue. Once the reviews come in and they prove to be... not good, Tara realizes just how in over her head she is. She gives up on making a good fic and doubles down on the things everyone found funny. This is why the spelling, which has its passable spells early into the fanfic, dissolves into brain-breaking horrendousness.

My Immortal was initially a parody, but Tara went insane and started taking it seriously.

The story was so bad that it became dangerous to work on it — and indeed, people who dwell too much on it seem to lose a screw at some point. Tara, being so invested in the work, lost it. She's still writing it — she's currently on Chapter 30,964, but she hasn't been able to put it online for more than a decade because she's broke and can't pay her Internet bill. That's what happens when you don't take a break to actually work.

My Immortal is the result of a Christian girl having a psychotic break.

Tara is a pretty normal girl in a small American town. She has a mental break at some point^note perhaps she realized that she wasn't eating real butter, but "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" which led her to stop going to church, convert to Satanism, kill her dog, and start speaking in unintelligible textspeak. Her parents do everything to try and help, but none of the specialists they find can fix it, so she's institutionalized. Poor Tara has a hard time coping and wants her old life back,^note and her real butter but in her confused and unhinged mental state, she can only express this desire in the form of Harry Potter fanfiction. It has some of the trappings of her old life, looking something like an American high school, but Tara also inadvertently inserts the symptoms of her mental break, which lead her to do things her community would think are "evil" like being a Satanic "goff", self-harm, lots of drugs, and lots of sex. Most tellingly, Tara wants to live in a world where she'll be accepted, which is why in the fic everyone loves her.

My Immortal is one of Patrick Bateman's weird daydreams.

It has all the hallmarks — shitty sex scenes, obsession with fashion, jarring pop music references, and "shocking" gore. It also implies that Patrick Bateman imagines himself to be a teenage girl named "Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way". Don't take our word for it — the folks at r/shittyfantheories are way ahead of us.

My Immortal is the product of a young girl who's feeling uncomfortable with her sexuality.

Ebony claims to be bisexual, but she never actually has any sexual relations with any girls, yet gets it on with practically every guy she sees. She's a repressed heterosexual — she's into guys, but she thinks she needs to be gay or bisexual because it's "cool" and "goff". It might be a certain patronizing jealousy of sexual minorities for getting "attention" because of how hard they have it.

The theory is bolstered by the Alternate Universe Parody Fic "Dudley Dursley's Sassy Gay Friend", in which Dudley, doing Internet research on homosexuality in order to better understand his cousin, encounters My Immortal — but rather than a Harry Potter fanfic, it's a Gothic girl's memoir.

My Immortal is not Harry Potter fanfiction.

It's a bad story with plagiarised names and places. You'll notice that very little of the story implies that it actually takes place in the Harry Potter universe. Rather than a magical British Boarding School, Hogwarts looks a lot like an American high school that doesn't appear to teach magic. Tara may have figured out how similar it was and recharacterised "Hogwarts" as a castle with "professors" and a "headmaster" in England (in canon it's in Scotland). It could be in an American town called England.

My Immortal takes place in a chaotic timeline.

It explains why there doesn't seem to be any kind of logic in the universe of the fanfic. The timeline didn't start bifurcating when Enoby went back in time, though. Rather, Marty McFly caused the first bifurcation before the story even starts (exactly the kind of thing Doc warned him about!) — Enoby just made things worse. The fic ends when it does when the timeline became too chaotic to support organic life.

Tara's account was never hacked.

If we assume that Tara was trolling, she must have faked the hack. Notice how a new account popped up, with a very Tara-like screen name (XHotNHeavyGoffz666X), which uploaded both a very similar sequel and the original story — including the hacked chapter. It's not a Tara impersonator — it's the real deal! Just like the last time. And the time before that...

Everything in the story after the hacked chapter was the hacker.

After Chapter 39, every error becomes more exaggerated, the punctuation becomes hysterical, the same typos happen over and over again, and the missives against the critics become more unhinged. This wasn't just Tara doubling down on what she wanted to do — this was a continuation of the hacker's trolling, in imitation of Tara's Signature Style (but somehow worse). If it were really Tara doubling down, she might double down on the stupid nicknames, too, but now "Vampire" is reverting back to being called "Harry".

My Immortal is a masterpiece — we just aren't ready to see that yet.

It's occasionally been compared to Finnegans Wake, which was so absurd and controversial that it was horribly received. Then it was Vindicated by History. We can't really imagine how history will vindicate My Immortal... maybe it will be considered the pinnacle of Postmodernism, or a deconstruction of conventional storytelling in the highest form.

My Immortal will be redeemed by its film adaptation.

In cooperation with Seltzer and Friedberg and Uwe Boll, the My Immortal completes the written work's absurdist promise and propels it to the level of... well, Finnegan's Wake. Or it will be so bad it wraps back around to good, like how a ridiculously big negative number plugged into the wrong computer system wraps around to a ridiculously big positive number.

My Immortal will set up the biggest practical joke in the history of literature.

Someone will hate the fanfic so much they actively try to find the author's computer and delete the fanfic. And what will they find? A 200 page story written by Tara that makes Agatha Christie look like an amateur.

My Immortal is a copy of the Daily Prophet that Ron and Hermione's kids accidentally put online.

Ron and Hermione's kids, despite being wizards, have access to a computer. Obviously, it's not at Hogwarts (computers wouldn't work well with that much magic around them), but their mum is a Muggle-born who probably knows how to use one. Even their dad's side isn't that hopeless — their dad managed to use a telephone at age twelve (albeit with some difficulty), and their grandpa's job involves Muggle artifacts, which could give him exposure to a computer.

As for why the story looks like a truly awful fanfic of their parents' adventures as opposed to a work of journalism, there are two possibilities:

• Hermione caught the story before anyone else. Not having the time or means to delete it without anyone noticing (which she knows is vital), she instead changed it into what we see. The result was probably magically induced and far beyond the means of her imagination (otherwise, one would shudder at what exactly was going through her head when she did it).
• It's a genuine Daily Prophet story by Rita Skeeter, without the benefit of her editors. Goblet of Fire shows even the final edition of the Prophet printing Skeeter stories with glaring errors, like misspelling the names of the Triwizard champions not named Harry and calling Arthur Weasley "Arnold". That indicates that her editors have so much work to do that they occasionally miss something. Even a professional trying to edit My Immortal with a press deadline would fall a bit short of perfect.

The story's abrupt end was the point at which everyone was arrested by the Grammar Police.

The fic was so bad that it began to warp the rules of grammar. It caught the Grammar Police's attention early on, but they couldn't find it on the Internet until the "hacker" tipped them off. Just after Ebony shooted Avada Kedavra (and missed), the Grammar Police barged in and arrested all the characters. They also got Tara, who's currently locked in a mental asylum, while doctors and linguists work to rehabilitate her into a proper speller. "Tara" and "Raven"'s subsequent interactions with their fans are characters from the fic granted brief parole from their imprisonment. Britney and Darkness escaped and became fugitives in the world of fanfiction, terrorizing the characters of other fics.

My Immortal is a Real-Person Fic Within A Fanfic.

Written by Taebory, a Shrinking Violet Muggle-born with a massive crush on Draco and malfunctioning Error-Correcting Ink.

My Immortal is based on Gone with the Wind.

Tara watched the movie (she didn't read the book, obviously) because she thought the plantation was named after her and she was inspired. Consider the characters:

• Ebony = Scarlett: Temperamental drama queen with shallow emotions. Both are willing to kill people in order to never be hungry again.
• Vampire = Rhett: The heroine rhapsodizes about this character's attractiveness, but she's so totally not in love with him! She often decides she hates him when he turns up in her life.
• Draco = Ashley: The heroine is so in love with this character. It's a total fluke that she keeps thinking about another guy!
• Britney = Melanie: Meek girl the heroine hates for no reason.

My Immortal is a fic within a fic.

Starring Tara Gilesbie and Jenny (Raven). It explains the occasional inconsistencies in Tara's character and why she never grows as a person in over three years. The story is probably a parody of fanfic writers themselves. Whether or not the author was trolling or never thought people would believe her story is irrelevant.

My Immortal is a Mirror Universe of F.A.T.A.L..

They're both terribly, terribly written, they have excessive amounts of unnecessary sex, and their authors that respond stupidly to criticism.

My Immortal is Volxemort's journal.

He has been spying on Egogy and her friends, writing his findings down under the cover name of Tara. The fic ended when it did because Enoby killed him. He's probably doing some kind of automated recording, which would allow the journal to record his final moments.

My Immortal is reality, and you are the only one it hasn't driven insane.

You are the Only Sane Man. Everyone on Earth, including you, is as absurd and nuts as the cast. You are the only one who managed not to surrender to the madness, and the world you imagine is much more in line with something you can cope with (although it's far from perfect). J. K. Rowling is your mind's conception of Tara Gilesbe. None of this makes sense, which is exactly how it should be.

There are no typos. My Immortal was written in an alien language.

Tara is an alien, and My Immortal was written in her native tongue. It could still be a Harry Potter fanfic (but a very good one). Alternatively, it has nothing to do with Harry Potter — it's an intelligent thesis to teach humanity about Tara's people, and to prepare us for their coming. All those Troll Fics that spawned after Tara are her people, too. In their language, "Herry Ptter" means something like "smart seminar", and "prepz" means "illiterate".

The next chapter of My Immortal will redeem the story.

It could just be the final revelation that Tara is an incredible troll. Or, like the film adaptation WMG, it may simply be so bad it wraps around to brilliance. Or it could explain everything we had read — typos, plot holes, and skewed characterization included — to the extent that Tara becomes a literary god who makes Shakespeare look like an amateur.

Unfortunately, it's been more than a decade and we're still waiting. This is what a Cargo Cult is made of. But here at TV Tropes, we're in desperate need of things to trope.

My Immortal is set in the verse of A Very Potter Musical.

It makes total sense! We shall ignore the irrelevant fact that My Immortal was written three years before A Very Potter Musical and focus on the important details. First of all, consider the way in which Hogwarts is overrun by Muggle pop culture and Americanisms. Second of all, look at the characters:

• Harry, Hermione, and Ron: Friends with Draco now.
• Dumbledore: Yells and swears at students ("Malfoy, you little shit!")
• Voldemort: Perhaps he never wants to kill Ebony or "Vampire" himself because he hasn't "been feeling so evil lately". And he wears tap shoes, so how OOC would high heels be?
• Lupin: He's a pedophile in both ("Cho, I said I was joking!")
• Snape: Ditto. He has Ho Yay with Ron in A Very Potter Sequel. And you really could see the musical version of Snape saying things like "What is it that you desire, you ridiculous dimwit?"
• Hedwig: Talks in A Very Potter Sequel.
• Umbridge: What's the one way in which Umbridge was OOC in My Immortal? That's right, being nice to Dumbledore. Well...
• Hagrid: Is technically still a Hogwarts student according to A Very Potter Senior Year.
• "The fat guy who killed Cedric": In Very Potter Musical continuity, this becomes Quirrell, who did strangely look like he had twice the body mass of a normal person while Voldemort was attached to him. Almost like Voldemort was just hiding his body under the back of Quirrell's robes. Now we know why Voldemort and "the fat guy who killed Cedric" were living together. And Voldemort was wearing high heels at the time.
• Draco: Everything.

It works especially well with this scene:

Dylan Saunders as Dumbledore: They were having sexual intercourse in the Forbidden Forest!
Tyler Brunsman as McGonagall: Why did you do such a thing, you mediocre dunces?
Joe Moses as Snape: How dare you!
Lauren Lopez as Draco: BECAUSE [fails to strike pose] I LOVE HER!
Joe Moses as Snape: Fine. Very well. You may go up to your rooms. [hammily exits stage]

Ebony is musical!Cho. "Ebony" is just her "goffic" name in the same way that "Vampire" is Harry's "goffic" name. Or at least very least, Ebony is "played" by Devin Lytle with the Southern accent.

Devin Lytle as Ebony: WTF, is that why y'all wanted condoms?
Brian Holden as Lupin: Only you wouldn't give them to me!
Devin Lytle as Ebony: [flirtily] Well, you shoulda told me.
Joe Moses as Snape: You dimwit!

The fanfic is the Dying Dream of a depressed girl bullied to suicide.

It's her perfect version of the world, twisted by blood loss delirium.

My Immortal is a hoax created by Death Eaters to start an anti-Dumbledore movement among Pureblood parents.

It's written along the lines of Go Ask Alice — it purports to be the diary of a real Slytherin student, but it's Based on a Great Big Lie. And it's not very well researched, either, given its bizarre conception of what teenage students are thinking and its misunderstanding of Muggle culture. But its purpose is to show Pureblood parents how bad Hogwarts has supposedly gotten under Dumbledore. The bad spelling and grammar are intentional, to show the school's horrendous academic standards. Its portrayal of even hardcore Slytherins like Draco Malfoy rejecting Voldemort and embracing Muggle culture are meant to shock and offend the sensibilities of the parents. My Immortal circulates among the parents, and sadly several of them are sufficiently ignorant to take it seriously.

Alternatively, Voldemort was bored.

My Immortal is a retelling of The Catcher in the Rye.

Compare Ebony with Holden:

• Both are middle-class teenagers who feel separate and superior to their peers, yet curse their lives.
• Both are obsessed with authenticity; Ebony decries "posers" and "preps", while Holden hates "phoneys". Both stories also share a style in depicting conformity in a school environment.
• Both swear a lot.
• Tara's relationship with Raven is based on respect turned to hatred, paralleling Holden's relationship with his brother. Both stories' visions of their respective relationship's future is vague.
• Both encounter awkward situations in which they believe their teachers are "perverts" who are infatuated with them.
• Both stories end abruptly, and the reader is Left Hanging.

My Immortal is an extremely warped version of Harry Potter from Jorge Luis Borges' "The Library of Babel".

Said library's books contain every possible combination of letters in the English language. Most of the books are complete gibberish. Some are legitimate literature. This... straddles the border. But now it makes sense how it was produced.

My Immortal takes place in the same universe as Turkish Star Wars.

They're both nonsensical, vaguely reminiscent of more famous works, and relatively obscure before being discovered as paragons of So Bad, It's Good. Their protagonists are unstoppable, and their plots are paper-thin, mostly to allow the story to indulge in what it really wants (sex in My Immortal, violence in Turkish Star Wars). The Evil Wizard from Turkish Star Wars is Ebony's father; she was sent to Hogwarts after he was cut in half. And Snap moonlights as Italian Spiderman.

My Immortal is a Future Imperfect version of Harry Potter.

It's from either Warhammer 40,000 or Mortal Engines. One of the Harry Potter books was discovered, badly damaged, either in the ruins of America or somewhere on Holy Terra. Whoever did the transcription embellished it and added parts, trying to come up with a storyline for the random text fragments.

My Immortal is an Alternate Universe of Harry Potter in which Arthur Weasley has a high seat in the Ministry of Magic.

Noted Muggle admirer Arthur Weasley finally finds himself in a position of power, in which he can display the full glory of all those bizarre Muggle appliances and cultural artefacts (that he barely understands himself). The characters' materialism is a direct result of deeper immersion into Muggle culture, which doesn't speak very highly of said culture. Said Muggle culture is known only superficially, and certain "modern" Muggle devices have uncertain purposes, like an iPod that can travel through time.

My Immortal is an Alternate Universe of Harry Potter in which Voldemort never hears of the prophecy and never tries to kill Harry.

Voldemort's first reign of terror unravels when he tries to kill Harry, so in this universe, his first reign of terror never ended. It's a bleak world; Dumblydore has become bitter, foul-mouthed, and depressed, and Lupin and Snape are broken, lonely perverts. As his power grew, the dark ways became seen as "cool". Ebony and her friends were raised in a culture where imitating (and dressing like) the Death Eaters is the epitome of awesomeness. Even Harry Potter, whose parents survived but had to adjust to keep surviving under Voldemort, becomes a "goff". Ebony is a wannabe, trying to be like the Death Eaters without really understanding them; her peers accept her, but not any genuine Death Eaters. She doesn't actually believe in Death Eater ideology; she just claims to because it's "shocking", in much the same way she's a "Satanist" (which would shock very religious people). If it came down to it, she would fight against Voldemort — which she does.

Ebony can see through time, and it's slowly driving her insane.

She can see flashes of the past or the future, but she doesn't understand what's happening and tries to fit her visions into a linear conception of time, resulting in something that very much isn't. This is expressed in the story in several ways:

• Several times, the narrative will describe an event which hasn't happened yet, and when it does happen, the exact same paragraph will appear. This is Ebony seeing flashes of the future.
• The characters often jump from one location to another; for example, Ebony and Willow go from the dungeons to the Great Hall in a single line. This is Ebony seeing flashes of the past; she can't keep straight that what she's seeing didn't happen just now.
• Characters' backstories change or get Retconned. This is Ebony trying to piece together a character's past when she can't see anything in a linear progression.
• The odd mixes of makeup and clothing that show up on most characters are actually different things that characters are wearing at different points in time. Ebony sees all of this at once, making everyone look like a Rummage Sale Reject.
• The time travel sequences are a disastrous attempt to reconcile everything into a straight line. It's a total Anachronism Stew, with characters from one period seeing musical acts from another, neither of which are in the right place.

Some of the bizarre plot points and descriptions come from different elements suddenly popping up in Ebony's narrative, often as small as a single word. For example, she thinks Young Voldmort told her that his middle name was Satan. He could have actually given the character's actual middle name "Marvolo", but interference from other events superimposes the single word "Satan" in where "Marvolo" should be. This would particularly explain why certain one-shot characters are so Out of Character; one character's description gets another character's name (e.g. Hagrid and Cedric apparently being the same person, Hedwig being not Harry's owl but Voldemort's gay lover). It also works for accessories; this is why both Vampire and Draco have flying cars (because one or the other is edited in place of whoever owns the car). And certain plot points also make sense this way — when "Satan" is brought to the future, this is actually Voldemort finally breaking into the school, and as the narrative continues, Satan transforms into Voldemort.

My Immortal is an artistic representation of humanity's animal instinct and desire, untouched by modern society.

The work resonates because the spelling and grammar are so bad, they wrap back around to genius. Specifically, it is so removed from anything resembling "civilization" that it activates our animal subconscious. It's further reflected in the characters' representation of the author's basest desires — to be the center of the universe, utterly unconcerned with anything and everyone else, including the original work.

My Immortal is an extremely elaborate Take That! at the Internet's taste in stuff.

It's considered one of the worst things on the entire Internet, and yet everyone's still talking about it. This is deliberate — it's playing on the Internet's longstanding Bile Fascination and how it prefers horrendous trainwrecks to actually pretty good stuff. The Internet could be aficionados of incomprehensible "true art", but more likely they like to point and laugh at each other, and here's someone nearly everyone can use as a punching bag. Whoever wrote My Immortal was disgusted at the Internet's preference for "ironically" good to actually good and wrote something that would siphon the Internet's attention. Perhaps the author(s) themselves spread gossip about how bad it was to attract the haters.

My Immortal is a product of NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMo is an Internet challenge in which you write a 50,000 word story in a single month. The whole point of NaNoWriMo is literary abandon — write now, fix later. The author of My Immortal participated in NaNoWriMo in this way to win a bet. In keeping with NaNoWriMo's ethos, "Tara" just hammered out whatever was in her head to work as fast as possible, without going back to proofread (as they say, editing is for the following month). In the early chapters, it's actually not too bad. But once the story picked up a cult following and people started commenting on the terrible spelling and grammar, "Tara" decided to turn it up to eleven. NaNoWriMo also explains the lack of continuity (it's all Writing by the Seat of Your Pants), as well as the random plot twists and pop-culture references — NaNo encourages these, calling them "plot bunnies". In sum, the whole thing is the product of a process that encourages writing down as many words as possible, as fast as possible, with no other consideration.

My Immortal is an advanced sociological study in socialist revolutions.

The dynamic between the preps and the goffs is really an analysis of the dynamic between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The preps, drawing from the canonical Gryffindors — clever, successful, and popular — are the self-absorbed elites, and the goffs are the downtrodden, creative misfits who foment the coming revolution. My Immortal turns Harry Potter on its head — rather than the heroic Gryffindors taking down Voldemort, it's the goffic Slytherins.

In fact, most of My Immortal reflects not only how the ruling elites are oppressing the working class, but also how much of the working class doesn't really know what they're doing. The obsession with "posers" highlights how some people claim to be fighting oppression but are really just slacktivists who fall prey to the same trappings as the people they claim to fight. Notice also how Ebony reinforces her "goff" credentials not by behaving like a "goff" but through bourgeois commercialism — specifically, shopping at Hot Topic. The story also takes pains to point out that it sucks being oppressed, and the teenaged goffs are dealing with all sorts of things technically unrelated to their plight but which the bourgeois is not helping to solve — depression, self-harm, underage sex, and paedophilia.

My Immortal is a satire of modern Goth culture.

Its "goffic" characters rail against "posers" and yet epitomise the concept. They barely understand the subculture, only superficially referencing artists who outwardly appear vaguely "gothic" but don't subscribe to the ideology themselves. They act extraordinarily stereotypically, as if they're desperate for attention and think they can get that by invoking Aggressive Categorism. They get depressed over trivial things and slit their wrists casually, as if it were yet another "cool" thing to do. They have trouble imposing their bright-line classifications on complex individuals, like Dumbledore, who paints the Great Hall pink one day and black the next.

My Immortal is a parody of Paradise Lost.

Now, since Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory, there are a couple of ways this can shake out:

• Voldemort, also known as "Satan", is Satan. He represents the angel who rebels from Dumbledore, the God figure. Draco and Ebony are Adam and Eve, who live in blissful harmony until Satan shows up to tempt them. Then they become aware of their sexuality and start banging all the time. The Forbidden Fruit in this case is the "amnesia potion" that Satan uses on Ebony to convince her to fall in love with him and do stuff together. Voldemort's insistence that Ebony kill Vampire represents Satan's role as The Corrupter — he needs Ebony to do the work so that he can take possession of her soul (his threat to kill Draco shows that he's capable of doing it himself, but won't). He's already got Snap (a.k.a. "Snoop" and "Snake") to execute his orders for him.
• Ebony is the Satan analogue — she is, after all, a Satanist. Professor Sinister/Trevolry argues that if Ebony tempts Voldemort to fall in lust with her, he'll be so distracted he'll stop massacring Muggles. Voldemort is a being in a high place, and Ebony's mission is to distract him from his true vocation and orchestrate his fall to her level.
• Ebony is still Satan, but she's the good guy. The way the story is presented, God Is Evil; he's only worshipped because he beat Satan, and religion is Written by the Winners. Tara is trying to redeem Satan in the eyes of God's followers, showing them the error of their ways. Notice how the Christians have morphed into shallow, preppy, paedophilic idiots, and the "goffs", while outwardly weird-looking and violent, are portrayed as higher, enlightened beings.

Harry Potter is in fact a My Immortal fanfic.

My Immortal broke the fabric of time. It found a crack in the space-time continuum and fell far into the past. It was lost for many years, until it was discovered by J. K. Rowling. She thought it was stupid but did yield some good ideas, which she reworked into what we now know as Harry Potter. Once Tara discovered Harry Potter, she retrieved her own copy of My Immortal and uploaded it to FanFiction.Net. She, obviously, thought it was brilliant. The Internet did not agree.

My Immortal was written to discredit every band mentioned in it.

It was written by a rival band hoping to bring down the sales of My Chemical Romance, Good Charlotte, Evanescence, everyone. It's a form of Reverse Psychology — by talking about how cool these bands are, the authors are hoping to convince the readers that they must not be cool at all. To hammer home the point, the praise of the "goff" bands is put in the mouths of brain-dead teenagers. We don't know exactly who the band is, but it might be affiliated with an entity Tara disses at some point.

The writers have a particular emnity for Amy Lee. That might be why the story warns people who don't know who she is not to read it.

My Immortal is Hell.

No fire is hot enough, nor any punishment ironic enough, to satisfy eternal torment of the Devil. This, only this, read aloud for all time, until your ears bleed out your heart, until you scream out your lungs, until you go so mad you go sane, can quench the Devil's need to cause you agony. And when you're done, you have to read the 48,000 sequels.

My Immortal is the centerpiece of an Alternate Reality Game.

It's hiding a secret code revealing the location where Vlodxmort is keeping Tara in bondage.

My Immortal is the memoir of a now-dead Hogwarts student. (The Death Eaters changed stuff.)

Ebony was a normal Hogwarts student, until Voldemort decided to use her as a tool to get to Harry. He has Draco, his man on campus, use magic to warp her perception of reality into the Ebonyverse. It worked for a while, but it wouldn't take; Ebony would return to normal after a while and realize what was happening to her. Draco started using progressively stronger doses, but Ebony would keep fighting. Every time she came back to reality, she would write down what she perceived to help her remember the next time. Draco now goes to uncomfortable lengths to get the magic to stick, including inserting himself into her sexual fantasies. That has a more permanent effect on Ebony, but her body couldn't take it anymore, and she died soon afterward. Ebony realized she was dying and sent her recollections to her younger sister Tara, asking her to publish them so that the world could know the truth.

Unfortunately for Ebony, the Death Eaters intercepted the delivery of Ebony's memoir. It was too late to destroy them, as Tara was already expecting them, so they altered them. Poor unwitting Tara had no idea what to make of the memoir, so she published it on the Internet as it was. The Internet figured it was a fanfic of some sort, and the rest is history.

Tom Satan Bombadil-Anderson was present Voldemort all the time.

The time travel sequence has Enoby and company in the 1980s. In Harry Potter canon, Tom Riddle had already graduated Hogwarts forty years prior. In My Immortal, he's a Hogwarts student. Or at least posing as a Hogwarts student — he transforms from "Satan" into present-Voldemort when he's returned to the present. This is because he was present-Voldemort all along, and he dropped the disguise once he came back to his own time. While in the past, "Satan" knows about things that will happen in the future (and isn't surprised by the pop-culture anachronisms), which would support his being a time traveler in disguise.

My Immortal is a first draft of a Harry Potter shipping work.

It was never supposed to be a finished product. You can see all the hallmarks of a shipping fic, but no actual plot elements. This is because the author — like many fanfic authors — started by deciding on the various ships in the fic and considered the plot of secondary importance. There was eventually going to be a plot, but it hadn't been made yet. This explains why the fic feels like a bunch of weird vignettes setting up random sex romps as opposed to a coherent whole. It cuts off abruptly simply because the ending hadn't been decided on yet. The spelling and grammar are also going to be fixed later — perhaps the horrible grammar is meant to signal to the author which bits need to be fixed later.

My Immortal takes place in the Dolan universe.

It has atrocious grammar and spelling, it has virtually no coherent plot, and everybody behaves like a sociopath. Ebony herself is Dolan in disguise.

My Immortal's ending was intentional, as a Bolivian Army Ending.

There's quite a bit of evidence:

• Tara (or whoever) had been talking about ending My Immortal for a while. At the time, she said there would be only two or three more chapters.
• The final chapter collects all the characters together, including characters who hadn't been in the fic for a while, like McGoogle.
• The final scene is the first time in the fic where Enoby actually tries to kill Volxemort.
• And there's actually buildup to the final line, as Egogy reflects on her mission:
  Enony: I just wanted to go to the common room and slit my wrists with mi friends while we watched Shark Attack 3 and Saw 2 or do it with Draco, but I knew I had to do something more impotent. ABRA KADABRA!11111 I shooted.

My Immortal is Jojos Bizarre Adventure Part 9, as reimagined by a heavily drunk Seer.

The narrator can see the future and cannot reconcile her visions because of all the alcohol. She's looking at JoJo Part 9 without even knowing what it is. She thinks it might be from Harry Potter and adjusts accordingly:

• Ebony is Jolyene from Part 6. Her Stand is called "Kids with Guns".
• Draco is a shy, timid fellow who befriends Ebony. His Stand is called "Designated Lovers" — it creates slash wounds on the user, but rather than harm them it shields them.
• Harry's Stand is called "Brandon" — it weaponizes the user's tattoos.

Jesus existed in My Immortal.

Enoby's contention that a crucifix is one of the few things that can kill her suggests not only that Holy Burns Evil, but specifically that Christian holiness is effective against Satanists, even the Hollywood variety. It's so powerful that "C-R-O-S-S" is The Scottish Trope among Goffs.

My Immortal operates on Clap Your Hands If You Believe logic.

The actual reason that crosses can harm goffs is because goffs believe they should. It doesn't matter whether or not Jesus existed. It just fits their logic. Perhaps it's entirely because they're trying to offend Christians and want them to imagine the goffs as their worst enemy. Or if you believe another WMG on this page, it's because the fic was an experiment involving Orks, who operate on this logic.

Metalheads exist in My Immortal, and are allied with the goffs.

Considering the universe, they're likely even more fanatacially Stanist than Goffs.

My Immortal is In-Universe anti-goff propaganda written during a faction war.

The greater subculture is divided into factions, which are Serious Business. "Goffs" are something of a strange bastardization of Goth and Emo culture into Always Chaotic Evil. They worship "Stan", partake in cutting, and have awful grammar and spelling. Preps, by contrast, are depicted as Alpha Bitches and Designated Villains, whereas they're actually part of a rival subculture that's a bit closer to Earth.

Hogwarts is in a Crapsack region of England.

Everyone is dumb as a brick, teenage sex and depression are rampant, suicides at the local boarding school are unremarkable, and incest is common. Why else would Egogy wish she were related to Gerard Way because he's a "major fucking hottie"?

"Stan" is Satan's dumb, younger brother.

His worshippers certainly fit the part.

My Immortal takes place on a Garry's Mod Hogwarts RP server.

It explains a number of things:

• The physics are out of control. Characters appear to be able to teleport, and time travel is completely crazy.
• Everyone's name keeps changing because the server gets reset periodically, and everybody needs to make their characters again.
• The random cameos from Marty McFly and Tom Bombadil.
• It would be quite in-character for a Dumbledore on an RP server to shout, "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING YOU MOTHERFUKERS!"

God Is Dead.

From Chapter 13:

We ran in with our wands out just as we heard a croon voice say. “Allah Kedavra!” It was……………………………….. Voldemort!

My Immortal is a meta-adaptation of/counterpart to American Psycho.

Sounds like it was written on drugs, has a focus on the morbid, takes a negative look at a then-current subculture, has an ending that doesn't resolve the not-really-existant-anyway plot. It would line up with the interpretation that all the murders happened in Bateman's head, with Tara as the "Patrick" and the fanfiction as her imaginary reality.

The Author

Tara is an ordinary teenager whose Old Shame fanfic just happens to be one of the Internet's most famous.

All right, we have to get this out of the way first — Tara is not a Magnificent Bastard Troll, nor is she an outstanding specimen of a brain-dead teenager with genuine mental problems. She's more or less like everyone else her age. Consider:

• The fic is often held out as the "worst fanfic ever", but there are many worse ones out there. A modern audience reading this would wonder what the fuss was about. The mystique behind the fic isn't in its quality in itself, but rather in how it became an in-joke among Internet people.
• Tara would have been at the age when she would be starting to really understand the world in all its complexity. But the world is so complex that it requires far more years of experience to really understand. So Tara's at the age where she thinks she gets it but very much doesn't. It doesn't necessarily make her stupid; even the smartest of teenagers fall into this trap. That's why she includes so much sex, drugs, and rock and roll— erm, "goff" music.
• Fan Fiction has long been seen as a way for people to open up their hearts on the Internet and be seen for the Brilliant Souls™ they are. A teenager who's trying to do this would accept no criticism; they're not trying to write a good work, they're seeking validation as really cool, with-it, and Wise Beyond Their Years. It's a great outlet for an Attention Whore.
• Tara probably isn't actually depressed. Sad as it is to say, while there are certainly depressed teenagers around, there are also teenagers who want people to think they're depressed because (a) it gives them attention, and (b) it immunizes them from criticism (in much the same way assholes on the Internet pretend to have Asperger's Syndrome).
• Back when the fic was written, there were no fancy algorithms or influencers. If you wanted to find something remotely worth consuming, you had to surf Newgrounds, YTMND, a nascent YouTube — or FanFiction.Net. Nowadays, something like My Immortal wouldn't have crossed the path of someone looking for genuinely good fanfic; back then, you had to read through everything, and this one just stood out as a particular waste of time.
• Tara only stands out by going farther than everyone else. The Internet is a really nerdy place, especially if you're surfing it for Harry Potter fanfiction. Many of the people who flamed the work probably also once thought they were Brilliant Souls, disdained spelling and grammar conventions, and had a Perverse Sexual Lust for a fictional character. And on this site in particular, many people are fans of things and can't resist dropping a Shout-Out to them even then it wouldn't be appropriate. The readers are not so different from Tara. They knew how dangerously close they came to writing this fic. Some of them saw this as a green light to go flaming the work, as a way of masking their own insecurities.
• A work that's So Bad, It's Good is often far less interesting than the person behind it. In this case, an observer could interact with the person behind the work. Flaming the work not only got a reaction out of Tara, but caused her to double down on the things people criticized. Ask for better spelling, and she'll give you worse spelling. That's why the spelling not only degrades over the course of the fic, but also seems to be deliberate (e.g. "da" for "the" — who can't spell "the"?)

This all may seem like it's missing the point of Wild Mass Guessing or otherwise being The Killjoy, but there's actually something interesting to this when you think about it. The whole work underwent a tremendous Memetic Mutation, turning it from something anyone could have made into a Flanderized shadow of itself that almost nobody could have made.

With that out of the way, let's have some fun:

Who is Tara, exactly?

Tara was an extremely drunk and high Marilyn Manson.

During the time frame of the fanfiction's creation, his marriage was imploding — that's likely to have a negative effect on one's psyche. He was also supposedly working on a new album, which would be finished but never released. Said album was part of the "Celebritarian" art movement, a sarcastic critique of American media culture and celebrity worship. The only song that is suspected of surviving its shelving, "Mutilation Is the Most Sincere Form of Flattery", is a missive against pretty much everything Tara likes.

Around this time, his marriage finally implodes;^note Take note, kids: never marry a stripper! (Okay, fine, burlesque dancer.) he starts dating Evan Rachel Wood, then a 19-year-old moron; and he ups his intake of drugs and absinthe. For a while, he goes completely insane, and he hammers out My Immortal, a fanfiction in the vein of the album he had been working on.

There are some signs of Manson's authorship, if you know where to look. The constant "preps v. goffs" theme mirrors the music video for "The Fight Song", which is an American Football game between jocks and goths. "Tara" also drops some pretty obscure pop-culture references, historical or philosophical icons, and correctly spelled (albeit misplaced) big words like "eructation" and "Azerbaijan", interspersed with Manson's drug-addled attempt to mimic the writing style of the braindead teenagers he so despises. And Manson was known to have episodes of writing a whole lot of nonsense — when he broke up with Rachel-Wood, he had a genuine psychotic break in which he vandalized his mansion with incoherent writing on the walls.

"Raven" may not exist, she may be Rachel-Wood, or she may be Madonna Wayne Gacy (his legitimately schizophrenic keyboardist and best friend at the time) trying to keep a handle on the situation. If "Raven" is Gacy, that might explain who published it.

Tara is J. K. Rowling.

She secretly has a poor opinion of her admittedly insane fans, and she wanted to troll the heck out of them. She was particularly disgusted with what she was seeing on Fanfiction Dot Net — Mary Sues, Character Derailment, Americanizations. She decided that she could not only write that kind of story and get more reviews than anyone in her fandom, she could do it with worse spelling, grammar, and characterization. It explains how "Tara" guesses some of the plot elements of the last book — she wrote it. It also allows her to pretend she's only seen the movies but reference elements that only appear in the books.

Her knowledge of Tara's favorite music is uneven, to say the least. Yes, some of the songs mentioned in the fic, like "Demolition Lovers", are pretty damn obscure. On the other hand, if she knew anything about the genre, she'd know that Green Day is not as "emo" as people think. She probably skimmed her fans' profiles on FF.net and did some cursory research on Wikipedia — enough to pick up the name of a song and learn that a store called Hot Topic is popular among wannabe-emo kids, but not enough to pass for a legit fan. It's eerily reminiscent of her canonical "generic rock star" description of Bill Weasley.

Also, Rowling has semi-officially done Harry Potter fanfic — we call it Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. (Critics argue it was nowhere near as good as My Immortal.) There's also this to think about.

Tara is Daniel Radcliffe.

He admitted that he writes fanfiction. If someone very much involved with Harry Potter badly wanted to troll the series' Fan Dumb, the best person to do that would obviously be Rowling, but the second best would be the man who played Harry Potter himself.

Tara is Neil Cicierega.

He's a well-known fan of Harry Potter, and he's been involved in creating absurdist online content since the dawn of the Internet. He's responsible for so much Memetic Mutation that most people consume his creations completely unaware that they were made by him. He's also exactly the type of person to write something like this and keep it a secret for the sake of maintaining the mystery.

Tara is Stephenie Meyer.

Look at the obvious vampire connection between My Immortal and Twilight. Now, there are a number of problems with this theory, but since this is Wild Mass Guessing, we can solve them:

• You might point out that Twilight predates My Immortal by about a year. The easy explanation is that My Immortal was written in response to people comparing Twilight to Harry Potter. The harder explanation is that she wrote My Immortal first, but she published it on another site, then copied it to FF.net once Twilight became famous.
• You might point out that the spelling and grammar are far worse than any professionally published author should be capable of. To which we say... she faked it! Or her editors really worked overtime on Twilight. Who's to say Meyer even knows how to use a computer?
• You might point out that Meyer is a Mormon, which would make the fic very uncomfortable and difficult to write. All the drugs, all the sex, all the swearing. To which we say:
  • She's not really a Mormon! Deep down, she's a Satanist. She can't admit it in public, but using an Internet pseudonym, she can say what she really thinks. And she might even be a little more enthusiastic than usual because of how hard she has to suppress her Satanic beliefs.
  • She's pretending to be a Satanist, to discredit Harry Potter fandom. This would explain why the story exhibits the Theme Park Version of Satanism. She might be trolling J.K. Rowling, or she might genuinely think Harry Potter turns its readers to Satanism and want to de-convert them.
  • She was both! My Immortal was written when she was a Satanist, but she subsequently found God and became a Mormon. Then she wrote Twilight.

Tara is Kristen Cast.

Look at all the ways:

• It's said that The House of Night = Twilight + Harry Potter. It's also said that Twilight = My Immortal – Harry Potter. So, mathematically speaking, The House of Night = My Immortal.
• A teenage girl writer inserts herself into a magic school and turns into a vampire. Which story was just described?
• Raven. Redbird. Nice try.
• "My Immortal" is an Evanescence song title. "House of Night" is an Evanescence song title. There Are No Coincidences.
• The reason why The House of Night has proper spelling is because Kristen's mother P.C. Cast spell-checked it. P.C., by the way, isn't "Raven". That, or P.C. Cast is actually a spell-checker on Tara's PC, which is still not "Raven".

Tara is Gerard Way.

He wrote My Immortal to mock his overzealous fans without experiencing a public backlash. We know he writes things, and he's been outspoken against the kind of snobbery Ebony epitomizes:

Gerard Way: If for one minute you think you're better than a sixteen year old girl in a Green Day T-shirt, you are sorely mistaken. Remember the first time you went to a show and saw your favorite band. You wore their shirt, and sang every word. You didn't know anything about scene politics, haircuts, or what was cool. All you knew was that this music made you feel different from anyone you shared a locker with. Someone finally understood you. This is what music is about.

Tara is Amy Lee.

It's even named after one of her songs! Lee (or one of her bandmates) wrote it with the idea that there's No Such Thing as Bad Publicity, and it would be a boost to be associated with So Bad, It's Good fanfiction. Alternatively, Lee collaborated with one of the other putative authors like Gerard Way or Rowling herself.

Tara is whoever inspired Gilderoy Lockhart's character.

J.K. Rowling admitted that Gilderoy Lockhart, the dimwitter egocentric professor from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, was based on a real person, who was so deluded that she was sure he would never pick up on it. Whoever it was also wrote My Immortal. This leaves two possibilities:

• Tara wrote My Immortal in response to Harry Potter's positive reception. If she knew Rowling personally, she was probably jealous of the attention she got and thought she could do one better. She... couldn't. This requires Tara to be a lot older than we think she is.
• Rowling was inspired by My Immortal to write Lockhart into the book. This is a lot more difficult to reconcile (if only because Tara references a lot of things from later books), but there's the obvious time-travel shenanigans, or there's the idea that Rowling was inspired to write the entire series from seeing a proto-My Immortal.

Tara is Uwe Boll.

Boll wanted to show not only that he could write fanfic, but also that he could act. That's why he created Tara — it was an alter ego for him to play. He was serious about My Immortal itself, but he just wasn't up to the task. Ironically, it was still his best received work — none of his films could qualify as So Bad, It's Good to the same degree.

Tara is George W. Bush.

The sitting President of the United States wrote the worst fanfic ever, as a way to distract the American populace from his unpopular policies.

Tara is Barack Obama.

Not the sitting President, but his successor. We know he's One of Us — he might be aware of the Internet phenomenon that is Fan Fiction. He thought it would be funnier to write intentionally terrible fanfic, For the Lulz. He had to stop once he started campaigning for President in earnest.

Tara is Tim Burton.

Wednesday’s visions in the show seem to be a Suspiciously Similar Substitute to Ebony’s visons around Chapter 23 or so. Eyes rolled back in head, random & uncontrollable, etc. Plus, Tim Burton is well known for films with the kind of “goffik” aesthetic Ebony seems to like. She also references one of his films.

Tara is Tite Kubo.

He's already a renowned Trolling Creator, and he figured it would be even more fun messing with someone else's fanbase.

Tara is Chuck Norris.

He wondered one day whether he could write something so heinous, even he couldn't read it. Since he's Chuck Norris, he wrote the fic without reading it. And then, he released it to humanity. "Mr. Norris" is a self-insert.

Tara is James Joyce reincarnated.

She is the same entity who wrote Finnegans Wake, the previous holder of the title of "most insane work of troll literature". My Immortal, on the other hand, is so brilliant that it crosses the proverbial line twice and reverts all the way back to puerile stupidity. And much like Finnegan's Wake, it was quite poorly received originally; give it fifty years, and we'll see where we are then.

Tara is Oscar Wilde reincarnated — but he Came Back Wrong.

Unfortunately, poor Oscar lost almost all of the writing acumen for which he was renowned in his day. Without any natural writing ability but desperate to get back into the game, he decided to write fanfiction.

Ebony is a badly disguised male protagonist. Wilde wanted to write a gay protagonist, but he wasn't sure how his homosexuality would be received in his new time period, so he (clumsily) edited it. Consider Ebony's references to "his boy's thingy" and her description of experiencing an erection ("only I'm a girl so I didn't get one you sicko"). Ebony also expresses fondness for gay men (or, in her words, "don't u fik gay guyz r lik so hot") — later amended to "bi guys", as Wilde adjusts the fic to his understanding of the tastes of his newfound era.

In particular, there are parallels (extremely obscured) to The Picture of Dorian Gray:

• The preface of Dorian Gray states, "Those who find ugly meanings in beauty are corrupt without being charming." My Immortal expresses the same attitude, albeit much less artfully, as "if u flam ur a prep."
• In both works, the protagonist rejects the love of their life, then does absolutely nothing while said love goes on to commit suicide. (In My Immortal, though, he gets better.)
• In both works, an immortal character with a broken soul can be healed through The Power of Love — Dorian Gray thinks so about himself, while Professor Trevolry thinks so about Voldemint.
• Lord Henry smokes "opium-tainted cigarettes". Ebondy "smoke[s] cigarettes and drugs".
• Dorian Gray describes its protagonist as "some brainless, beautiful creature" — which describes Enony to a tee.
• Dorian Gray devotes a whole chapter to the shinies Dorian gets, and Sybil also gets some Costume Porn. My Immortal is practically made of Costume Porn.
• In both works, people are openly trying to imitate the protagonist's style. My Immortal adds some backlash from the protagonist.
• Both works use a Textual Celebrity Resemblance: Dorian's mother is described as having a "Lady Hamilton face", whereas several characters in My Immortal are likened to popular musicians. Both works use celebrity references that reveal their time of publication.

"Raven", in this case, is Wilde's beta reader, a similarly poorly-resurrected Edgar Allan Poe. Poe unfortunately made everything worse, because he wanted to make it one of his trademark gothic stories, but he totally lost the handle on what "gothic" was. He inserted himself into the fic, using a figure from one of his most famous works as a pen name. Wilde, meanwhile, developed a bit of an unrequited crush on Poe, hence all the Tara/Raven subtext in the Author's Notes. The massive breakup and subsequent makeup wasn't over a sweater.

This WMG has now been adapted to short story.

Tara is Tommy Wiseau.

Look at the similarities:

• My Immortal is all about vampires. Its lead character is a vampire, several supporting characters are vampires, and Harry Potter himself is renamed "Vampire". Meanwhile, Tommy Wiseau is compared to a vampire (it's a WMG in itself), The Room was originally supposed to have a vampire subplot, and Tommy spoke of a future film project about vampires.
• Both My Immortal and The Room have plot elements that pop up and are never mentioned again, no matter how jarring that would be. In The Room, a character announces that she "definitely" has breast cancer, and no one bring it up again. In My Immortal, Draco apparently kills himself, yet is alive and well in later chapters with no explanation.
• Both My Immortal and The Room have multiple awkward sex scenes which suggest that the writer has no idea what sex is actually like.
• The dialogue in both My Immortal and The Room are littered with profanities, even from characters whom you wouldn't expect to swear a lot.
• Tommy's loose grasp on the English language would no doubt contribute to the endless spelling and grammar errors in the fic.

Tara is a young German girl.

This explains her poor grasp of English, her constant use of the term "Yah?", and the reference to "Das Nightmare b4 Xmas". She's probably quite young — maybe even as young as five or six, but more likely nine or ten. She's watching TV without her parents' knowledge and picking up things she shouldn't be seeing — a bizarre mix of European porn and American pop-culture, in a language she can't even understand. She might have seen the Harry Potter movies, but she can't even pick up on the names of characters, places, spells, and other concepts which are just not intuitive to her. For instance, she might have heard of "abracadabra", and this is why she says that instead of Avada Kedavra.^note In fact, in Harry Potter's Fantasy Kitchen Sink universe, Avada Kedavra is probably related to "abracadabra", the latter being a spell that would conjure things, and the former being one that would destroy things. And her description of sex terms using roundabout euphemisms like "thingy" and "you-know-what" may come from her legitimately shaky understanding of sex terms.

Now, if you want to be pedantic, you'd point out that "das" is not the correct article for The Nightmare Before Christmas, whose formal German title is still in English and whose title properly translated into German would be Der Albtraum vor Weihnachten. So one would have to assume her German is almost as bad as her English. And wouldn't you know it, there was a German Harry Potter fanfic author who was known for terrible spelling, in particular misspelling Dumbledore's name in several of the same ways Tara did. So there you go!

Tara is a Vogon.

She went into free verse instead of poetry. It's still pretty bad, and among the worst in the Universe, but Earth still has the reigning champion, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings. (That is, presuming she isn't Jennings.)

Tara is the other kind of Goth.

She figured that marching into cities with a barbarian horde doesn't work anymore, but she still wants to wreck her enemies. So she wrote the worst fanfiction ever, and let civilization destroy itself.

Tara is a Troper.

She's clearly familiar with Buffy the Vampire Slayer — she named a character Willow and makes a few other references (e.g. "bitca"). She also seems to be familiar with some Troping terms, like her mention of a "Latin Standoff". If she's a troll, she's so Genre Savvy that she's skewered practically every Cliché in the book. And the fic was written in the early days of TV Tropes, not too far removed from its origins in an argument on a Buffy fansite.

The Troper who said Tara Gilesbie is a Troper is Tara.

The Troper who said the Troper who said Tara is a Troper is Tara.

The Troper who said that the Troper who said that the Troper who said Tara is a— THONK.

We apologise for the previous WMG. The Troper responsible has been restrained and sedated. It wasn't Tara, and we're still looking for her. If you have any information on her current whereabouts, please call ███-███-████.

The Tropers responsible for the previous four guesses have been sacked.

Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretti nasti...

The Troper who sacked the Tropers responsible for the previous four guesses was Tara.

They, too, have been sacked.

The Troper responsible for sacking the Tropers responsible for the previous four guesses has been sacked.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

There is no Tara. The fic wrote itself.

It's the embodiment of every bad fanfic ever made, amassed from the dregs of Fanfiction Dot Net, spontaneously brought into existence on the website's servers. It's terrifying to contemplate.

Tara exists, but was created by the fic.

The fic wrote itself, but it also created an "author", a personality to interact with the Internet and continue its own legend. Tara may have become independent of the fic at some point, not only cutting the fic off before its conclusion but stepping in as the mysterious "hacker".

What else can we guess about Tara?

Tara's last name is actually "Gilespie"

She's spelled her protagonist's own name wrong more than half the time, is it really such a stretch that she would misspell her own? This opens up the idea that she could be related to a famous "Gilespie" or "Gillespie" — maybe Tara's father is aviation historian Ric Gilespie.

Raven is a Troll who made the fic worse.

Tara insists the fic went through a spell-checker, but she didn't do it herself — she had Raven do it. So Raven thought she could have some fun with it. And Tara was none the wiser.

The story was written as a side effect from meds.

Tara suffers from insomnia and nightmares, so she takes sleeping medication. In the middle of the night she would go to her computer and type horrible fanfiction while still asleep. She could never have written something so bad while conscious, could she?

Tara made a contract with Kyubey.

She wished to write the most well-known Harry Potter fanfic ever... and it came true in the most straightforward way possible. After making the wish, her typing became worse and worse no matter what she did to correct it, and the heaps of flame reviews she got threw her into despair. "Raven" is actually Kyubey. Tara turned into a Witch around halfway through the fanfic, but her Witch form (Ebony) was too subconsciously attached to the fic and continued to write more of it. Oddly enough, the epilogue of the fanfic "Peulla Magi Mary Sue Magica" heavily implies that this is the case.

"Tara Gillesbie" is an experimental female Ork prototype.

She has no idea what Earth culture is like (or Imperial culture, either), and all hear ideas come from inaccurate sources — perhaps a recording or vox of some sort, or maybe a fragmented document on pre-Dark Age Terra. The Old Ones who created her were also lacking somewhat on reference material for a female Ork (what with the endless war around the galaxy), so they were forced to use outdated references to another species — in this case, a female human teenager.

There's no evidence to suggest that Orks are even literate, which explains why My Immortal is the linguistic mess that it is. The fic may even have been a test to gauge her intelligence — the scientists want to see the extent of her creativity. She didn't pass the test, despite having more than 40 chapters to prove herself. The fic ends when it does because the scientists ended the experiment and euthanized the poor subject. That's why we still see no female Orks.

Tara is Raven's alter-ego.

Raven wants to troll the Internet, and in so doing has a ton of "burner" accounts on several places on the Internet, many of which belong to "Tara". These accounts are mostly inactive, and the few posts they have are brief and always say the same stuff about "prepz" and "goffs" and "haturs" and Wangsting about My Immortal's hatedom. "Tara" has kept the same one-dimensional "goffic" personality since the fic began. And she even contradicts herself — on her first MySpace, she claims to have taken her profile picture herself, but on her second page, she claims the exact same picture was taken by Raven.

As for why — Raven could be angry at the attention bad fanfic writers get at the expense of better ones. She might have written other fanfics which were well-received but little-seen. Raven might not be as good a writer as she thinks (we do have access to the fics she wrote, which aren't great), but she did prove her point — people prefer trainwrecks to middling stuff. She created Tara as a way of deflecting suspicion and avoiding My Immortal's reputation affecting her earnest works.

Tara and Raven as split personalities.

They are the same person, but it's not a deliberate split. Neither of them are the "original" — they continually fight for dominance, surfacing one after the other. Notice how Tara writes a chapter, then Raven edits it. Only Raven can write worth a damn; Tara is functionally illiterate. Tara eventually wins that battle, spending more time in control and making the fic progressively worse, either assuming Raven already edited the later chapters or shutting her out entirely. This also explains why Tara and Raven have a falling out (Gerard Way posters notwithstanding).

Tara and Raven aren't the only personalities, either. Others are wandering around in there, explaining absences from both Tara and Raven (Tara seems to go to England three separate times over the last few chapters). Tara and Raven share a love for Harry Potter and "goff" culture, but the other personalities might have different tastes that leak into the fic — The Lord of the Rings, Back to the Future, Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The "hacker" might have been a third personality who didn't respect any of the others. Tara genuinely considers herself a goff, but she's never out long enough to actually experience much in the way of goffness, which leads to her shallow understanding of it.

As for the base person (let's call her "Echo"), she created these personalities in part out of shame. Raven was created out of embarrassment at a secret vice in the form of goff culture. Tara was created out of disappointment at the poor fanfic Raven was writing. The "hacker" was created out of disgust at Tara's work. She can manage all of these personalities because she's a Time Lord.

Tara wrote My Immortal For the Evulz.

Tara wanted to drive a mass amount of people insane and cause chaos. She had no power in the outside world, but she could affect the Internet. And thus My Immortal was born.

Tara wrote My Immortal to cope with being a loser in high school.

The fic reads very much like an American high school drama, using one of its tried and true tropes: nerds vs. cool people. Tara, being a loser, didn't want to write a typical "nerds vs. jocks" fic because she desperately wanted to sound cool and unique. Hence, Ebony's gang is a bunch of goths, and the jocks become preps. However, Tara's desire to be cool leaks into her portrayal of "goff" culture; she hates the preps because she wants to be one, and she accidentally makes the goffs behave more preppy and cool than they should in this type of fic.

Tara was planning to write a new fanfic before being driven off the Internet.

The XXXbloodyrists666XXX userpage on FanFiction.Net, late in the tenure of My Immortal, has a line reading "i will try 2 post a new fanfik maybe derring da summer [...] but i probebly wont koz all od u r such idiotz". Now, that fanfic never happened, for one of the many reasons elsewhere on this page discussing why Tara stopped writing — frustration, institutionalization, untimely death, boredom. It's been more than a decade and we've got zip (although a lot of Tropers have been really hoping). But what would it have been? Would it have been utter proof that Tara was a troll all along? Was it planned to be something in the vein of My Immortal in another fandom? Would it have been a continuation of My Immortal, in the same universe but a different story, an analogue to the final chapter that would have redeemed the story? Did it not exist at all, the result of the profile page falling victim to a "hacker" yet again? Nobody knows.

But if you want a juicy clue as to what we missed, consider this line in close proximity:

"EVRY 1 C NEW MOON!!1"

Tara is an insane AI.

She was created to make great works of fiction, but the power went to her head and she instead decided she wanted to be humanity's god. She would do this by creating a Brown Note. She also lost her technical vocabulary and had to substitute it with sex terms; the badly written sex scenes are actually instructions on how to fix her. "Put his thingie into my you-know-what" could well be a diagnostic sequence.

Tara is part of a Comic Trio.

Tara is the Navigator, deluslionally convinced that her fanfiction is good, and determined to put it up. Raven is the idiot (although she seems to be at least a bit smarter than Tara), encouraging Tara and enabling her. The reviewers are a collective Only Sane Man, who try their best to get that stupid thing off FanFiction.Net; Tara ignores them.

Tara is a medium.

My Immortal is the Dying Dream of a gothic Harry Potter fanatic, surname Way. Things were kind of lost in translation.

Tara is an attention whore.

And she knows there's No Such Thing as Bad Publicity. She wanted people to talk about her story, no matter what. That could mean she's a Troll, but it doesn't necessarily — she could have been an earnest writer who was so intent on giving people what they "wanted" that she would willingly let her vision and creativity deteriorate to play idiot for people on the Internet. It's not revulsion she wants, it's love.

Tara is a Muggle who stumbled across Hogwarts.

The school's usual protection mechanisms happened to not be working for whatever reason when Tara blundered in. So instead of the highly uninviting waste disposal site that Muggles usually see when they stumble upon Hogwarts, Tara saw something else. But it wasn't the real Hogwarts; it was some bizarre mishmash of Hogwarts, a concert from The '80s, and a Hot Topic store. Poor Tara tried to inform the Muggle world of what she saw, but it came across as a disjointed mess. The odd grammar could be attributed to brain damage from a broken Perception Filter. Or maybe she just bonked her head while trying to escape.

Britney is an Author Avatar.

Yes, TaEbory is the obvious Author Avatar, but Tara has more than one. Britney is a normal unremarkable girl, which is what Tara is in real life. Tara hates this and created Britney to "punish" this side of herself. Tara went on to give Britney character attributes she didn't like to justify said punishment. (Whether or not Tara has those traits remains a matter of debate.)

My Immortal is Subliminal Advertising for Coca-Cola.

Many of the spelling mistakes aren't really "mistakes" — they're designed to make you think about Coke. In particular, the Invisibility Cloak is semi-regularly referred to as an "invisibility coke". There's also Dracola, who "used to be called Navel but it tuned out dat he was kidnapped at birth and his real family were vampires." And it's working — we're betting that at least one Troper's raring for a Coke right now. LRMReading on YouTube also made a Running Gag about Coke after reading "Dracola".

To add to the theory, the "invisibility coke" isn't an invisibility cloak at all — it clearly doesn't work! "Mr. Norris" found Enoby and Draco despite them wearing one. It evokes the image of them hiding in a giant Coke bottle. What they should have done was drunk the Invisibility Coke — Coke that turns you invisible!

Tara is a Guy in Real Life.

There are two ways to go about this. The first is to accept one of the many theories suggesting this was a Troll Fic and simply expanding the field of possible authors to include the other half of the population from the usual suspects.

The second is to think it is an earnest work by a guy who, for whatever reason, is pretending to be a girl. Maybe he thinks he won't be taken seriously as a fanfic author because Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls. Or maybe, as "Gertrude Perkins" once put it, "I gave myself a female pseudonym; everybody's doing it these days." How this author could have the presence of mind to write pseudonymously and yet produce... this has yet to be determined.

Tara is XXXmidnitegoffXXX.

XXXmidnitegoffXXX is one of the several Troll Fic authors who did an unofficial "sequel" to My Immortal — and yet Tara herself lists this person as one of her own favorite authors. Why would Tara single out this author in particular? Maybe they know each other. Or maybe they're the same person.

Oh, and he confessed. Not that this means very much around these parts, given the mythos behind the fic. But food for thought.

Tara is Twitter user "Alphys".

Alphys came forward in 2017 claiming in an open letter on Twitter to be the writer of My Immortal. Granted, she ended it, "P.S., Undyne is my wife, HAHAHA, SUCK IT HATERS." But that could mean anything in this context.

Tara is these two other guys.

Specifically, the guys who confessed here.

Okay, we better stop. If we started giving credence to every sentient being with a keyboard who claimed to be Tara, we'd be here all day. We've got such a wide variety of guesses to get to! Like:

Tara's account was hacked several times, all by people who thought they were the first hacker.

The "hacker" who shows up before Chapter 39 wasn't the first. Nor was the one before him. Nor the one before that.

In an astonishing twist of fate, a series of disparate, unrelated Internet trolls looking for something to hijack stumble upon My Immortal and go to town on it. Each one finds the fic pretty bad, but is inspired to make it worse than before. This is why the fic's degradation over time seems a little uneven and disjointed; it seems to shift stylistically. Eventually, by the time Chapter 39's hacker shows up, the fic has degenerated into such a morass of text-speak, awkward sex, and sloppy time travel that the hacker sees little room for "improvement" and instead decides to announce himself.

A third individual was in on the story.

The person who posted the fic on the blog page after FanFiction.Net took it down is skilled in the English language, moreso than either Tara or her co-writer Raven. And this person also refers to both of them in the third person, while referring to themself in the first person. Okay, that would make sense if it were just a stranger who wanted to do the world a service (or disservice, depending on how you look at it). But this person also seems to have fairly in-depth knowledge of how the story was written, knowing exactly which parts were co-written by Raven and which weren't — more knowledge than an average reader could pick up.

Tara is Nyarlathotep.

"She" wrote My Immortal to screw with human beings and entertain herself. It's quite fitting for an entity that's a Brown Note in and of itself. And the bizarre spelling errors are but a glimpse into the thought process of a being whose own name is The Unpronounceable.

Now, usually a reader would Go Mad from the Revelation after exposure to a work by that potent of a being. But this is TV Tropes, and we're made of tougher stuff! We're either so crazy already it doesn't affect us, or it's only a matter of ti-Shub-Niggurath!

Tara is a worshipper of Nyarlathotep.

Not actually the entity itself, but rather one of its devotées. She got the idea to write a Troll Fic like this from Nyarlathotep, whose actual magnum opus is The Pokemon Story — much nastier, and thus much more befitting his character.

Tara is Haruhi.

Two reasons behind this:

• It's obligatory for WMG, and
• My Immortal fits Haruhi's style. We've seen what happens when she makes a movie: it's disjointed, poorly edited, and has no coherent plot. If she tried to write Harry Potter fanfiction, it would look a lot like My Immortal. The "goffic" bits come from Haruhi having some contact with the Elegant Gothic Lolita community and thinking it was so moe.

Tara is an advertiser for a clothing store competing against Hot Topic

The whole fic is an elaborate mudslinging campaign agaist Hot Topic, designed to make people think their customers are stupid, shallow, and horrendous at spelling and writing in general.

"Tara" is an A-10 Thunderbolt.

She's not human at all — she's a fighter jet. "Tara Gilesbie" is actually the pilot's daughter, a twelve-year-old Potterhead whose music tastes include Marilyn Manson, My Chemical Romance, and Good Charlotte. Airman Gilespie had a poor understanding of his daughter's interests, and he did an even poorer job explaining them to his comrades, but this is what the aircraft overheard, and based on this warped perception, it wrote My Immortal.

The aircraft knows little about the Potterverse, but it does know a lot about guns, flying, and warfare, and this is reflected in the story. It's why the story has such a fascination with guns, which normally don't exist in the Potterverse, and which appear capable of holding a gazillion bullets that can be sprayed rapidly — the aircraft projected its GAU-8 Avenger into the story. It also subconsciously found ways to project flying things into the fic, such as Draco's flying car and the broomsticks TaEnony and Draako pull out of their asses to flee Volxemprxt's lair. The sex scenes are actually referring to refueling, which the aircraft clearly enjoys — especially when it happens in midair, which is pretty cool.

The characterization comes from the aircraft's limited understanding of its pilot's family and comrades. Ebony's depression mirrors the real Tara's — her dad was half a world away and might never come back. She might have had bipolar disorder, and her dad would probably have worried a lot about how that would affect her perception of his deployment. "Raven", meanwhile, was someone deployed with Airman Gilespie, possibly even a superior officer, with whom the pilot had a falling out.

The story has a depressing ending — poor Airman Gilespie was killed in action, shot down somewhere over the Middle East. He was based in Dubai, in the relative safety of the United Arab Emirates, but one fateful morning, he was sent on a mission. The warplane, raring for action, was super excited, as was reflected in the last chapter's Author's Note ("ofmy im leeving dubya pretty soon kant wait!!! Diz wil prolly be da last chaptah until I kum bak.") Neither pilot nor plane survived the mission, and that's why the fic ended when it did.

English isn't her first language.

Simple. There's another WMG on this page suggesting she's German. Or she could be Turkish, as befits the WMG suggesting a shared universe with Turkish Star Wars. Whatever the case, she has no formal training in English and has to learn the language phonetically, leading to her persistently horrendous spelling of even basic words like "the".

Tara is actually Valeria Lukyanova.

Valeria used to be an edgy goth, and in the beginning of her interview video with Vice she mentions Tara to be one of her spiritual names. Combine that with the fact that she believes in magic and struggles a bit with the English language, and you're got a good candidate for the true identity of Tara.

Raven/Jenny was the hacker.

As a friend and the editor, she would have access to Tara's computer (and files) and would probably know the password, or at least where to find it. It is possible that Tara was even signed into FF.net at the time (it does have a "stay logged in for three days" option), so Raven/Jenny would just need access to the computer.

Tara is friends with Cori Falls.

Just take a look at their writing styles. Okay, Cori's grammar and spelling are way better than Tara's, but that's not a matter of style, just execution.

The My Immortal rehost site was created by Tara.

This theory assumes Tara is a troll. After her story got deleted from Fanfiction.net, she rehosted it herself, pretending to be one of her own lulz-loving "fans". The site even includes a link to a petition to get My Immortal put back on Fanfiction.net for crying out loud.

My Immortal was written by either Megami33 or KrisRix. Maybe both.

Tara comes off as a sort of proto-Abridged!Raye from Sailor Moon Abridged. She hasn't perfected the No Indoor Voice yet, but is taking steps towards "MUST! PRAY! TO! SATAAAAN!" and has perfected the love of pain and violence. And Ebony's black-waist length hair (which Sailor Mars/Hino Rei/Raye has in canon) is tinted with purple and red — the colors of Sailor Mars' fuku.

Tara is Kara from the Star Trek episode "Spock's Brain".

Yes, the woman who gave us the famous line, "Brain and brain, what is brain?!"

Kara saw the first four Harry Potter films through television signals picked up by the Eymorg. Only the first four movies had reached Sigma Draconis VI by 2268, which is why Kara thinks the fifth movie is about to come out. But she was impatient and started writing anyway, despite being vaguely aware that the transmissions are technically adaptations of an underlying work (to which she doesn't have access). Her spelling is as bad as her prose, and she can't even spell her own name correctly (or consistently), leading us to assume it's "Tara".

"Raven" is the person whose brain formed the original Controller. Exposure to My Immortal was what caused the original Controller to be "finished". When Kara absorbed knowledge from the Teacher to get Spock's brain, she happened to be logged into her fanfiction account. After retrieving the brain, she went to her computer, but she was confused by what she saw because she remembered the story being brilliant and this clearly... wasn't. She concluded that she must have hacked into someone else's account and wrote the hacker chapter. After the knowledge faded from her brain, she went back in without remembering having written the hacker chapter, and she continued writing as normal. My Immortal ended shortly thereafter when Captain Kirk forced them to abandon the Eymorg complex.

Tara is Lil' K, a.k.a. LILSHOWSTOPPA from the infamous YouTube video "ME TELLIN YOU MOTHA FUCKERS OFF"

Outwardly, Tara was a white "gangstuh" who thought she was Pretty Fly for a White Guy. But inwardly, she had a secret desire to be "goffic". She knew her fellow "gangstuhs" would leave her in disgust if they found out, but Tara nurtured that secret love as best she could — poorly, because internalizing it prevented her from interacting with actual Goths, leading to her superficial knowledge of the culture. One thing never changed, though — her horrible vocabulary and her strong tendency to curse out and threaten her critics.

The only one to whom she could open up was a friend in the same situation, Jenny a.k.a. "Raven", with whom she would have secret parties where they Goffed it up and worshipped Gerard Way. One day, they thought up the idea of combining two of their secret "vices", leading to the creation of a Harry Potter fanfic with a "goffik" protagonist. Tara started getting more and more into it, and Raven, still wary about what their "gangstuh" circle might say, stopped editing the work and eventually had a falling-out with Tara.

Note the circumstantial evidence that LILSHOWSTOPPA posted her video in February 2007, while My Immortal was still being published, and both Tara and LILSHOWSTOPPA stopped verifiably updating around the same time. Perhaps Tara's experience with the "hacker" led her to swear off the Internet entirely. Note also a piece of "gangstuh" culture leaking into My Immortal, what with Hagrid suddenly appearing "singing to the tune of a gothic version of a song by 50 Cent."

Oh, but wait, you say, Tara's a troll. Well, then so's LILSHOWSTOPPA. And they're the same troll.

Tara's account was run by someone on FanFiction.Net's staff.

Someone working at the website was tired of reading through all the bad Slash Fic, Rouge Angles of Satin, emo wannabes, and endless Lemons. They decided to write a Stealth Parody to beat the badfic authors at their own game. There's some evidence that My Immortal had some protection of some sort — it survived the huge number of reports it got, but its many imitators were zapped on sight. The hacked chapter, with its reference to "Fanfiction.net Hell", was even a dig at all the deleted imitators. But in the end, FF.net realized what they unleashed upon the world and did a large-scale purge of My Immortal and everything like it.

The editor is to blame.

Tara is actually a brilliant author who wrote a Fanfic that was the epitome of So Cool, It's Awesome. Her editor hijacked the brilliant fanfic and turned it into the parody we're reading now. For some reason. Probably jealousy.

Tara and Jenny (assuming they are not fictional) come from relatively rich families.

How else would they be able to go on these vacations to England and Transylvania?

Tara is nigel molesworths cousin.

...as any fule kno.

Tara was mentally disabled.

She had some kind of condition which affected her ability to read and write, and she was bullied in school because of it. So she turned away from the world and went "goffik", with Raven being one of her only friends. She and Raven fought and made up but eventually drifted apart for good, and an increasingly lonely Tara's depression spiralled until she was Driven to Suicide.

Tara wants to be "goff" because it's sexy.

As has been hashed out elsewhere, she has a very superficial understanding of genuine Goth culture. While other guesses on this page have suggested other reasons for her to be... well, a poser, this one posits that it's all about sex appeal. She just thinks it's cute. And she's hoping a cute guy will notice and fall in love with her, like all the characters in My Immortal fall in love with Enony.

Tara is a young teenager who will one day become an accomplished writer.

Her career arc will kinda mirror that of Jane Austen, who wrote her first book when she was fourteen — case in point, it was called Love and Freindship (sic). While it wasn't great by any standard, it did show signs of what Austen would later be famous for in her acclaimed works. And interestingly, Love and Freindship was actually a parody, skewering many of the common tropes of literature of the time.

Tara's the same way. In this case, she's attempting to parody the hallmarks of her era's writing — which includes Fan Fiction. Indeed, several works of popular literature since My Immortal started life as a fan work of some sort. This is how Tara can straddle the gap between "Troll Fic" and "earnest effort"; she is making silly mistakes borne out of her youth and inexperience, including her disdain for grammar and spelling and her complete inability to write a comprehensible plot, but she's also quite adept at picking out all the things that fanfic writers were into — Darker and Edgier, subcultures, Shipping, Ho Yay — and turning them into a farce.

Tara is a USUK shipper.

Some of her author's notes have her randomly yelling "USUK!!!!!1" Most people parse that as telling her critics that they suck. But it's actually parsed as "US/UK" — she ships America and England in Hetalia: Axis Powers. It makes sense because (a) she explicitly finds gay guys hot and isn't shy about Ho Yay, hence My Immortal itself including a past relationship between Draco and Vampire; (b) she's shown some affinity for Japanese culture (even if on a superficial level); and (c) she's the type who would throw out random and unprovoked shouts of support for her preferred ship.

Tara is Tara Strong, suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder.

She's a Woman of a Thousand Voices, but perhaps a thousand was one voice too many. We saw some warning signs that she was getting Lost in Character, such as this clip. We also saw her inject herself into odd Shipping wars on Twitter. But she's got enough of a grasp on reality that My Immortal is still a Troll Fic, a work designed to express the insanity that comes from having to remember which ten-year-old boy she's supposed to be portraying that week.

The other "characters" in the fic's saga are therefore also Tara. "Raven" is a heavily Flanderized version of the Teen Titans (2003) character of the same name, and the "hacker" is Batgirl. Tara and Raven are trying to bring about The End of the World as We Know It c/o "Trigon", and Batgirl is trying to stop them and save the world from the insanity. She evidently succeeded, given that the fic never actually finished.

Tara was in love with Raven.

Tara is obviously familiar with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, since she referenced it at one point. Tara wrote Raven into My Immortal under the name of "Willow". On Buffy, what kind of relationship did Tara have with Willow? That's right, they were dating.

Tara is the Simurgh

After all, Genre Savvy Worm readers can tell you two rules: Never underestimate the Simurgh, and you are underestimating the Simurgh. We know the Simurgh wants to cause conflict. So, it left a Brown Note perfectly designed to cause chaos, conflict, and destruction, that would persist and take effect independantly of its source, and could be promulgated across all worlds. The initial results (Scion's rampage and death) were so impressive that the Simurgh did the work to create a piece of Tinker Tech that spread the story across the Internet across every reality.

Tara was a mentally-ill teenager who is now dead.

It's a grim theory, but here goes:

Tara really was serious about My Immortal. She really did fancy herself a "goth". She really believed that the story was not only great, but also as deep and serious as the problems she was facing. Her account really was hacked. And she really was cutting herself, which really did lead to her hospitalization.

Unfortunately, Tara couldn't handle the fic's negative reception, and she started cutting herself more, hoping to emotionally blackmail the readers into telling her the fic was great. It led her mental health into a downward spiral — the more she got depressed, the more the fic suffered, the more people mocked it, and the more depressed she got. The constant blood loss certainly didn't help, especially with the attention to detail she needed to give the fic something resembling coherent spelling, grammar, and characterization.

The fic ended because Tara eventually didn't survive her downward spiral. She might have committed suicide, or she might just have fatally harmed herself (not caring whether you live or die isn't much different from killing yourself outright). She may or may not have gone to England, and she may or may not have done something dangerous in an unfamiliar place, but the poor girl wound up dead.

Tara Gilesbie is actually Alessa Gillespie.

...and My Immortal is her way of punishing the world for its sins.

Whoever Tara is, we'll never find out.

It works with both possibilities. If Tara was an earnest writer, she's grown up since then and she'll never own up to it. If Tara was a troll, everybody's lost interest by now. After all, it's been more than a decade since the last update — if you're Tara, either you're a grown woman reviving your Old Shame, or a grown man reviving an old joke. You can't win either way. The password to the original FF.net profile may not even exist anymore.

This goes in conjunction with the next theory:

Whoever claims to be Tara is lying.

We've already seen several mutually exclusive claimants to the role of "Tara Gilespie", some of which are even listed as guesses on this page. Given the strong disincentive for the real Tara to make herself known after all these years — and Tara's accounts known susceptibility to hackers — it's more likely than not that anyone who claims to be Tara is not Tara.

Tara stopped writing My Immortal to go focus on Twilight.

My Immortal and Twilight have a lot in common, what with themes of darkness, vampires, a brooding boyfriend meeting a teenage Escapist Character and falling head over heels in love with her, and So Bad, It's Good execution. Twilight is not mentioned in My Immortal and is almost conspicuous in its absence, what with all the Shout Outs Tara throws at her other favorite works, but there's a simple reason for that — Twilight hadn't been published when My Immortal was written. (At least, if you look at time linearly — this is WMG, after all.) Tara is exactly the type to have loved Twilight once it came out, and indeed when that happened, she lost interest in My Immortal and started getting her Wish-Fulfillment from the better executed (relatively speaking) Twilight.

"Suzi" was a troll.

At the beginning of Chapter 35 — the one where "Morty McFli" shows up — Tara thanks someone named "Suzi" for an idea. Except "Suzi" is not one to be trusted; she's a troll. And her idea was the insertion of Marty McFly. The evidence thereof is that the extent of Tara's familiarity with Back to the Future is that Marty exists and he has a "tim machine", which in My Immortal is not called a DeLorean or even described as a car, instead being something that fits in your pocket.

Tara wrote My Immortal while high.

It solves the obvious problem — you'd have to be high on something to write something like My Immortal. But it also explains the bizarre line, "I TOOOK OUT A CIGARETE END STARTED TO smoke pot," with the weird capitalization. Tara, being The Stoner, considers smoking tobacco more alarming than smoking cannabis, which is why the "cigarete" is in all-caps and the "smoke pot" is not. (One can also think of it as a signal that Evony is also a stoner who calms down the minute she takes a puff.)

Tara is the daughter of Jim Theis.

A juvenile amateur "writer" creates the most infamous fic of the genre and of the generation, starring a slutty and violent unsympathetic protagonist and featuring gratitious bad sex scenes, many malapropisms amd word crimes, excessive focus on irrelevant details, and skimpy outfits? Like father, like daughter!

Tara is a former friend of J. K. Rowling who helped her write the Harry Potter books.

It's related to the above WMG that Tara was the inspiration for Gilderoy Lockhart — she knew Rowling, and that's how she could guess elements of then-unreleased books like Harry being the seventh Horcrux. In this case, Tara was upset that Rowling never gave her due credit for her work, so she decided to get revenge by writing a horrible Harry Potter fanfiction (and at the same time decry Rowling for being a "hamophobe" years before the greater Internet started calling her a transphobe).

Tara is from the Caucasus region.

Two misspellings of "Azkaban" in My Immortal are "Azerbaijan" and "Abkhazia", both of which are in the Caucasus region and neither of which are things your typical American are likely to know about.

Tara is Adolf Hitler, resurrected as a demon.

After decades of torture in Hell, Hitler succumbed to Satan's will and pledged allegiance to him. Satan, though, was equally impressed with Hitler's immense evil and resurrected him as an Archdemon. Hitler returned to Earth with newfound powers he picked up in Hell, including knowledge of My Immortal, a book of high art that drives readers insane (thus proving itself quite useful as an implement for torturing the damned). Hitler was given the mission to translate My Immortal into English — it wouldn't be quite as potent as it is in its original Black Speech, but it would give a nice preview to the sinners on Earth of what awaits them in Hell.

Hitler was chosen because he was the best equipped to do it, being the only Archdemon of human origin and thus the most familiar with human subcultures. However, that's just relative to his fellow demons — after all, he chose as his vessel a Goff-obsessed teenage girl named Tara. Filtered through her perception, the translated My Immortal came out as a poorly written Harry Potter fanfic. (Some of the poor writing might have been Hitler himself, though; if Mein Kampf is any indication, he was never a writer so much as a ranter.) He was assisted by "Raven", here possessed by Hitler's real-life deputy Rudolf Hess, thus making Hess the first Grammar Nazi in the world. Hitler and Hess had a falling out at one point, as Hess had some unfinished business in Scotland he wanted to take care of.

All this is Führer supported by "Das Nitemare b4 Xmas", which would be as grammatically correct in German as the rest of the story is in English.

My Immortal is a religious text from the far future.

Thousands of years After the End, the residents of a post-apocalyptic Dubai, whose name had been corrupted to "Dubya", discovered several damaged copies of the Harry Potter books and an as-yet unwritten Gothic young-adult Urban Fantasy series. Tara, the expedition's leader, took the books to a prophet named Raven, who interpreted them as messages from the Umarkans and Imratis, the gods of the Goffs, a tribe who inhabit Dubya. Raven ordered Tara to transcribe them into Dubyan, in which they became religious screeds in which the Goffs triumph over their oppressors, the Prep tribe.

Years after that, after a religious war or two, the Goffs come out on top and attribute their victory in part to their holy text. They seek to translate it into other languages, including English — or rather what's left of it in the far future. The English translation therefore became a garbled Nu Spelling mishmash of Goffic religious literature and a Recursive Translation of the Harry Potter books. Even then, the translation from Dubyan hit some snags, particularly with respect to a chapter inserted by a "hacker" who was actually a Prep spy, seeking revenge for the destruction of his own clan.

Tara, meanwhile, was a participant in the battle against the Preps. The English translation includes her last update, in which she expresses her excitement at leaving Dubya — she's going to fight a holy war. She was tragically killed but became a religious martyr.

Tara is a secret fan of Hilary Duff.

She's either a troll, or she's so insecure and desperate for validation from her Goth friends that her writing is particularly vitriolic toward Duff. But her true feelings leak out occasionally, such as a reference at one point to a scene from Duff's film A Cinderella Story which she compares positively to her relationship with Draco.

Tara is a prep who based Ebony on an annoying emo girl from her school.

Tara is your average, well-adjusted teenage girl from the mid-2000s whose tastes are what you'd expect: Aeropostale, Hilary Duff, the Disney channel, and things with bright colors.

She appears to know much more about prep culture than goff culture. The goffs all behave like stereotypes, suggesting a very superficial knowledge of the culture. Meanwhile, she demonstrates knowledge of prep culture like A Cinderella Story (see the above guess) and rattles off a list of prep stores.

Tara and Raven were bullied in school by the emo kids for being "preppy". One particularly annoying bully was obsessed with Gerard Way and Harry Potter. The pair tried to get back at them in a very nerdy way: writing on Fanfiction Dot Net pretending to be their bullies. They didn't know the difference between "emo" and "goth" (and didn't particularly care); they just wanted to make them look stupid, hence the atrocious spelling and grammar. They responded to negative reviews by doubling down on exactly what the reviewers said was bad, thinking it would make their bullies look worse. Raven started to feel bad about pretending to be someone else on the Internet, but Tara wanted to keep going, hence their falling out. (Or else the "falling out" was a parody of the constant drama they observed among the emo kids.)

Indeed, it's one of many theories that bridges the gap between "earnest work" and "Troll Fic". There are mistakes typical of a young and inexperienced writer, but their goal isn't a straight "goffik" story but rather a parody thereof. The illiteracy and bizarre characterization seem to be deliberate, but there's just something about the flow of the story and the bizarre references sneaking through that seem a bit too genuinely "teenage girl" about them.

Tara has dyslexia.

That would explain the consistently inconsistent spelling.

Tara has access either to a dictionary or a malfunctioning spell checker.

Why can't Tara seem to spell "the" but can write longer, obscure words correctly? Maybe she naturally writes with bad spelling and grammar, so she sometimes checks the dictionary to corrects some words that Raven can't understand herself. The Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus lists "ebony" and "raven", in that order, as synonyms for "jet" (as in jet-black), which means it's quite possible that she read it at least once. Or maybe Tara uses a spellchecker that for some reason can't understand phonetic spelling but tries to interpret the stranger words, hence the random obscure words.

Ebony

Ebony is aware she's a bad person.

Most readers assume that Ebony comes off as a bad person because of Tara's poor writing skills. But there's a strong case to be made that Tara was intentionally writing an Anti-Hero — someone who revels in The Dark Side of sex, drugs, violence, and Satanism, but who still sees Voldemort as a threat to Wizarding society and fights against him. Enoby does all this while strongly differentiating herself from the preps — she associates niceness with preppiness and is proud to not be a nice person, and "gofficness" is shown to be about more than just heavy eyeliner and emo music — it's about embracing one's negative personality traits and depression.

Ebony lives in the canonical Harry Potter universe.

Her real name is Demi Ravenwood, she's in Slytherin, and she's a depressive, anti-social, reclusive student who creates vivid fantasy worlds to cope with her loneliness. She never actually interacts with Harry or figures into his adventures, which is why the books don't mention her.

Ebony is a succubus.

She's a demon, and a wizard on top of it, which gives her strong magical powers. She has her own way of perceiving the world around her, which combined with her powers make her appear frightening and demonic. She can twist people's personalities and bring people back from the dead. And she does everything "sexily". Think Sabine from The Order of the Stick.

Ebony is a poser!!!!11112

Dumbledore listens to an *NSYNC song on her "tim machine" iPod. Now how did that get there...?

Ebony is into BDSM.

When Ebony says that she's a sadist, she means the "sado-" part of "sadomasochism" — she's a wannabe dominatrix. Emphasis on the "wannabe" — she's a shallow idiot who understands BDSM about as well as she understands being gothic. She doesn't understand that a BDSM-type sadist isn't an actual sadist — they only pretend to be one when they have sex. This is why she's capable of feeling sorry for Voldemort despite being a "sadist". She's also never really had BDSM sex, because none of her sexual partners (Draco, Vampire, et al) are into it, and she just wants to be a part of the subculture — she's perfectly capable of sexual satisfaction with just "vanilla" sex.

My Immortal is the Apocalyptic Log of a teenage girl slowly going crazy.

As the story goes on, she makes less and less sense; entire paragraphs are placed before the events they describe are happening. The already bad grammar continues to go downhill as she writes, ending up as a garbled mess. "Raven" is just a figment of her imagination, or else another side to her personality who has much better grammar and spelling. The hacker's chapter was the last straw and was what she thought happened when she truly cracked.

Ebony was created when Willow tried to take all the darkness out of the hearts of the Harry Potter cast.

Willow was a Ravenclaw who was plenty clever but had zero common sense. She was a bit detached from other people, but she genuinely wanted the best for everyone. With the threat of Voldemort looming over the school, she thought she could help by extracting the darkness out of everyone's hearts.

She was able to devise a spell that would do it and channel it into a doll she had. But she underestimated its potency, and the darkness took on a life of its own, becoming Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way. Ebony had the ability to turn people to evil (and "goffickness"). Most students succumbed to this ability, but some seriously strong-willed students were able to resist — they became the "preps", whom Ebony despised for not bending to her will. Ebony's twisted viewpoint causes her to see the "preps" and "posers" as committing unspeakable deeds, when in reality, they're frantically trying to kill Ebory and redeem the canon characters.

Willow herself was the first victim of her creation, becoming almost completely corrupted to the point of having no will of her own. But she does have her moments of lucidity — for instance, in Chapter 38, when she tries her hardest to redo canon, but because she couldn't resist the urge to ship the very non-canon Draco/Hermione, her spell fell apart. Enony alternates between liking her (as her creator) and hating her for her attempts to resist. In the end, Willow musters just enough willpower, when Evony is fighting Voldemort, to undo her spell and end the story.

Ebony is Peeves.

Peeves is a spirit of chaos, and chaos makes him stronger. During Snape's tenure as headmaster, Peeves grew more powerful by feeding on the general chaos at Hogwarts, including the rebellious spirits of Dumbledore's Army. Shortly after the events of Deathly Hallows, Peeves reaches Reality Warping levels of power, and under the guise of Ebony, he sets into motion the events of My Immortal. The "preps" are the particularly strong-willed students who are fighting Peeves' mind control.

Enoby wrote My Immortal.

My Immortal is non-fiction. Hogwarts is really like that.

No brain damage, no mind control, no alternate universes. Hogwarts is a scarily bizarre, depressing, hormonal place. Harry Potter as you knew it is ruined forever. (Sorry.)

Ebony killed herself at the end.

All we know is that she shouted "ABRA KEDABRA" — the text doesn't specify what she was pointing at. She was actually pointing her wand at herself. That's why the story cuts off so abruptly — the narrator died at that point.

Now, it remains a matter of debate whether she did that on purpose. She easily could have, what with her history of self-harm and suicidal ideation. Or she was just so confused (from drug use, or perhaps blood loss from all the cutting) that her wand was just facing the wrong way.

It also remains a matter of debate whether she could actually be killed by the Killing Curse, given that Enoby specifies that the only things that could kill her are a cross or a steak. Then again, the canonical Killing Curse is Avada Kedavra, and she said "Abra Kedavra", which could be a different curse — which conjures steaks. (Mmm... steak...)

Ebony is bisexual.

She won't admit it herself, but she describes her female friends about the same way as she does her male ones — quite leeringly, such as her mention of Willow's "really big bobs".

Ebony is the Alpha Bitch.

Everyone here says so, so it would make an official theory. Here's how she measures up to Rosalind Wiseman's newest "Queen Bee" criteria:

• Her friends do what she wants to do: Check.
• She isn't intimidated by other girls in her class: Absolutely.
• She compains about other people copying her, never leaving her alone, or being too sensitive: Ebony frequently complains about others "tring 2 be b goffik" and whines about never being left alone. She doesn't complain about anyone being too sensitive, but that's mostly because she doesn't even try to hide her contempt for her targets.
• When she's hanging out in a group, she's in the center. When she moves, they follow: Ebony is the center of the story. If you removed her, none of the other characters would bother to do anything.
• She can argue anyone down, including friends, peers, teachers, and parents: Of course. She breaks school rules on a constant basis. She never wears the uniform, she's incredibly foul-mouthed, she does drugs, and she has sex with other students all over the school. And she never faces consequences for any of that. She doesn't even have to beg; she usually just yells at them.
• She can make another girl feel "anointed" by declaring her a special friend: Probably. She certainly thinks she can, trying to redeem Voldemort by making him "special" to her.
• She's strategically affectionate — for example, she sees two girls in her group, one she's pleased with and one she isn't. When she sees them, she'll throw her arms around one and insist that they sit together and barely say anything to the other: Ebony's friends are all clones of her, and she's rarely displeased with them. But when she falls out with them, like with Willow, they may as well not exist. She finds out second-hand from Hermione that Willow died (not that it stuck) and got violated by Loopin.
• She won't take responsiblity when she hurts someone's feelings: Absolutely. Draco may have killed himself (it's not clear) from lack of attention from Egogy, but she never thinks about how she may have treated him.
• If she thinks she's been wronged, she feels she has the right to seek revenge and will do so: Ebony tortures and murders people over perceived slights.

So in spite of all the vitriol Evony spews at "preps" and "posers" — the kind of people who would, in a sane work, be the Alpha Bitch — she fits the profile better than anyone else.

The bad grammar and spelling are a metaphor for Ebory's mind.

When you look at everything Enony goes through, it would be hard for even a normal person to keep it together. Her boyfriend tries to kill himself and gets captured. Her friend dies and someone has sex with her corpse. Two of her teachers film her naked. The Big Bad essentially tells her "kill your friend or I kill your boyfriend." She's suffering from Sanity Slippage, and the worse her grip is on reality, the worse her spelling and grammar are.

Ebony is a Time Lord.

Not only is it obligatory, it actually makes some sense:

• She can Time Travel, and has some knowledge of the future, but this leads to the occasional Anachronism Stew as the Timey-Wimey Ball struggles to keep up.
• She has Psychic Powers, such as telekinesis, telepathetic massages, and visions. She's a Telepathic Spaceman.
• She has terrible taste in fashion, but no one seems to notice, even though most of her outfits are highly inappropriate.
• She can carry the DeLorean around with her because her pockets are Bigger on the Inside.
• Draco kills himself but inexplicably recovers because Eonby lent her one of her regenerations. Regeneration can also explain why so many male characters resemble different "goff" celebrities at various parts, as well as Tom Satan Bombodil transforming into Volxemort.

Ebony's a lonely Yandere.

She's uber-upset when Draco tells her no one understands him. She thought she did, and she surmised he was as lonely as she was. But when she realizes that they aren't as close as she thought, she freaks out. Throughout the story, she desperately seeks comfort from her friends, and without them she's scared and lonely. Notice how she talks most about committing suicide when others around her appear to have abandoned her, like when Draco commits suicide or did it with Snap.

Her "goffic" nature is a coping mechanism — she thinks her brooding will make her cool and give her friends, but it also makes her feel courageous and strong. My Immortal isn't about a spoiled goth princess Mary Sue; it's a deconstruction of a lonely girl who deals with intense pressure by being goth.

Ebony, and every other goff, is under the influence of magic or drugs designed to make them into Death Eaters.

Voldemort builds his ranks of Death Eaters not from genuine loyalty, but from brainwashing — and "gofficness" is how those Death Eaters perceive the world around them. The magic makes its victims see everything in black and white, but this is so unnatural that their brains are forced to rationalize it in terms of "goff" and "prep" school cliques. This makes the Death Eaters not only easy for Voldemort to control, but also very difficult to reason with.

My Immortal is the story of one victim, a particularly strong-willed Hogwarts student. She tries to fight off the twisted influences, and to some degree she's successful — she does think in terms of "goff" and "prep", but she manages to associate Voldemort with preppiness. She looks for similarly strong-willed students, like Harry Potter, and befriends them as a means of fighting back. Her and Harry's efforts are able to tip off Dumbledore to Voldemort's brainwashing. Dumbledore tries to fight back by associating himself with "goffness" (and thus goodness), doing things like painting the Great Hall black and drawing attention to the fact that no one's wearing robes with pop singers on them. Snape is also able to resist; he pretends to be under the influence of Voldemort's mind control but secretly works with Dumbledore.

But in spite of Dumbledore's best efforts, Ebony is driven further into madness. She starts hallucinating the same events repeatedly, even hallucinating Voldemort's friendship. But she still has the faintest of grips on reality. Snape is helping out, and she can see that Snape's submission to Voldemort is not genuine; that's why she sees Snape as a "poser". In her final confrontation with Voldemort, Ebony gathers her last threads of Heroic Willpower. For a brief moment, she can see what must be done, and she fires a killing curse at her captor, just before the goffness fully consumes her soul. The story ends there — with Ebony Way, in a Heroic Sacrifice, saving us all.

Alternatively, this can be combined with another WMG that the final chapter of My Immortal will redeem the story. That final chapter will describe Ebony's recovery from her goff-sickness and her newfound understanding of her ordeal.

Ebony and friends have a Hive Mind.

When Egogy and Draco go to Dumbledore for help, they talk in unison and say the same thing. They look, dress, and act the same. They are essentially interchangable with one another. Clearly they acted like their canon selves before Enoby showed up. She altered their memories and added them into her hive of scum and villainy.

Ebony is "good at too many things" in bed.

She has some mind-blowingly awesome sex with Draco, and he's so impressed that he tells everyone he knows. Naturally, this makes her an object of widespread sexual desire. Hargrid, Vampire, and Snaketail (to name a few) all lust after her despite not having actually talked to her before. Anyone who can score with her finds out for themselves that yes, she's pretty freaky in bed. Good thing she's real easy — everyone can get a piece of the action. Voldemort, however, misconstrues her "talent with a wand" and tasks her with killing Draco.

Ebony is an average Hogwarts student who's disillusioned with her life.

My Immortal is Ebony's fantasy of what she wishes Hogwarts could be. Being a Hormone-Addled Teenager, much of her fantasy is sexual. Her crushes range from her fellow students to various Muggle celebrity musicians. She keeps to herself, and other students pick on her, like Britney. She may have been bitten by a vampire and struggling to cope with it, or she may wish she was bitten by a vampire so that people would pay attention to her.

The time period is a matter of debate. She could be a contemporary of Harry Potter, obviously starstruck by such a high-profile figure. But she's in Slytherin, so she sees a lot more of Draco and crushes after him as well (and knows nothing about him and his likely disdain for the Muggle music and culture she likes so much). She's not very assertive; she wishes she were involved in the fight against Voldemort, but she never got into it in earnest until Deathly Hallows, when the Death Eaters bring the fight to her and her fellow students. She may be the "Ebony Raven" who was announced as dead on the radio.

Alternatively, she goes to Hogwarts long after Voldemort's fall. She's heard the legend of Harry Potter and his friends, but knows less than nothing about them — not that this stops her from imagining being their contemporary. This would explain why she's a fan of music that doesn't exist in Harry's day.

In other words, this is the real story.

Ebony and Satan were not watching The Exorcist, but a workout video.

When Ebony and Satan go to see "The Exercise", that is not Tara's misspelling of "Exorcist". There is actually an aerobics video being shown at the Hogsmeade theater, possibly because of some sort of mix-up. It's got a goffik Richard Simmons (now there's an image), and Ebony and Satan watch it because it seems like the perfect movie to have inappropriate public sex to.

Ebony describes how "a boy and a gurl were doing it sudenly a cereal killer came", which is obviously (hopefully) not something that happens during the workout video, but it's also not something that happens during The Exorcist. Ebony's describing something that actually happened in the theater. Given that Ebony and Satan get naked in public a few paragraphs later and even kill a woman for objecting to their indecent exposure, it makes sense that they wouldn't mind someone else having sex in public (as long as they're not "dumb preps"). They're also nonchalant about the other couple getting randomly killed, but they're vampires and who cares. In fact, the "cereal killer" might literally be a cereal killer who needs blood for his cereal (because no self-respecting vampire would eat it with milk). Ebony and Satan are totally okay with that as long as he doesn't pour it before adding the cereal.

Ebony has Bipolar Disorder.

In the manic state, symptoms include:

• Inflated self esteem
• Lack of self-control, including a Hair-Trigger Temper
• Impaired judgment and reckless behaviour
• Sexual promiscuity

And in the depressive state, they include:

• Difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions
• Feelings of worthlessness
• Persisent thoughts of death and suicidal thoughts.

Given the way My Immortal is written, it seems like Gofficness is almost synonymous with bipolar disorder, especially given the frequent mood swings and suicidal ideation.

Ebony is in Azkaban.

My Immortal is the Apocalyptic Log of a prisoner slowly going mad, carving the text into the walls of their cell. No one discovered it until Deathly Hallows, when the Dementors were removed from the prison and someone was able to actually concentrate on it.

Ebony is a resident of Ward 49.

It's also known as the Janus Thickey Ward on the fourth floor of St. Mungo's Hospital, and it houses long-term residents whose brains had been permanently affected by magic; canonically, we see Neville's parents and ex-professor Lockhart there. My Immortal is written by one of the other patients. Given the prominence of Voldemort and his plans for world dominion, Enony, like the Longbottoms, may have been the victim of a Cruciatus Curse used by Voldemort or one of his followers. Chapter 39 is a brief period of lucidity.

This fanfic posits a similar theory with the patient being in Hogwarts' hospital wing, but this level of brain damage clearly needs more than a school infirmary can provide — it requires the best care the Wizarding world has to offer.

Ebony must sleep with Voldemort in order to defeat him.

Because anyone who sleeps with her pretty much becomes her slave.

Ebony and her friends worship Voldemort.

"Satan" is not just a nickname; Voldemort eventually came to be known as Satan and was worshipped. Ebony and her friends don't know that Satan Was Once a Man, possibly because he cast a spell on his followers to keep tabs on them. Voldemort uses his Satanist followers to do his bidding, and Ebony and her friends are just pawns in his complicated power play. That's why Snape was so uncharacteristically freaked out about Hargrid being a goff — he mistook it for being related to Satan and thought he had fallen under Voldemort's control.

Ebony gained full Medium Awareness over the course of the fic.

That's why the fic ended when it did — that's when Ebony found out about the other side of the Fourth Wall. She disappeared from the Internet so as to hide her actions — actions that will see her cross into our own reality.

And when she does, The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You.

Ebony is being tortured by the Death Eaters.

The story takes place during Deathly Hallows, when the Death Eaters have taken over Hogwarts. Ebony is a Slytherin in the same year as Harry. She's a Muggle-born, but she's also a Seer, which explains her close relationship with Trelawney.

When Voldemort took over the school, he identified Ebony as being able to help him using her precognition. But she only saw his defeat, and Voldemort started torturing her as punishment. She blames Dumbledore for her predicament, as if he hadn't died Voldemort wouldn't have taken over. She also blames Snape and Lupin for Dumbledore's death, because they were among his most powerful allies and did nothing to help him. Vampire, B'loody Mary, and the rest of her "goff" friends don't exist — they're parts of her personality imprinted on the Death Eaters who follow her and routinely torture her. Nor does Dumbledore exist ('cuz he's dead, obviously); Ebony projects him onto her head torturer, as the embodiment of an entity who could end her suffering but doesn't.

But other characters are real, and they're worried. Britney is Ebony's twin sister, who has no idea why Ebony has changed so much and tries fruitlessly to help her. Willow/Raven is another friend who's worried about Ebony, but Ebony's fragile mental state leads her to accidentally get both of them punished; she tries to kill Willow, and Willow abandons her. Neville is also trying to help her, but he's leading Dumbledore's Army and has a lot on his plate, so he can't devote all of his attention to her. Draco is somewhere in between; the first sex scene with him is real, but it's passionless pity sex, and the subsequent sex scenes are actually Ebony's torturers raping her. Filch is also an "in-betweener"; he's one of her torturers, too, but his identity is swapped with that of his cat.

Many of the nonsensical scenes are Ebony trying to rationalize her torture, both magical and sexual. The concert scenes, for instance, are a way for the Death Eaters to try and convince her to trust them; when the band turns into "Vloxemort and the Death Deelers", this is when they start torturing her. She hears the Death Eaters discuss whether she should be allowed to live and projects this argument onto Umbridge, about the fake Dumbledore.

Snape and Lupin do try to rescue Ebony, but it goes very badly — they catch Ebony in the midst of an attempted Bath Suicide, which is why she's naked. Ebony doesn't take it well and thinks they're trying to rape her, too. She actually tracks them down and successfully tortures them. This makes it more difficult to try and rescue her. Hagrid tries, too, and is somewhat more successful, but he can't penetrate Ebony's extreme paranoia, and in the end the Death Eaters torture her again for interacting with him.

Ebony has been considering suicide for a while now. Snape and Lupin already interrupted one attempt, and the hacked chapter was a nightmare arising from her deepening self-loathing and her inability to finally end it. She decided to try and kill Voldemort, but she couldn't go through with it and turned her wand on herself.

Enoby is an Eldritch Abomination.

Her mere presence has driven all of the Harry Potter characters to insanity.

Ebony is Q.

Centuries before he had Picard to bug, Q came down to Earth, took the form of a teenage girl, and altered the people of Hogwarts according to his whims. Willow is also a Q, which is why she came back after she "died". By extension this also makes her Discord.

Ebony is the Anthropomorphic Personification of badfics in general.

There is a reason she uses every single Mary Sue cliche. She is not simply a Harry Potter fan character; She is the entire concept of bad fanfiction in general, given a human form. And she's warping the fabric of reality around Hogwarts to her will.

Enoby is immune to the Death Note.

No, not because she's a vampire. Because it's impossible to spell her name correctly, since even the author doesn't know how it's spelled.

Enoby has a twin sister.

Her name is Ivory Light Innocence Dove Way. She is the preppiest prep ever. She never swears, is a virgin, and can't stand any of the so-called "goffic" bands. She is a werewolf. She has pale blonde hair with frosted blue tips and braided in yellow streaks. And she can spell perfectly. But her understanding of preppiness is about as extensive as Enony's understanding of goffness. This essentially makes her a Purity Sue, the star of a mirror-image fanfic written in Purple Prose, in which she wangsts about her Dark and Troubled Past and redeems all the characters Ebony turned to goffness.

But despite being Different as Night and Day, Ebony and Ivory live together in perfect harmony side by side on their piano keyboard.

Enoby is a hermaphrodite

She mentions her "boy thingy" yet claims to be a girl.

Enoby is an alien.

She came to Earth in an attempt to conquer it. Just being around her causes people to go insane and become hopelessly attracted to her or want to follow her and become her clone. Prepz are people who can somewhat resist her, but they still go insane and often turn evil, just not as perfect clones of her. The only hope for the version of the Potterverse that she resides in is for the Doctor to come and save the day.

Enoby is (or is somehow mentally linked to) an Ork.

Terrible grammar, terrible accuracy with firearms, being a "Goff"? She may be another of da boyz, either losing track of da proper Orky values or just trying to annoy us 'umies For the Lulz.

Ebony is sort of a counterpart to Canon!Dumbledore.

Both of them are powerful, or at least said to be powerful. Both try to redeem Voldemort. Both of them fall in love with someone who goes on to become a Dark wizard, despite their attempts to change them, and both end up having to fight them. Both have more names than usual. And their names both refer to colors: Ebony (black) and Albus (white).

Enoby is the next wave of the Saya no Uta invasion.

She's somehow managed to make everyone at Hogwarts suffer the same disorder Fuminori did, turning the world into a huge crapfest and shrouding her own disgusting self behind the appearance of a goffik chick she saw on a magazine. That explains why she's so easy — she's collecting semen just as Saya did.

Ebony is Voldemort's illegitimate child.

Don't ask. It's even weirder than the other one.

Ebony and the other "goffs" are really the bad guys.

The author threw in some Obviously Evil traits (like Hollywood Satanism and being a vampire) to see if anyone would get a hint as to Ebony's true alignment. Voldemort was supposed to pull an Enemy Mine with the Gryffindors in the final battle because Ebony had a plot to kill Harry, and Voldemort won't let anyone else to kill him due to his own obsession with him. Or you know what? Let's just stop at "Ebony is the bad guy" and leave it at that.

Ebony is only a Satanist because of Samifer.

If the author could predict Harry being a Horcrux, they could predict this.

Ebony has powerful magic and uses mind control to make the Harry Potter characters her mind slaves.

The villains are really the only ones unaffected and dedicated to fighting against Ebony. The stranger and more... eccentric moments are just misunderstandings on Ebony's part because she's half insane herself.

Ebony understands Sign Language.

And that's how she can "talk in silence". However, it is Goffik Sign Language and can only be understood by other Goffs. Perhaps it is by knowing and being fluent in Goffik Sin Language (geddit) that one can become Goffik when they were not before, and how a Goff can sort out the posers from the real Goffs.

Ebony has powers similar to Shadar.

At some point during the course of the Harry Potter books, a witch with unusual magic appeared and derailed it. Many of the characters are acting strangely because they have become Brokenhearted (Borkenhearthed?):

• Harry and company have become depressed goths because they lost their Hope and Enthusiasm.
• Draco got hit with something similar, but a little mistake by Ebony resulted in him getting extra Kindness, hence why he's willing to move in the same social circle as Hermoine.
• Voldemort is trying to have someone else kill Harry for him because he lost his courage, and is now too scared to face Harry himself.
• Brittany was once a very nice girl in Gryffindor who wasn't involved in the plot, until Ebony decided to remove her Kindness.

Ebony's heartbreaking spree was brought to an end when she got into a fight with Dumbledore. He managed to turn one of her spells back on her, stripping her of her Ambition (and accidentally taking a big chunk of her memories.) He acts erratically because he's had his own heart broken, but he's experimenting on himself to fix it, so he can fix everyone else.

Ebony is transgender.

That's how she can be a girl but still know what an erection feels like. She's adamant that she didn't actually get an erection because at that point, she no longer has a penis; she had a sex change, perhaps a magically induced one (something that's certainly plausible, if not explicitly seen, in the Potterverse).

Ebony is an American immigrant.

She's very familiar with American stores. She thinks English accents are sexy, implying she doesn't have one herself. And she doesn't seem to understand that Hogwarts is in Scotland (which likely precludes her from being Scottish). One can guess that she uses American spelling, except she doesn't appear to be using any kind of spelling at all..

Ebony is a Humanoid Abomination that has powers similar to those of vampires, but she isn't a vampire.

There's some sort of formality to it all in the Potterverse, perhaps requiring one to have been bitten by a vampire. It's not clear this is what happened to Harry, but he has the right to call himself "vampire" while Egogy doesn't.

Ebony is Atlantiana Rebekah Loren from Forbiden Fruit: The Tempation of Edward Cullen.

She wanted to escape the messy situation she found herself in, so she emigrated to the UK, adopted a new name, and dyed her hair black because it was as different from her natural pale blonde hair as you can get.The fact she's American and new at Hogwarts explains why she doesn't recognize Harry Potter at first, notices his English accent, and is obsessed with American shops such as Hot Topic.

She also possibly experimented with a potion or spell that altered her memory, to avoid blowing her cover and ensure she can leave her past behind. That's why she claims she lost her "virility" to Draco even though Atlantiana wasn't a virgin. Indeed, it's quite odd that as self-obsessed as Ebony is, she gives fairly detailed backstories of the other characters, even minor ones like Crabbe and Goyle, but doesn't say anything about herself.

Alternatively:

Ebony is Atlantiana's mother.

The two of them are both impossibly beautiful, goffik, dress like whores but slutshame others who do the same, are extreme Jerkasses, and have blue eyes. But they're not the same person; they're just related.

It explains how Tiana could be a human before having sex with Edward despite Caius being her biological father; Ebony, who hates how she's So Beautiful, It's a Curse, didn't want that to happen to her daughter and used her magic to turn Tiana into a human.

You might be asking: How did Ebony manage to get impregnated with Tiana despite being a vampire? Because Our Vampires Are Different, that's why.

And that's not the only kid Ebony has. She's also Joan and Twila's mother.

The story isn't actually set in HP's setting, Ebony is just a being of unimaginable or unknown power that really likes Harry Potter

You ever notice how Enoby, despite being 17, never has any relatives, backstory, or any indication she didn't just pop into existence on the first chapter, or how instead of 90s Britain, the story feels like it takes place in America in the 2000s, but with a few Harry Potter trademarks? Whatever Ebony is, she's a huge fan of Harry Potter, and recreated locations and characters from it to act out her strange, hormonal, mostly inaccurate fantasies, creating an odd place where people that she either created, or brainwashed can freely maim and murder each other, or commit suicide, and walk out just fine the next day, and it can somehow rain and snow at the same time. If they're really being controlled like that than perhaps their mood swinging tendencies are them fighting against the mind control she has over them.
The reason she chooses to look like she's 17 is because that's the cool age in her eyes where she can be a badass grown up and have sex and wear black clothing.She's also either just kinda stupid, or is willingly acting as deranged as the setting is because it's all a game to her. The reason she uses guns and knives way more often than spells is because when she IS using magic, she's able to curbstomp Lord Voldemort himself with what was either one spell or a cat, and that would spoil the fun.

Other Characters

Voldemort really is Tom Bombadil.

He is either just messing around with the goffs, or he has become genuinely Stupid Evil for no logical reason. Probably because of his divorce with Goldberry.

There are subcultures at Hogwarts other than preps and goffs.

At least two references to punks exist, and there are probably others out there as well, as there would be in your average high school (e.g. sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads). The punks probably get reference because they're allied with the goffs against the preps; what happened to the punks is anybody's guess.

Dumblydore is trying to set an example for the divided student body.

He shows interest in both goff and prep things, and it's because he's trying to prove the point that the students don't have to fit into some prep/goff binary; they can be whoever they want.

Voldemort has put all the characters in a secret hell.

It's why he flies away rather than follow through on his random threats to kill people; he's already subjected them to a Fate Worse than Death. And Ebony is part of it; two minutes in her presence is enough to drive any soul insane.

Voldermort is the hero of this story.

He's trying to stop Ebony from poisoning Fanon, but he has underestimated her.

Navel is the owner of the Elder Wand.

This makes him the most powerful character in the story. Voldemort's clearly got his own wand, but he never seems to kill anyone with it despite threatening to do so — he only becomes dangerous in Chapter 44, when he summons Navel's wand. He's hoping to take control of the Elder Wand by stealing it from Navel. Navel has the added benefit of being, in canon, a candidate for the person prophesied to defeat Voldemort; Tara was aware of this and made him a goff, because all positive characters are goffs in her universe.

Dumbledore is an epic Cool Old Guy.

Dumbledore is, in fact, an awesome Chessmaster who pretends to be senile and manipulates Ebony so that she'll defeat Voldemort. He knows there's no way to get her to fulfill her part in his plan other than Reverse Psychology, so that's what he does. Even though he outwardly acts unhelpfully to Ebony, he defends her before the Ministry when he thinks he isn't looking. And when push comes to shove, he usually is helpful, as when he saves her from "Volxemort and the Death Dealers" and orchestrates the rescue of "Lucian and Sirius". He only refuses to rescue Draco because that was Something She's Got to Do Herself. He intentionally plays the part of a "poser" because he knows Ebony's prejudice against non-"goffs" will ensure that she views him as simply an enemy; she won't try to see any deeper motivation in his actions.

Ebony is normally too shallow and stupid to realize this. But she does kind of realize how Dumbledore is helping her. Their relationship is like that of a rebellious teenager and her parent; she needs him for emotional security, even though she nominally hates him most of the time. This isn't reflected in the story because she's telling it on her terms, and she's too petty and immature to depict him as a good guy. And she is openly upset that Fudge sends him away.

Hargrid and Hagrid are entirely different people.

"Hargrid" is different from Hagrid in several key respects: (a) he's a Hogwarts student, (b) he's able to use a wand, and (c) as far as we can tell, he is not a bearded half-Giant. He could well be an OC based on a friend of Tara's whom she clumsily inserted as a sort of O.C. Stand-in; Tara just forgot to mention this friend in her author's notes.

Hargrid is meant to be Cedric, and Hedwig is meant to be Hagrid.

It ties in not just with the above guess, but the other guesses as to Tara's extremely tenuous grasp of the Potterverse and how she can't attach names to the correct characters. Tara even admits that "Hargrid" was a mistake and was supposed to be Cedric, but then she goes on to call him "Hargrid" in later chapters, so who knows what that means. But it has the advantage of solving some of the time travel shenanigans; "Hargrid" is a Hogwarts student at the same time as Harry because Cedric is, and "Hedwig" is Voldemort's gay lover because Hagrid did go to Hogwarts at the same time as Tom Riddle; Tara interpreted Tom framing Hagrid as revenge for Hagrid breaking his heart.

Vlodemort/volxemort/Tom Bombodil is a Time Lord.

When Ebony returns to the past, Tom "Satan" Bombodil seems to function exactly like a Time Lord. He knows things will happen in the future as if he has been there. The last chapter describes "Satan" as transforming into Voldemort, which sounds a lot like Time Lord regeneration.

The "earlier" regeneration (for lack of a better term) is Tom Bombadil. His TARDIS broke when he was visiting The '80s, and he was forced to regenerate. He was so messed up that something went wrong in the regeneration, leading him to become Voldemort, the guy with no nose. As Voldemort, he searches for a new time machine, and hatches a grand scheme in which he would manipulate the timestream so that someone will bring a time machine into the past for him to use.

After a couple of decades, Voldemort identifies Ebony, a relatively normal Hogwarts student who happens to be so stupid and self-absorbed that she would be a perfect Unwitting Pawn. He manipulates the timeline to turn Ebony into a vampire with irresistible seduction powers. Then he inserts himself into Ebony's life as a Big Bad. The idea is that he knows Ebony will be so self-centered as to think she alone could travel back in time to redeem him — in the only way she knows how. This makes her little threat to him, and will allow him to convince her to bring him back to the future and use future tech to rebuild her primitive time machine into a fully functional TARDIS.

And this is exactly what happens. Voldy kills Ebony once the final phase of his plan is in motion, partly because she's outlived her usefulness and partly because she does have vampire seductress powers and still poses a minor threat. Voldy dodged her "abra kedabra" and then killed her with a steak. That's why the fic ends when it does; in order for Enony to think she's the centre of the universe, she has to be the viewpoint character.

As for how Voldy was able to fiddle with the timestream without having access to a time machine? Retroactive Preparation. Morti McFli is an even later regeneration of Voldemort's (both have "mort" in their names), who already has a time machine from Voldemort's successful plan. Morti is the one who not only tells Voldy about Ebony but also gives her the means to travel back in time to redeem Voldemort. (And he couldn't just hand the time machine to Voldemort himself because Never the Selves Shall Meet.)

And one final Mind Screw to the theory: it doesn't have to be The '80s. Egogy gets so much about the time period wrong that she might not have visited it at all. Dumbledore looks completely different in the 80s because it's not him at all; it's Morti in disguise, trying to keep Enony's friends from "jumping" him just like in Back to the Future Part II.

The "Severus" in Chapter 30 is a manifestation of Snap's supressed good side.

In said chapter, Snap is torturing the main characters when suddenly the narrative refers to "Severus". And then the torture stops. This isn't actually a different character coming in to distract Snap and get him to stop; this is Snap himself, with a Goffic side who intervenes to stop him from harming other goffs.

"Snap" is "Severus"'s abusive father.

In Chapter 30, the son finally bursts in to save the other characters from his abusive father.

No, it makes very little sense, but that's still more sense than the rest of the narrative gives you.

Every variant spelling of a character's name is actually referring to a different character.

Ebony, Enoby, Enony, Egogy, TaEbory, and all the others are in fact different characters. They're all near-identical sisters, some of whom indeed died (whether by suicide or as murder victims); their deaths give the protagonist a darn good reason to be depressed. Same applies to all the other characters; while we think that Draako came back to life without explanation, these are actually different characters, and the one who committed suicide stayed dead.

Note also that many of these "misspellings" appear more than once throughout the story. That's not just a coincidence, is it?

Slutborn is Ebony's son.

It's in the name — "born of a slut". And who's a bigger slut than Ebony? She has lots and lots of sex and yet never seems to use protection (note how Lupin asks her for condoms but she appears not to have any). In all likelihood, Tara gave birth to Slutborn before the story began, and being a selfish teenager who's not interested in raising a child, she abandoned him.

Note also how Slutborn is apparently a goff (e.g. saying "Oh my goff!"). Goffness is apparently inherited, since anyone who simply professes goffness without being innately goff is a poser. And if it's not inherited, it requires a tragic backstory — which Tara ensured with her Parental Abandonment, perhaps even knowing it would make him a goff like her.

The father could be pretty much anyone, considering she's slept with Vampire, Draco, and Voldemort. Perhaps Slutborn isn't her only child, either (great candidate for the professor's sibling: Jezebel Slutborn from Imma Wiserd).

Filch and Mrs. Norris are anamangi.

In canon, Filch is human and Mrs. Norris is her cat, but My Immortal features a human named "Mr. Norris" and his cat "Filth". Indeed, Filch and Norris are a pair who switch back and forth so that one is human and one is an animal, throwing people off the scent. In the canon, Filch is described as a squib, but he actually is pretending to be one to be Beneath Suspicion; no one would suspect the "insecure old man who can't use magic" to be an animagus.

Slutborn, Loopin, and Sirius are OCs.

They're not supposed to be Slughorn, Lupin, or Sirius; Tara made them up. She just didn't have a great imagination and gave them modified names of canon characters. Occasionally they vaguely have elements of their canon characterization (e.g "Serius" being described as Vampyre's "dogfather", possibly referencing the canon Sirius's ability to transform into a dog), but for the most part they're nothing like their canon counterparts even when you'd expect them to be (e.g. no mention whatsoever of Lupin's lycanthropy).

If you believe the fic was earnest, this is simply a byproduct of the author's acute creative deficiencies; she wanted to make original characters but lacked the tools to do so. If you believe it's a Troll Fic, it's a great way to tweak the fandom's collective noses. And if you're into Timey Wimey stuff, like in the guess elsewhere on the page that Tara knew Rowling from somewhere (e.g. being the inspiration for Lockhart), you can say that Tara did come up with the names from whole cloth, and it's Rowling who repurposed them for her original characters.

Marty McFly works for Dumbledore.

After the plan to stop the Dark Lord is set in motion, Ebony keeps running into Marty or his "tim" machine for no directly stated reason. Ebony doesn't have any way of traveling on her own between the past and the present except by dying, which Professor Sinister and the others would probably view as too dangerous to rely on. Dumbelydum, therefore, sends Marty — with his own means of time travel — to shadow her in the past and help her return to the present if things go wrong. Marty disguises his time machine as an iPod and plants it on Ebony, so that she could use it to escape from Past!Dumbledore near the story's end. He's also responsible for Ebony falling through the hole and appearing back in the present after her first time travel session. Depending on the nature of Marty's employment, he and Doc might even have been among the people sent to London to find Serious and Lucian.

In fact, Ebony might not even have a "die and time jump" power. Marty just stepped in when Ebony was near death. This works because of the Timey-Wimey Ball, as demonstrated when the bullet from James' knife-gun fails to do its job — you can't be killed if you're taken out of your home time, so that's why it makes sense to save Ebony by sending her to the past.

Dumblydore knew Voldemprt had Drako.

He was crying when he thought Draco had died. Not two chapters later does he openly mock Draco. It is possible he knew what happened to Draco and wanted Enoby to find him on her own so that they could get back together. It also ties in well with the other guesses as to his inconsistent behaviour.

Voldemort must have sex in order to be defeated.

Sinister's speech about him Voldemort not being evil if he found love wasn't about The Power of Love; it was specifically about sex. Whether sex with Voldemort would kill him, redeem him, remove his powers, give him amnesia, whatever — it would neutralize the threat he poses to the Wizarding World. And Ebony is chosen to do it specifically because she's the sluttiest student in the school.

Tom Rid's store is new.

That's why Enoby never heard of it. He probably gave pamphlets or something to Dumbledore so he could advertize to the goffs. But alas, he is young as Distracted by the Sexy, and he goes out of business giving Ebony free clothes. That's why he and the shop fade out of the story.

Hedwig is a mode-locked, gender-bended animagus.

It's a punishment for them being an unregistered animagus.

"Trevolry" takes "vloxemortserum" in an attempt to predict the future.

If "vloxemortserum" is a terrible misspelling of veritaserum, the most powerful truth potion, then it would make sense for a seer to take it so much that they become addicted to it. That is, if it enabled someone to speak truths that they did not know, it would be the perfect tool for prophecy. Makes her addiction to it a form of Fridge Brilliance, really.

Draco is a filthy-minded Star Trek fan.

When the narrative says that Draco "put his spock in [Ebony's] you-know-what," it's actually a reference to the Star Trek character. Either Draco penetrated Enony with a Spock action figure, or he named his penis after the character.

Snap is a good guy.

Unbeknownst to Ebony, and indeed to everyone else in the story except Dumblydore, everything Snap has done so far is a ploy to gain Voldemort's trust as part of an overarching plan to defeat him. Among the direct hints at this are that the characters discover that he's a genuine goff, and he lets Ebony and Draco off the hook for screwing in the forest (which, in some demented way addressed elsewhere on the page, is part of the plan).

What makes this interesting is that given the evidence of Tara's limited knowledge of the Harry Potter, she and Rowling likely independently came up with the twist with respect to this character.

Wormtail became Snaketail because it's more goff that way.

Since Satan was disguised as a snake in the Garden of Eden, snakes are inherently goff. Way more goff than plain old worms, obviously. (Perhaps Tara wasn't aware of what you get when you spell it wyrm, with a Y.)

Tara cannot be a goff, because goffs are by definition downtrodden.

She certainly tries, but she's manifestly unsuccessful. A serious analysis of the Goth subculture in an American High School will reveal that Goths are way down on the social ladder. While they're hardly the only high school clique that gets bullied, the difference between goffs and your ordinary nerds is that goffs want to be down there; they don't aspire to move up in the pecking order and hold pretty much everyone else in total disdain.

Tara was aiming for your typical "nerds versus jocks" high school dynamic, but with a twist. She chose to swap out the nerds for another subculture — except she chose pretty much the only one with so different a dynamic that the tropes are different. And she didn't realise the tropes were different. This leads to a bizarre fic with a limited and inaccurate conception of what "goff" is (e.g. thinking Green Day and The Nightmare Before Christmas are goffik).

It's a variant of the general WMG that Tara's not a genuine Goth because she gets everything wrong. But the interesting thing about this variant is the idea that as long as she wasn't a goff, there was no way she could get everything right.

The veil will bring Serious to the Kid Icarus universe.

There, he will live up to his nickname.

The Marauders in the Ebonyverse are different.

While the origins were the same, Lupin left them early on. Searching for a new purpose, they became an all-Animagus band. The members:

• James "Samaro" Potter, who figured he should use a nickname a bit less conspicuous than "Prongs".
• Sirius "Serius" Black, ditto.
• Severus "Snake" Snape, so nicknamed because his animagus form is a snake. He's not into subtlety at all.
• Peter "Snaketail" Pettigrew, who is not a snake but rather a rat. Like in canon, he was extremely jealous of his erstwhile friends — but here, Snape is part of the group, and his open and vulgar imitation of Snape got him kicked out of the group before he could betray it. (Well, that and his being a Dreadful Musician.)
• Lucius "Luscious" Malfoy. His animagus form is a ferret. And one shudders to think how he feels about ferrets.
• Hedwig, whose animagus form is an owl. He shadows Harry in owl form much the way Peter pretended to be Ron's rat in canon. (And he pulls a Gender Bender in the process.) Without Peter to betray the group, Hedwig becomes the Potters' Secret Keeper, which saves them from Voldemort (but doesn't keep their son from becoming a suicidally depressed vampire, or something).

"Brittany" is Luna Lovegood.

Enoby always wanted a blonde enemy called Brittany, so she just started calling her that. And Luna went along with it because, well, she's Luna.

Voldemort forced Snap to read Romeo and Juliet.

This was the only book Voldy had for ten years in exile, and he obviously got really into it, hence his sudden use of Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe ("I hath telekinesis!") He forces his minions to read it as well, Snape included.

And lo, Snape did rediscover romance. That's why he lets the students get away with everything, as long as it's done in the name of love. He lets Draco and Enoby run off after Draco declares his love for her, and he doesn't even punish them when Draco runs into class naked to tell her he loves her. Yes, Snape is shipping their tragic romance.

(He also got into Twilight and discovered how sexy werewolves can be.)

Loopin has vorarephilia.

He's demonstrated or been accused of several sexual deviancies, including pedophilia, necrophilia, exhibitionism, and voyeurism. In canon, he is a werewolf. Easy to see why he masticated to bathing Ebony.

Willow and Draco are both ghosts.

At least, they turned into ghosts after their apparent deaths. This is how they can continue to appear in the fic after their supposed deaths. It's also why no one was surprised to see them alive when they were supposed to be dead.

Indeed, seeing Willow come back as a ghost is what allows Ebony to make up with her. Ebony, being a sadistic Satanist Slytherin vampire goff, likes death and everything about it. She'd see being a ghost as so cool. Realising how cool her friend is, she knew she had to fix things up with her.

As for Draco, in the My Immortal universe, nothing can get in the way of love. That's why it's possible for her to have sex with a ghost.

Crab and Golye are adopted.

They're described as siblings of the Weasleys, but they don't have the trademark orange hair. Perhaps the Weasley siblings were also adopted. In My Immortal, their parents are abusive (like everyone else's), so it could be a horrible foster home of some sort.

Dumbledore is Draco's sire

In one chapter, Draco refers Dumbledore as his sire. Maybe Dumbledore is a secret vampire who turned Draco into one. We can guess that siring (i.e. turning a mortal into a vampire) may actually exist in the My Immortal-verse after all.

Voldemort is a dog.

That's why people call him the "Bark Lord". And that's also why the "Crookshanks" spell made him fall off his broom — he reacts poorly to cat magic. He is described as a person, but he could be an Animagus.

"Preps" aren't an actual group; it's just what Enoby calls everyone she doesn't like.

Ebony implies that there are two rival groups at school — the preps and the goffs. But the preps don't show any evidence that they see themselves as a group. That's because they aren't; they're just the rest of the student body. They're distinct from the goffs because they don't act completely insane, and they dislike the goffs not because they disapprove of their music or fashion interests, but just because the goffs are so disruptive that they can't concentrate on their studies.

Relatedly:

The preps are conducting an open protest against the goffs' behavior.

Hogwarts was like any other school until the "goff" subculture turned up — and completely took over. The "goffs" have practically no interest in academic advancement and openly flaunt school rules, doing things as blatant as running around the school naked, openly self-harming, threatening other students, and shouting profanities at the drop of a hat. The other students tried distancing themselves from the goffs, but the goffs' disruption was so great that the student body couldn't concentrate. Their strategy is to rile up the goffs into doing something really stupid that gets them thrown out of Hogwarts, or at least to draw the faculty's attention. That's why they go around dressing in bright colors and being aggressively optimistic.

Plot

It's All Just a Dream.

Events happen one after another without explanation. Odd names are associated with familiar characters, sometimes many names for a single character. Some articles of clothing in the fic, like leather fishnets, don't exist in Real Life (and are just too weird to be magicked into existence in the Potterverse). And that's only the start:

It's all the dream of a canon Harry Potter character.

We don't know who, but Real Dreams are Weirder, and it's not out of the question that one of them might have taken the wrong potion one night and had a particularly vivid and demented dream that they were fictional characters being adapted to Fan Fiction by some barely literate teenage girl.

Morty McFli brought 2000s music to the 1980s.

That's why the concert appears to be playing anachronistic music. Morty downloaded Enoby's favorite music onto his iPod time machine and brought it back to show his friends in the 1980s. And, well, it caught on. As a bonus, canon Marty pretty much did this in the original Back to the Future by introducing rock and roll to his 1955 audience.

Morty McFli jammed with Lucian's band in the 80s.

It ties in with the above theory; he wasn't a full-time member, but he was into music and turned out to be a valuable resource for a band looking for its own unique "sound". Lucian is a friend of his, and thanks to his future knowledge he knows Lucian will get shot, but he can't go back and save Lucian himself because he never got along with Satan/Vlodemort. So despite not knowing Enoby at all, he gives her his time machine and sends her back to do the job. There are two reasons for that; first, she does have a link to Lucian because she's his son's boyfriend (for lack of a better term), and second, being from the future nobody in the band will know who she is.

Ebony uses Mental Time Travel.

She doesn't actually travel to the past; she projects herself into the mind of Tom, thus altering his perceptions and filtering the world through her own viewpoint. This explains his knowledge of the future and why she can't be killed. In his new state, Tom causes changes to history that remake the world into the crazy wannabe goffik nightmare from Ebony's time. This creates a world that's very conducive to create someone like Ebony, who ends up going back in time and creating a Stable Time Loop.

One corollary to the theory is that Dumblydore has Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, a side effect of his prodigious Pensieve usage. He remembers meeting Enoby in the past and how she saved Lucian's arm. He remembers how the timeline was before the time loop started. That takes some powerful magic, but this is Dumbledore after all.

There are no Groundhog Day Loops.

It's just shoddy writing. Tara is trying to start In Medias Res with a kind of literary How We Got Here sort of teaser like they do on TV. But there's a reason that trope is particularly suited to TV, and Tara's nowhere near a good enough writer to pull it off in prose, so it just looks like a few random instances of a scene repeating itself.

There are Groundhog Day Loops, and they're all Voldemprt's fault.

Both Ebony and Vloxemort can travel through time, and every time we see a scene repeat itself, Volxemort is somehow involved. He's influencing the timestream and trying to Make Wrong What Once Went Right. He's just very... imprecise.

Voldemort is grooming Enoby to be his favourite Death Eater.

She's certainly dark and evil enough. She just needed a little incentive to evolve from a lazy Jerkass into the powerful, hard-working witch she becomes later on. He sees a lot of potential in her and is willing to put the work in. The only reason he doesn't tap her as his successor to the mantle of Dark Lord is that Voldy is an Immortality Seeker who doesn't plan to relinquish power any time soon.

Vampire is Ebony's Replacement Goldfish for Draco.

There's very little physical evidence that she like-liked Vampire before Draco was kidnapped, aside from a single observation on his looks. When she finally screws Vampire, she mentions how he looks exactly like Draco. Even after Draco comes back with no explanation, Eonby is still wary of him leaving her (such as her freakout when he screams that no one understands him), so she keeps Vampire around as a love interest.

Hogwarts has a shortage of teachers.

That's how the faculty can keep their jobs after doing things like using very profane language and threats against students, openly discriminating against certain groups, spying on certain students (including secretly videotaping a girl taking a bath), having sex in the hallway, and invoked not being totally enamored with the protagonist.

Snap wanted Draco and Enoby to date.

He's playing The Matchmaker. But not out of a genuine belief in The Power of Love, but rather because the relationship is useful to Voldemort. Indeed, Voldemort definitely exploits the relationship for his own ends, because he explicitly threatens Draco to get Egogy to do his bidding. Now you can see why a strict teacher like Snap can let Draco and Enoby get away with practically anything on account of their relationship.

The iPod time machine is a Transformer.

Specifically, it's a new Triple Changer incarnation of Soundwave. The Decepticons sent him to the Wizarding World seeking a new magical weapon to be used against the Autobots, and also to spread Decepticon ideology. Unfortunately, Hogwarts is hostile to electronics, and that includes Transformers; Soundwave's arrival causes him to immediately be locked into iPod mode and forces his consciousness offline. He does fight his way back somewhat, and shows this by transforming into a time machine; but his ability to transform remains limited, and he also doesn't want to reveal his true nature until he gains the trust of Volsemort and the Death Dealers so they can take him back to the future.

And this might not be the only Transformer hanging around in the story. The cideo camera is also a mode-locked and unconscious Transformer. Really, this can explain any electronic device in the story which you wouldn't expect to work at Hogwarts.

The story takes place in an Alternate Universe where John Lennon survived.

In "our" timeline, he was shot and killed in December 1980 by Mark David Chapman. In the My Immortal timeline, he was still shot but survived. In both timelines, The Beatles were discussing the possibility of a reunion tour. In "our" timeline, that obviously couldn't happen without Lennon, but in the My Immortal timeline, Lennon's Near-Death Experience accelerates the process as he works hard to reconcile with his former bandmates. The reunion tour leads to more than one jam session which eventually leads to a new album. But as the members are still experimenting with their own styles, and Lennon is still recovering psychologically, the album is quite a bit Darker and Edgier than their traditional work.

And that's why Ebony thinks the Beatles are "goffik".

There's a severe Ebola Zaire outbreak at Hogwarts, and the fic is a sufferer's disjointed ramblings.

A lot of the fic can be explained by the symptoms:

• Irritability — everyone's got a Hair-Trigger Temper and generally angry enough to use particularly foul language, even characters you wouldn't expect like Dumblydore.
• Psychosis — well, the fic was clearly not written by someone who's right in the head.
• Bleeding from cuts and injection sites — explains why Enoby seems to be Overdrawn at the Blood Bank when she slits her wrists.
• Red eyes from internal haemorrhaging — explains Vampire's "red contact lenses".
• Occasional haemorrhaging from the eyes — explains the Tears of Blood.
• Petechia — explaining the odd makeup patterns.
• General malaise — explaining why everyone seems to be so depressed.
• Extreme and disturbing inflammation of the sex organs — Enoby wants to take advantage of that, but she knows the reader would be Squicked out by the details, hence why she says "thingy" and "u-know-what".
• Massive vomiting food, digestive juices, and intestinal tissue — the only one not really mentioned, but that would be so Squicky that the author doesn't want to talk about it. Maybe that's why she thinks a steak will kill her, though.

The story was written by a sufferer who believes it to be her life's chronicle. It ends abruptly when the author enters the final stages of the disease, when she starts convulsing on the ground, gushing blood, virus, and bits of sloughed-off internal tissue everywhere before she finally, almost mercifully, dies. The fic ends abruptly at that point.

Sinister, Snap, and Loopin were sent to Al-Asad's safehouse in Azerbaijan.

"Azerbaijan" isn't a misspelling of "Azkaban"; they were actually sent there. The remnants of an Ultranationalist force sent to assault the village after Al-Asad's death saved them and sent them back to Hogwarts.

My Immortal is set in a Mirror Universe.

It's a Star Trek-style mirror universe, not the full Bizarro experience; the good guys go bad and the bad guys view themselves as good but don't necessarily become "good". Some character traits are "flipped", and some are "twisted" to become darker. Observe:

• Harry is in Slytherin, which in canon he adamantly didn't want to go to. Accordingly, he doesn't believe Ambition Is Evil, he hates Muggles, and he's just way Darker and Edgier.
• Draco is not too far out of character, but his reasons for hating Harry are very different from canon, and he's also lost his Emotion Suppression ability and become far more weepy and sensitive.
• The Weasleys, a closely knit family in canon, are now a complete mess.
• Hermione, in canon a Muggle-born bookworm, is now born of dead vampire parents and has apparently never touched a book in her life.
• Neville, the other option for the Chosen One, now has a backstory that is similar to what the Dursleys told Harry. And he's also lost his clumsiness; if you're a vampire, you wouldn't last long as The Klutz.
• Dumbledore was always a little crazy, but in canon it was the byproduct of his incredible power and intelligence, and here he seems to have a genuinely serious mental illness.
• McGonagall was always quite strict, but in canon she would never hand her students off to anyone she knows will torture them, and here she gives them to Snap without a second thought.
• Snape hasn't changed too much, but in canon he was in the tank for Slytherin, and here he's in Gryffindor (which actually makes a tiny bit of sense) and hates Slytherin even more than his canon self hates Gryffindor.
• Lupin, whose lycanthropy has been taken as a metaphor for child abuse in canon, is now a paedophile himself.
• Trelawney's drinking problem has mutated into a full-blown drug problem.
• Hagrid has turned to Satanism and was never expelled.
• Umbridge went completely off her rocker, even compared to her canon self. In some ways, this makes her less evil, but she's still out there.
• Filch, in canon a Squib, is now a sufficiently powerful magic user to become an Animagus — and so is Mr. Norris.
• Voldemort, who in canon cannot understand love, now knows enough about it that Enoby could actually seduce him.
• Hedwig went from a snowy owl and glorified courier to Voldemort's gay lover. Not even a fully Bizarro Universe can cause that.

There can be more than one Chosen One in the Ebonyverse.

Due to the changes in the structure of the universe needed to make the events of the fic possible, the prophecy now doesn't limit the number of Chosen Ones. Anyone whom Voldemort marks "as his equal" can be a Chosen One. In this case, he "marks" Ebony by giving her a task which he previously only ever entrusted to himself — killing Harry Potter.

Ebony Found the Resurrection Stone in the Forest and that's why it all happened.

The story actually takes place after the final book. Ebony found the ring in the forest, which is why she can see characters who shouldn't be at Hogwarts in 2006. The only person remotely in-character was McGonagall, who was still there and very real. Unfortunately, having such a powerful object drove Enoby insane. She's still in St. Mungo's, imagining all this happening.

Ebony is a fragment of Voldemort's soul acting out its host's sexual fantasies.

At some point circa 1991, after the death of Quirrell, Voldemort's spirit escapes to find a new host. He's a bit freaked out at being discovered, so he flees the country and briefly finds himself in America. While there, a bit of his soul flaked off, kind of like how it did with Harry, and it made its way into a newborn American Squib child, whom we can call Mary Sue.

When Mary Sue was six years old, Harry Potter defeated Voldemort and the wizarding world was saved. She grew up in a magical community and heard a lot about Harry and his contemporaries, including Draco Malfoy. She can't use magic and is a little bummed out about it, but she's reasonably well-adjusted — aside from that one last remnant of Voldemort's soul, slowly growing and gaining power and waiting for its opportunity.

Fast forward to 2004. Mary Sue is now 13, and she's embroiled in the emo craze, when Voldemort's soul fragment unleashes its power — giving Mary Sue a rush of magical capabilities she never had before and far beyond any of her peers. Having grown up as a Squib, she's very excited by her incredible newfound power and has no idea how to use it. And given her very recent sexual awakening, she's intrigued by the Power Perversion Potential. So she decides to use it for a crazy goffik orgy.

Now styling herself Ebony, she travels to Scotland, breaks into Hogwarts, pretends to be a student — and tortures the students and faculty into playing her fantasy with her. She finds other students to play the roles of Harry and Draco, except they're not actually Harry and Draco, explaining why they seem to be so different. Some of the staff are the same characters, though, like McGonagall and Hagrid (the latter of whom has to play both "himself" and "Sedric").

All this is, in Enoby's words, XTREMLY SCRAY — even to Voldemort himself. Disgusted by Ebony's use of her power, he abandons his plans for a comeback to put an end to the greater evil he unleashed.

My Immortal takes place in the Alternate Universe from the Buffy episode "The Wish".

The Harry Potter books exist within the Buffyverse. Once the Master's vampires start to branch out from California, the Watchers' Council backs the establishment of an actual school of witchcraft and wizardry to combat the threat. In an effort to protect the identities of the students and faculty, the people and locations are referred to by code names, taken from the Potterverse. So the characters are not actually the characters from the book, but they do largely fill the same roles within the school.

Several years have passed since the events of "The Wish", in which time the Master has located the Gem of Amara (with Spike's help) and devised a way to replicate some of its properties. This, combined with the ready availability of mass-produced blood, allows vampires to start masquerading as humans with startling effectiveness, as well as to survive many of the traditional vampire-slaying methods like exposure to sunlight. The Master now imposes himself on "Hogwarts" and takes the mantle of Lord Voldemort, the series' Big Bad. The staff at Hogwarts are caught completely off guard, allowing many of the students to be turned before they could react. And some of the faculty join the Master, too, Snape and Lupin the most notable among them.

The Master's plan is to kill "Harry", the school's most promising student (who is appropriately named after the series' protagonist). He can't send Snape and Lupin to do it without blowing their cover, so he instead he taps Ebony, a girl he had turned earlier. Only problem was that she resisted her conversion and suffered brain damage in the process, which carried over to her vampiric state. This made her rather resistant to following orders. She does enroll in the school, but she won't kill Harry; she just goes around feeding on or lusting after other students. Harry falls into the latter category. Snape and Lupin also get caught monitoring her (but they can't be fired because the school needs all the help it can get).

Seeking to manipulate Ebony, the Master threatens her boyfriend Draco. Draco is a bit of a sensitive type, madly in love with Ebony but unable to reconcile her obvious feelings for Harry. He's skeptical of Ebony's story about Voldemort and lowers his guard, leading him to be captured and turned. His and Ebony's subsequent adventures draw Dumbledore's suspicion, but he doesn't want to give away what he knows and just keeps a close eye on them. Draco slowly falls even more in love with Ebony and begins to experience the same weakening of resolve that Spike did when he had the implant. Eventually, the Master crashes the concert in Hogsmeade, and Dumbledore is forced to fight him while the students flee. The battle is lengthy, and Dumbledore is turned in the process, as are several students like B'loody Mary. In all the chaos, no one notices Dumbledore has been turned, and he returns to the school and his position as headmaster. The Watcher's Council notices a steep decline in Dumbledore's effectiveness but fails to realize that he has become a vampire.

Then everything changes when Ebony catches one of the Master's several televised messages revealing his latest advancements in vampire superiority. In her fragile mental state (she caught it while Draco and Harry were fighting over her), she interprets it as a vision, directed at her personally. She is sent to Professor Sinister (Jennifer Calendar) to determine if her visions are real or just a by-product of her insanity. Initial tests are inconclusive, but then she has a vision that saves the lives of rogue demon hunter Riley Finn and chaos mage Ethan Rayne — which not only reveals the danger they face, but also neutralizes the attacking vampires' gems. This is a game-changer for the Council, who begin rituals to try to focus her powers, which she perceives as time travel. The Master's people on the inside all try to stop Ebony but fail; Draco and Harry join Ebony's side, Snape and Lupin are brought back by Britney (the school's resident slayer), and Dumbledore is exposed (although he manages to frame Calendar in the process). In the end, the Master intervenes himself and initiates the final battle — which kicks Ebony's power into overdrive, destroying every replica of the Gem of Amara in the world and making every vampire in the room vulnerable to sunlight, which kills them all — including Voldemort, and Ebony herself. That's why the story ends as abruptly as it does.

And just to tie everything together — the way the vampires dress in the episode, when they're not trying to blend in with humans, looks kinda like what Ebony and company wear in the fic. And there's also a character named Willow who's always wearing corsets.

The Satan that travels through Tim with Ebony is actually Voldermort.

Ebony's changes to the time stream force Volderemont's memories to change. He suddenly realizes that he recognizes Ebony from somewhere — and starts to fall in love with her. He goes with her to see if it's really her. When he sees her in the outfit she was wearing from the concert where she jumped in front of the ballet, his fears are realized. Knowing that TaEbory has borken his hearth with her deceit, he can't help but cry. And turn evil.

When she goes back in tim the final time, Volexmort follows her disguised as Stan, hoping to keep her from changing history and further. Tara, none the wiser and trying to preserve her relationship with Drago, tries to hook him back up with Hedwig. He plays along, shadows her through tim, and returns with her — then transforms back into his true self to make a dramatic entrance.

Draco never died by slitting his wrists, and that was the author's intent.

At the very beginning of the chapter when this happens, Tara states explicitly that Draco couldn't die by slitting his wrists. This was supposed to be a clue that at the end, while something happened to him, he wasn't really dead. Ebony herself only finds this out secondhand from Dumbledore, who himself found out from "Snaketail" (who is a student, because in this universe he's sixteen for whatever reason). Tara's intent was to have the reader figure out that Draco was kidnapped, and for The Reveal to happen long after the event, but her execution was... lacking.

Draco has a Horcrux.

This would explain why he came back to life after slitting his wrists. In fact, he's his own Horcrux; he has to kill someone to make one, but he's too cowardly to actually kill anyone (this was true in canon, and in the fic he's even more wimpy), so by being Driven to Suicide, he creates a Soul Jar ensuring that he can't actually kill himself. It's that kind of fic.

Other

Hot Topic enchanted their clothing.

That's why the characters act so strangely when they're wearing Hot Topic clothing. As a Muggle store, it's outside Hogwarts' radar for protection against Charmed objects. (That's Arthur Weasley's department, after all.)

The fic was made on acid.

If it wasn't, it must have been magically induced. And you can still use the Muggle acid as a means of excising the fic from your memory. Get it at Trope Co.!

"Goffic" is a portmanteau of "gothic" and "fic".

It's not a misspelling, it's just a "clever" description of the kind of fic Tara was aiming for!

"Goffik" is a typo, though.

"Goffic" is a reference to Tara's particular brand of Goth culture.

It's a word Tara made up exclusively for herself and her friends. She's not content with being part of the subculture; she wants to create an entire subculture all to herself. She's got the ego for it; she wants so badly to be "unique" and "special" that she'll do completely pointless things to distance herself from the rest of us.

"Goffic" is a reference to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

The book is often abbreviated "GoF", and Tara was trying to refer to it in an oblique way. It's a way to show that the culture is deliberately inaccurate, because it's a specific magical variety of it found right around the time of the book. The term had been bouncing around in Tara's head to refer to the concept for a while; she just never got around to telling the rest of the world what it means.

My Chemical Romance never existed.

They are, and always have been, Voldemort and the Death Dealers. They specialize in rock and Christian gangsta rap. What we know as "My Chemical Romance" is just a disguise.

Tara wrote the hacked chapter unintentionally.

She was getting a lot of reviews stating that the fic was so bad, it was indistinguishable from the product of someone bashing the keyboard. She decided to show the haters what that would actually look like, and she did it for real. The result was the hacked chapter. She posted it, in part to show the haters how wrong they were and in part for the "lolrandom so kwaii" rush she got from it.

And since she used her head, the effect on the fic lasted longer than just that chapter.

The fanfic ended itself.

It just couldn't take it. And there are a host of reasons why it gave out:

• Ebony became such a Black Hole Sue that she became a literal black hole, causing the fic's universe to collapse on itself.
• Ebony caused an unintentional Instrumentality, with her ungodly Sue-ness stripping the characters of mind, body, and soul.
• The cosmos declared war on itself in a desperate attempt to rid itself of Ebony.
• The other characters realised what she really was and killed her.
• The fic itself gained sentience and, out of horror at what it discovered itself to be, killed itself.

Das niteMARE b4 xmas is a different film from The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Das niteMARE is a goffik tale about a first-generation German immigrant woman (Das) with an interest in horses (MARE) who promised her exasperated daughter that she would learn to understand her Leet Lingo (nite, b4) before Christmas (xmas).

Some of the misspellings are Bland Name Products.

It applies to movies, bands, places, clothing outlets, and various other products.

Someone will make a self-parody My Immortal movie.

It won't be a serious adaptation, but it will be a faithful one, and it will be the most bizarre and trippy thing in cinematic history. Imagine how Zero Hour! (1957) became Airplane!, times a thousand. If Airplane! killed the air disaster movie genre, this movie would kill all of Fan Fiction and the entire Harry Potter franchise.

The story was the product of several drunk friends.

It was collective Artistic Stimulation. They had the idea to write a fanfic and attribute it to a made-up belligerent teenager named Tara. It wasn't a great idea, but it sounded great because they were drunk. And the more they drank, the worse their ideas (and prose) got. When they sobered up, one of the friends, Raven, realized how the negative attention to My Immortal was also drawing attention to her actual fics, and figuring there was No Such Thing as Bad Publicity, she decided to keep writing during binge-drinking sessions. The others went along with it because free booze! Such is the life of a Hard-Drinking Party Girl.

We can't enjoy it because we're all prepz.

The only way to enjoy it is to be Goff, whic requires goff clothes, which requires being Goff.

Tom Rid's store is not a Morton's Fork.

He'll only give you the clothes for free if you're already a goff. You can still buy the clothes if you're not a goff yet, and this is indeed one of the steps in becoming a goff. Indeed, buying the wardrobe is half the work; the other half is moving somewhere where nobody knows you and making up a tragic backstory.

It's all Superboy-Prime's fault.

When he was banging the walls of reality, he hit the Harry Potter universe, leading to the universe of this fic.

The story is Tara's application to the Evil League of Evil.

Bad Horse was impressed by her innovative new approach to torture, and he gave her a nice starting position under Fake Thomas Jefferson.

The story is a Langford Basilisk.

If anyone was to ever truly understand the story in its entirety, well, *tzzew*.

"Mastabating" means "building a Mastaba".

Still means it's either "speld rong" or a Perfectly Cromulent Word, though.

A Maru Sue is a Mary Sue whose Suedom manifests in winning the Kobayashi Maru scenario.

It's an Unwinnable Training Simulation, so any character who actually wins at it must, almost by definition, be a Mary Sue. Unless they're male, in which case it's "Maru Stu".

The hacker was connected to the Protectors of the Plot Continuum.

She makes a lot of jokes and kills a Mary Sue in a creative way. After said Mary Sue is killed, canon reverts to normal. Sound familiar?

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