I FIXED THE TYPO IN THE TITLE OK SHUT UP PREPS!!!!!

Sure , if Tara writes a Mary Sue self insert fic she’s writing “the worst fanfiction ever” but if Dante does it, he’s “redefining Catholic canon.” Heaven forbid a women does anything.

I just can't imagine that there's someone out there who just goes about day to day life knowing that they wrote my immortal. or maybe they've managed to forget somehow? crazy.

I still can’t over that in the Hermione fic they made Luna, one the quirkiest not like other girls characters ever made and turned her into a prep solely because she’s blonde

Always thought the fandom perception of Slytherin as the “goth outsider house” was weird, because in the books most Slytherins we meet are rich racists. Malfoy is the ultimate prep.

How much better would the world be if serious authors left in those authors notes. Imagining Tolkien and Lewis had like "fuck you and your lion, Lewis" in the actual text.

See, the thing is, in the story Harry says people call him Vampire because he likes the taste of human blood, but it's never explicitly stated that he's actually a vampire. He's just a lil freak

As a middle school teacher, I can 100% believe that this was a real and genuine passion project written by a 13 year old: misspelled words and all.

My new kitten is named Ebony Darkness Dementia Raven Way. It's very silly but she just gets called Bonnie. She already has lore if anyone wants to hear it.

i was in gym class and i overheard a kid in the grade below me say out loud “I looked into his gothic red eyes (he was wearing color contacts)”. good to know that the kids are alright

My friend pointed this out, so I thought I might share with y’all. Dubya is absolutely a place - it’s used colloquially for the Dallas Fort Worth metropolitan area! Much how George W. Bush is referred to as “Dubya” among Texans, we also use it for the city of Fort Worth. When we want to be clear, we call it DFW. She may have been intentionally vague! There are many Hot Topics in this part of the country. And also a lot of seething resentment for country girl Swifties, Christian hardliners, and the preppy aesthetics thereof among the scene and goth subcultures here, which really tracks in tone with Tara’s posts. My friends said this and I was immediately convinced. And burst out laughing out loud. My cousin could have known that girl. It’s just hilarious to me.

Dubya isn't a misspelling of Dubai, it's an extremely localized pronunciation and spelling for DFW, as in Dallas/Fort Worth in Texas. Holy shit. I was a teenager of almost the same age as 'Raven' when this thing hit the Internet. I might have seen the author of My Immortal at a mall or something and never known...

One thing I like about My Immortal is that it subverts the love triangle through having the love triangle being an actual triangle rather than a corner. I can't think of any published books that do that. The whole "she got kicked out because she skipped maths" thing made me laugh when Arthur Weasley can't tell the difference between a 5 and a 20 on British notes. I mean they're different colours -

You know, hearing that the Author was supposedly like 14 while publishing My Immortal makes it seem really real and make a *lot* more sense. Some kid who hasn't really learned how to write yet, throwing things like self-harm and depression around bc it Seemed Goth and Cool with no idea what it actually meant, getting into petty internet scuffles, and just bringing up how Cool and GOTH she is constantly. It feels so very middle schooler who than got hit hard with genuine internet nastiness and got scared off.

also to add to the "tara was real" argument- it makes A LOT of sense for her to keep quiet for all these years about being the author of my immortal if she wasn't just a persona or a troll. imagine going through all that at 14yo, having to deal with people hating you so much for writing bad fanfic that they obsess over you, hack you, try to pretend to be you, etc. she got embarrassed at her 14yo writing, or the entire situation got so upsetting by the time of the hacking that she refuses to have anything to do with my immortal anymore, or she's grown up and realized the internet is a scary place for people the internet loves to hate and she's much safer remaining anonymous.

As a certified writer of cringe, I have no reason to believe that these fics were anything other than genuine, and that's what makes them amazing.

My Immortal is like the modern Voynich manuscript: incomprehensible, an unknown author, the subject of years of scholarly debate. Gerard Way was there somehow.

not only did i completely forget that my immortal was harry potter fanfiction, but i also never realized her last name was just Way... I thought it was Ravenway... literally never even made the Gerard Way connection

It always kills me in the best way that Harry's name is just straight-up Vampire Potter. You could literally not put less effort into a name for a character. I love it so much.

There's no way somebody writes "energetically lethargic" and "talked together in silence" as not a joke

To me, it comes across as sisters, where one is a good bit older than the other. An older sister that shows her younger sister her favorite music and books and maybe tells her things she’s too young to hear. It sounds like it was written in earnest from both authors.

props to these two young emo girls for having the courtesy to share their fictional crushes and characters with one another- me and my little emo friends used to get at each others throats for “copying” like any of this shit actually existed?? We literally used to get SO pressed about the other liking our stupid fictional men

I really love how your girlfriend could cosplay malfoy without even trying

The fact that Anna Todd got a movie deal but Tara Gilesbie didn't is a crime against humanity

What i love about My Immortal is that it managed to subvert a lot of fanfiction tropes for its time. Like many "mary sue" protagonists were those "not like other girls" girls who acted "quirky" for male approval. But Enoby is the complete opposite. She is not not like other girls, other girls are like her. She doesn't act like a boy for male approval, boys act like her for her approval. She manages to reject mainstream norms without rejecting femininity (two things that a lot of pop feminists treat as interchangable) and did all of that while wearing blak platinum leather boots wif "Joel" written all over dem sandly. B'loody Mary Smith is also an interesting character. In HP fanfics, Hermoine is depicted as either a snotty nlog that finds her female peers annoying or a 2000s male writer's perception of a "girly girl" (shallow, ditzy, boy-crazy...). But in My Immortal, she is part of Eboby's girl pose without being turned into a brainless (well relative to the fanfic's standards) bimbo while still managing to be the most studious of the cast: gets along grate wif prof. Sinister, has a time pensive and thinks that Willow being expelled is worse than her being murdered. And this happened because the other girls didn't treat her any different or bully her for being smart and bookish, on the contrary, they seem to come to her advise everytime there is a magic problem to be solved. Snape is another funny character. In fanfic he is the go-to dark, gothic and mysterious pretty man that all the fangirls like, yet Tara took a long look at him and said "clearly a griffindor christian pedofile" and hooked him up with loopy Loopin that is still to this day the most random ass ship in the fic.

One of my non-tumblr coworkers once started a conversation with: “so my friend sent me the craziest self-insert fanfic last night, worst thing I’ve ever read.” Me: “like My Immortal levels of bad?” Coworker: “HOW DID YOU KNOW IT WAS THAT?!”

My Immortal is certainly one of the fanfics ever written. The characters are in it and the dialogue is words. The author is absolutely an author and the story is one of the stories ever written. It's a fanfic that exists.

I appreciate how "I'm Not OK" features the main character saying how sad it made her that people judged her just because she's goth.....while also seeming to judge a group of people because they're "preps"

I wonder if Tara's goal was to have fun, not troll, but she was playing sincerely and then got uncomfortable when she realized the internet was mean and cringing at the silly story meant for joy

The opening to "Im Not ok" has so much of the same vibe as 'My immortal' its like listening to one of those videos of what English sounds like to a non-english speaker. I was shaking thinking I had somehow wildly misremembered the iconic opening of my immortal.

I am around the same age as Tara (presumably) and I also wrote a cringy fanfic about my fantasy crush with a friend who I had a couple blow up fights with at around the same time. Like Tara and Raven, there was also a disparity in our writing abilities and one of us (me) worked as an editor for the other. Like Tara and Raven, one of us was way more into the universe we were working with while the other mostly focused on one person in particular within that world. Unlike Tara and Raven, however, we never published it online, thank god. The point is that I do feel like I have a unique perspective when I say that I absolutely believe the author and the editor of My Immortal were 100% genuine. My friend and I were better with grammar, and we were definitely the preps those two hated so much lol. But a lot of the attitude and the heart and the general behavior on display are very familiar to me.

i'm a big fan of the theory that tara had a crush on raven, and was playing into the goth and harry potter themes to try to win her approval. based on the petition and some of her other writings online, she does seem to be a genuinely insecure young teenager who was reaching out for attention and validation. i don't think this level of frantic desperation could be concocted by a troll.

"Reads like kids who are young and repeating things without the understanding the implications or consequences" As someone who was a teen in highschool in 2006/2007 (I was 15, 16) this is honestly how I remember it. I'm sure some of the people expressing their ideation were struggling with mental illness and don't want to minimize those people's experience in HS but honestly it was *disturbing* how trendy it was to self h*rm and talk about it and show off the scars for this weird emo clout when I was a teen.

Raven wrote an entire Harry Potter fic with barely any Harry Potter stuff in it. She was ahead of her time based on what J.K. Rowling has become

"It's been called both the best and worst fanfiction ever written" Both equally true statements.

From '"I'm Not Okay", there's a half-vampire character named Darren. This is a reference to a book series called 'Cirque Du Freak" which, spoilers for the first book, is a human, named Darren, who became a half-vampire to save a friend and starts a new life with the vampire who runs Cirque Du Freak after faking his own death. This is a pretty niche book series and can be used as further proof that this is not a troll.

The true irony is that, since Hogwarts is in Scotland, Ebony wouldn't have been able to get to a hot topic, they don't exist in the UK and she can't legally get to America easily without taking a flight. The author is so obviously American, it's freaky. Edit: I can't remember where I found out about Hogwarts location on Great Britain, I probably guessed due to how the train left at like 9am and they arrived at Hogwarts when it was relatively dark, implying a long journey. Also 1.6k like damn boi

ah, my favorite fanfic, “my immoral”❤️

y'know. i feel bad for tara. who found a way to express herself on the internet and be open and confident and cringey. only to then be bullied into obscurity. as someone who also was a wanna be goth kid and had no way to express that for so long (partly due to very limited internet access) i kind of admire her and her confidence.

It's weird to me that people think that "Dubia"/"Dubya" means Dubai, especially considering how many Americanisms they write into the story. It seems more likely that "Dubya" is slang for "W," which probably means Washington D.C. or Washington state (I'd guess D.C. if I had to pick, haha).

I like to think that, every time Raven and Tara almost forget about all this, another one of these videos is made and forces them to remember

The announcement of the next episode has the same vibes as “we are going be discussing three high profile impersonators of the grand duchess Anastasia”

Ok but as someone who is actually learning Japanese that part is HILARIOUS. “Hajimemashite” is 100% NOT something you say when greeting a friend-it’s EXCLUSIVELY for first-time meetings! It’s much more “nice to meet you” than “how do you do”. Depending on the time of day, Bloody Mary would actually have said “ohayo” (or “ohayo gozaimas” if she wanted to be more polite), “konnichiwa”, or “konbanwa” to greet Ebony. Also, “kawaii” means “cute”, so Ebony probably meant to say “sugoi” to the news of Willow’s demise. I realize how absolutely ridiculous it is to correct the Japanese in My Immortal of all things, I just wanted to share because I think languages are really cool in general •w•

14:30 my sixth grade self would like to say that Luna of all people would DEFINITELY not be a prep; in this emofied universe she’d probably be a scene kid

You can't deny it's one of the stories ever written!

Hey Strange, the Dallas-Fort Worth area in Texas is often called DFW. Dubya is specifically a pronunciation of the letter W you would hear in Texas. Tara very possibly could have lived in Fort Worth or one of the surrounding suburbs.

I realised that My Immortal was also written as a way for the author to discover her own burgeoning sexuality and kinks (Draco being tied up and whipped). Its weirdly surreal.

Somewhere out there, Tara is in her 30s, working a normal job and living a normal life. We may never know what happened to her. There’s also an element that I don’t hear brought up as often that she was a *child* writing My Immortal. When I was Tara’s age, someone in my family found my fanfics and I had to delete them all. It’s entirely possible that Tara’s parents didn’t like what she was up to online and that’s why My Immortal was deleted. I don’t think she’ll ever come forward of her own volition, but at this point, if she does, she’d have to have a hell of a lot of proof for people to believe her. I hope if she sees how so many people are still talking about her, she knows that a great number of us *aren’t* laughing at her like the preps who flamed her story; we love her as an internet icon who made history! Everybody who’s ever written fanfic was a 14 year old who couldn’t write for shit once, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of

"Raven admitted to never reading the Harry Potter books" Ah, a woman of culture. And a true Potterhead as well.

This reminds me so much of me and my middle school friend. She was really into Kingdom Hearts and made an OC that was supposed to get with Sora, so then *I* made an OC that got with Sora. I wrote a fanfic that was absolutely FULL of Evanescence lyrics that my character would sing in the story, like I wrote out all of the song My Immortal in there. This was circa 2005-2006 when I was 10-11 years old. Thankfully we didn’t go online in those days at my age so it stayed on my laptop. Truly, what a time to be alive.

What I find really interesting is that, outside of the actual My Immortal story (which was prezumably edited), Tara seems to misspell every word she types. Not occasional misspellings, not frequent misspellings, literally every word. I'm not sure what this means. Maybe it just points to her dedication to being different from everyone else. But it seems deliberate.

I want to believe that Tara went on to become a fashion designer for hot topic and completely forgot about my immortal entirely. She never stopped being an emo girl and she still types and talks like that and is a menace to everyone around her. I want to believe so bad.

If I could ask God 1 question, it would be "Who wrote My Immortal"

Wait. The first fic. "Heart beat like a subway train" is from Maria by Blondie. Okay, now I'm convinced more than ever that these fics were written by a troll making fun of bad HP fic. I don't see why an earnest emo kid would know about Blondie unless they secretly like their parents' music.

i hope raven and tara are doing well now and look back at these fanfics with the same sort of fondness we do, hopefully they also have a diffrent view towards self harm than they did when writing them, would be awesome if one day you manage to get the two of them to do an interview

i never see people mention this but: people used to just make up friends and stories like this online, too. my one friend did it quite a lot. made whole people out of thin air, writing about parties she had with them, drama, etc. and she inspired me to try my hand at it, too. honestly not as hard as it sounds and we both did it around this time period. making accounts for them, their own emails, everything. it was something pretty harmless when you were just doing it to entertain yourself (and then you have things like msscribe that went super wild with it.)

“my immoral” is a literature classic.

I remember a "My Immortal" roleplay forum existing. It was amazing and hilarious. Yes, I posted there. No, I have no regrets.

I will never forgive the hacker for being the harbinger of the end and robbing us of the ending we deserve

unfortunate this isn’t being taught in history courses, I suggest we ban together and make our OWN school called Tumblr University!

My personal theory is that both the "Tara was real" and "Tara was a troll" theories are true -- but while Tara was trying to write an authentic fanfic, Raven was a secret genius & edited it to be worse than it was, and was the real reason behind it being SO bad. The writing and grammar started off with less weird misspellings of words, but later progressed to things that seem plainly a joke, like "Tom Bombadil" instead of Tom Riddle, or "abrakadabra" instead of avada kedavra. Things that seem put in there intentionally. It doesn't make sense if you think Tara wasn't particularly bright -- but Raven was a proven author. And while few teens are bright enough to create something as brilliantly comedic, with so many references, it's possible she was. There are certainly some well read teens out there. Maybe she was secretly angry at Tara for copying her story idea, or maybe it was something else. But my personal theory is that at some point in editing it, IF she was real, she started to intentionally mess it up. The hacking would also make more sense if this was the case, because while "tara" isn't a hard password to crack, if she shared it, it would make it easier for someone to take over the account. That's all just my preferred interpretation tho lol. I just prefer the idea of My Immortal being genuine, even if I think it's more likely that it's not. Your idea that maybe she was a repressed American expat living in Dubai who created Tara as a way to express herself is a really good one that I hadn't heard before!

I remember when the first person to rise as the “The Author of My Immortal” was proved fake and it absolutely destroyed me. That’s when I learned when true intelligence is found only the fools will fight for ownership, as a true master knows that to hide his face within shadows is cunning indication of the greatest power: truth

There's absolutely no way a troll could have written that. The cultural viewpoints from: a troll who's writing this, or a real (goth) teen writing this are galaxies apart. The voice could MAYBE be replicated, but the gaze is too sincere. A troll wouldnt write in "Luna wearing a pink mini and Gucci shoes like a prep."

There's a joke in The Good Place nearly identical to 'I'm not related to Gerard Way but I wish I was because he's hot'. I've always thought that maaaaybe someone on the writing team is a My Immortal fan. It's probably not true but I WANT TO BELIEVE

I'm so happy people are FINALLY getting into Raven's works. I have the printed out and on my bookshelf. Never forget Eternity/Goth!Raven!Hermione.

honestly when you said "they need to share a brain for some reason" it made me think of those like, homoerotic girl friendships you have in hs before you're out of the closet that ends w a really huge blowout (like their friendship did)

I’ve never heard anyone talk about Raven and I’m not Okay outside of the My Immortal explanations Knowing that I’m not Okay is better spelt and is more faithful and adoring of Harry Potter makes the whole thing more believable- The idea that two young (likely secretly) mall goth friends really exist out there, one being extremely genuine and the other just wanting to copy their bestie, even if they’re not the best writer, can barely spell, and barely cares about the source material Also I think Tara’s horrific spelling is probably a mix of being young, maybe having dyslexia, mixed with 2000s internet/L337 speak and trying to be cool by shortening words and using z’s, x’s and numbers. My theory for who Tara was has almost always been that she’s a wannabe edgelord who lived in a kinda oppressive and conservative country who just wanted to look cool to her friends and boyfriend by writing a long fanfic, saying she’s depressed and goth, etc, and eventually got tired of being the subject of ridicule and trying to keep up this long story about a series she seemingly didn’t care that much about, and then fully gave up after fanfiction . net deleted My Immortal. I’ve always assumed that most of what she talks about in her A/N about her life are either lies or exaggerations because she’s a dramatic teenager trying to look cool. I never thought about the whole ‘Americans living in Dubai for business and travelling for business’ but that also makes a lot of sense

I always thought of My Immortal as a loving parody. Like people who were genuinely a part of the subculture, but knowingly made it over the top at times to playfully poke fun at how ridiculous it can be

I wonder if she had dyslexia, I remember writing pretty poorly when I was 14 too, especially because I was trying to emulate internet/lolz speech, which was popular at the time. There's also the possibility that she was actually younger than 14, which might have contributed to the poor spelling. I can only speculate that she could of been 10 and had a 14 year old sister, who probably inspired her internet persona. But I think we'll only really be able to know, is if they eventually come forward, if they're still alive, because although they clearly had a romanticized view of mental health issues and self harm, something that wasn't particularly uncommon on the internet at the time, you can't really say she didn't have mental health issues or self harmed, since we really don't know anything about her. If she's still out there, I do hope I get to see an interview with her someday, because I would absolutely buy My Immortal merch, just to be able to own a legendary piece of internet history

My guess: It wasn't a troll, but it wasn't serious either. It was two middle or high school girls who were laughing out loud over the keyboard while intentionally writing bullshit - and were veery good at writing bullshit.

Harry isn't a vampire named vampire! He's some guy who's named vampire and he likes blood but he is a human. And that makes it funnier

Darren as a half vampire is definitely a reference to the Vampire's Apprentice, which is turbo tween goth fuel

vampires do canonically exist in the hp universe but the terf never utilized them in the story. this is one of the many things tara did better

My immortal content is truly fascinating...please keep researching every single thing about this mysterious and godly internet fanfiction.....yes...every time I read it I shed a single tear

25:07 it cracks me up that corpse bride used to be emo asf. Maybe the emo aesthetic has just changed a bit, but every girl Ik who’s like “oh I love corpse bride” is just super sweet and adorable. Very traditional fem.

I've noticed that live readings of this tend to force the reader to sound like Arnold Schartzenegger doing a stereotypical Swedish person. Also, I never fail to laugh at a self professed "Goff" not naming a single iconic goth group (no Bauhaus, The Cure, Sisters of Mercy, Killing Joke, ect...) Also also, My Immortal is NOT the worst fanfic ever written. It's not even the worst Harry Potter one, that title belongs to "The Wolf Blood Lineage."

"Dubya" is a common pronunciation of the letter "W", particularly common in the American South. Tara's spelling is also consistent with a southerner writing phonetically: particularly someone from the upper South (notice "slettin" instead of "slitting" and the extra 'r's). To avoid confusion with Washington the state, many locals called Washington DC "W" or "Dubya": particularly in the mid-2000s since that was also a nickname for then-President Bush. That is also consistent with the idea that their parents traveled a lot: they were probably employed in government. Finally, I spent the school years 2002-3 living outside of DC. I saw the kind of cavalier attitude towards self-harm which you noted in Tara and Raven all the time among kids who lived in the city. Best guess: they were based in DC. Which yes, very likely means that the most popular fanfiction of all time was written by a black emo/goth girl. That fact may go some way to explaining her hostility towards JK Rowling and the lore of Harry Potter: a franchise that has a definite racism problem despite it's overall liberal politics and general anti-fascist message.

Honestly, I really love the way you talk about My Immortal with so much genuine excitement and also empathy and understanding towards the author! Like is it an absolute garbage fire of a fanfic? Yes, obviously. But is it possible that it was written by some young kids who just wanted to feel cool about themselves and were passionate about their interests? Also yes. Like idk something about the way a lot of people talk about the fic and everything surrounding it online doesn't sit right with me but i love all of your content related to it 🖤 Anyways it's 11pm in my country, my upstairs neighbours are having a party while I sit in my bed surrounded by christmas lights and darkness, watching a 40 minute video on My Immortal and trying to decide if I have enough courage to slide into the dms of a hot emo singer who's mutuals with me on instagram. I love being in my 20s and having just the wildest craziest friday nights, so cool.

I've never understood the Dubai assumption. I always just thought "Dubya" probably meant she lived in a town that started with a "W" name, and she was obscuring the location.

i think if you were in middle school around the late 2000's, you can probably think of 5 people in your high school class alone who could be the writer of this, and thats what makes it special, it has universal experience written all over it, either you were a person who spoke/wrote like this, or knew some1 who did.

"My Immortal" walked so "The Bible" could run

My Immortal's author situation is more mysterious and confusing than JFK'S assassination

the way they wrote luna in ghost of you as a prep as if she wasn't like, written as a very severe outcast in the books lol

21:00 it is possible that Tara and Raven are real people who had troll accounts and made these fics like this on purpose. It would make sense if Raven made her book as a joke just to put as many tropes as possible into it, and then Tara decided to make one too with Raven’s help and took it a step further by making the writing ridiculous. Then since My Immortal became so popular they decided to focus on that one and because I’m Not Okay would be discontinued they staged a fight just to milk the situation as much as possible. The real people mentioned might have known the fic was a joke and the shoutouts were just for the lols.

Thank you for introducing me to the I'm not okay fic. Now I can torture all my Sisters of mercy-listening friends with the line "They stopped at a portrait. It was of a girl with pale skin, long black hair, and black nails. She was the splitting image of the lead singer of Sisters of Mercy."

I'm only halfway through this video but the reading of "Willow"'s death scene has me SCREAMING laughing oh my god "We talked to each other in silence for da rest of da moovie" took me tf out thank u Strange 😭😭😭😭😭😭 Edit: "KORPS BIRD" I AM IN TEARS OH MY GOD

The "I'm not joking this is it" i think is a leftover commentary note, for a long time the only way to find I'm Not Okay was someone's text MST version and they had their commentary in bold

Blink 183 had me crying, omfg. Honestly, I remember writing as terribly as this on forums back in the day because I was convinced it was very cool, so it wouldn't surprise me if it was all completely legit

My Immortal was without a doubt written sincerely. It reminds me so much of the fanfiction my friends wrote in middle school

If any of the people who were claiming the authors of my immortal, they would have been capable of channeling thier teenaged selfs and write a perfectly, tonely matching ending to the My Immortal. Instead they're always like "trust me fam" and show off none of their gothic writting skillz.

13:50 "a goth-ified Hermione" writting fanfiction at 14 was so fucking fun bc truly all we had to offer was the audacity and complete disregard to cannon, huh?

The way Tara writes is literally how I'd write in my diary as a 10 year old so people couldn't understand it if they read it. By the difficulty Teya's having reading these posts I'm pretty confident my strategy worked 😭

The authors of my inmortal were the friends we made along the way

I remember a theory that proposes Tara could've lived in (or near) a 'W' state, Washington D.C. or somewhere in Texas. 'Dubya' is the Texan pronunciation of 'W', but was also a bit of a nickname for George W. Bush who was the U.S. president at the time of My Immortal being written. Could've been Tara poking fun at the pronunciation or just memeing.

When i was 12 and my cousin was 11, she started writing a very long self insert ben10 ff and i wrote some parts for her when we hung out. Then we both got into atla and i started an atla fanfic in which the characters met ben10 characters, and my cousin also brought in atla characters into her ff. Our writing was somehow similar and we'd be each other's guest writer sometimes, we didn't mind copying each other and we loved having the same crushes. This went on for like 2 years and now everytime we want a good mortifying cringe we read those old notebooks and thank god we didn't have the means to post it anywhere. My Immortal feels so genuine to me bc it's like me and my cousin if we could put our works out there and if we were goth :D (also i feel like their little fight wasn't real and it was just them having fun tricking the audience or making up a reason for raven to stop writing her fic)

THANK YOU I've been saying that my immortal reads like normal teenager writing for a WHILE now because it *is* one of those things I would have written when I was eleven or twelve and still figuring out how to write or how to exist on the internet etc. It felt genuine to me in it's badness because I WROTE a similarly horrendous fanfiction at a similar stage in my life, so y'know. Very much a thing children do

Calling it 'My Immoral" in the title is PERFECT (even if it's probably a typo hahahaha)

I went down a whole rabbithole like this a few months ago, I was gonna go and make an entire video about it, digging up information on internet archives for days, only to realise: At this point, the people who wrote My Immortal would have come out and admitted who they were if they wanted to be known for it. And I'm not gonna dox two kids just because they had the audacity to be bad at writing. That being said, I saw enough that I believe they're real people, who wrote it earnestly because they wanted to. And that's all I think people need to know.

So I knew a girl who lived in Dubai. Her parents worked for some rich guy, and while she wasn't goth she was definitely emo, into self harm, promiscuity etc. That sort of culture was rampant around that time among expat kids in the ME. Also they didn't have any real life outlet, due to the culture, so it was mostly a private internal thing, and because of that it was particularly fantastic. I mean this girl would tell some seriously messed up stories about seggs, heroin, mafias, blah blah blah. It was surreal.

every time you grace us with your binguses i feel privileged to behold their bingosity