Just A Miserable Lie: An Essay On My Immortal As The Peak Of Trollfic Perfection

thischarmingmothman:

My Immortal is the quintessential piece of bad fanfiction, a story so notorious that the very concept of badfic immediately brings up mention of it in virtually any circle. Much like a discussion about bad movies inevitably breaks down into someone screaming quotes from The Room into the middle distance in a terrible impression of an even worse accent, My Immortal is a guarantee whenever bad fanfiction comes up. It’s risen above the entry-level masterworks like My Inner Life and “the Goku/Anne Frank” fic, and with its sheer fame completely obscured the deep cuts of a 4 AM fanfiction.net binge where you learn things about yourself that you were much better off not knowing. Regardless of a person’s fandom or even how into fanfic they are, they understand the story to be the utter distillation of everything terrible about fanfic. There is something for everyone, whether the dark specter of a writer’s own teenage shames or something to cackle quotes from and spiral off into dramatic readings of. No fanfic has ever united people across barriers of fandom so easily.

And it’s all a lie.

Several months ago, I wrote a rather long-winded explanation of how My Immortal is not the creation of a teenage girl embodying the very worst in fanfic writers, but in fact the most masterfully-constructed piece of troll fiction ever conceived, which has, for going on nine years, managed to fool the internet at large into believing it completely genuine. But I was left unsatisfied with the initial result, which didn’t delve as deep as I would have liked into the points it raised, and missed quite a few important parts. So I’m making a second pass on the, hopefully concisely enough that I don’t need to make a third, because after writing a second essay about My Immortal, heaven knows I’m miserable now.

Special thanks to oisiflaneur for proofreading this 14,000+ word monster.

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