Demystifying My Immortal
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 21 май 2020
- ►DON'T FORGET TO SUBSCRIBE!
---
SUPPORT MY CHANNEL! BUY ME A COFFEE: ko-fi.com/redbardiscool
---
I've been working on this video for so long that I still can't believe I'm finally uploading it! Thanks so much for your patience--a few last minute changes and LOTS of technical difficulties on my side made uploading this video a bigger (and much more time consuming) task than I anticipated. Believe it or not, my original plan was to get this video up sometime around mid-April, haha.
To the real author(s) of My Immortal, if you're reading this, I'd like to thank you; like many others, My Immortal has been a huge source of laughter in my life, and I truly hope that you like my video--my love letter to your wonderfully gofik interpretation of the Harry Potter universe, haha. Even if you wanted it to be entirely off-the-record, I would love to chat with you sometime about your work and the profound impact it's had on the internet. I didn't share quite everything I learned about My Immortal in this video on purpose--I think I know what questions I could ask you to feel sure about whether or not it truly was you I was talking to.
---
A big thank you to my wonderful volunteer voice actors! Go check out their channels!
MrClemps: / mrclemps
DrCullenPHD: / drcullenphd
Shibbert: / shibbert
SuperButterBuns: / superbutterbuns
---
Thanks to @_seaPancake for doing the art in my thumbnail and end card! Check out more of her work here:
/ _seapancake
---
Thumbnail layout by @OGmagicalgirl
/ ogmagicalgirl
---
Twitter: / redbardiscool
Facebook: / redbardiscool
Insta: / redbardiscool
MAL: myanimelist.net/animelist/redb...
---
#myimmortal #harrypotter #fanfiction 
Кино
Can you imagine being the author of My Immortal and just silently watching the internet lose their shit trying to figure out who you are and throwing all these wild accusations everywhere.
Entertainment at It's finest. If I was in "Tara"'s shoes I'd be literally rolling on the floor from laughter and a little bit of nostalgia. I'm definitely proud of her though.
If I was Tara I'd probably make it my dark secret and watch all the shit go down with satisfaction.
I wrote some fanfic when I was younger. It garnered some attention in the community it was directed at... I've since separated from that internet identity and cringe any time I hear my works names whispered. I.. I'm so happy I didn't write My Immortal I'd die from the cringe today xD
@@azazel6342 what's the name of your work, if you don't mind me asking?
@@coffee_person938 I do mind actually. I've done a lot to get away from it lol
My theory is that I’m Not Okay started as legitimate, then got after she got so much poor feedback she decided to go even more over the top to vent her frustration. After seeing how fun it was to write intentionally poorly she decided to lean heavily into it and had her fun.
I felt this way too!
Yup she became the most iconic troll
That sounds pretty wholesome.
okay yeah this is my theory too
Sort of like how Scott Cawthon got a lot of criticism that characters in his game "Chipper & Son's Lumber Company" looked like creepy animatronics, leading to him making Five Nights at Freddy's.
The fact that Luna, the quirkiest, most hot topic character in Harry Potter canon was a PREP in one of these is beyond me
It's just because she's blonde, right?
she was quirky but how was she every described as a "hot topic" character? I say she was more portrayed as a new ager hippy type
That's because even though Luna's strange, she's always got a positive mindset, unlike the characters My Immortal sets up as its protagonists.
Just goes to show that there really is a hierarchy in “goth/scene” culture. You can always go darker and just when you thought you’d gone as dark as the void in between galaxies there’s alway going to be someone that’s as dark as Satan’s asshole.
@@InTheMindOfDavid thats why we avoid the gatekeepers in alt subcultures. unless they're saying no fascists allowed
I think the author of My Immortal was actually so ahead of her time that she ascended astral planes and began living in a dimension where she was friends with Shrek and was dating the entire MCR band. Iconic, if you ask me.
Lmao
Plot twist, jk aknowlrdge it and make it cannon
@@SovietArmyGuy *oh wait-*
Why did I think that they were saying ncr the entire time
Your likes are at a perfect 666
My Immortal was just J.K. Rowling’s first draft of Harry Potter that she posted to spite her publishers. You cannot change my mind. I’ll not let you. Never.
I totally agree. No mind changing here.
🔫 Your mind, change it.
@@uselessshroob you mean "Your mind 💞😍🌸🧚♀️ change it 🔫"
You really think JK Rowling would've been able to stop herself from adding to the canon of My Immortal on twitter?
My poor, sweet summer child...
You're wrong. The "Harry Potter" books are fanfic written after JK Rollins or whatever she's called read My Immortal. My Immortal is the original.
Also, Evanescence named a song after the story.
maybe the real author of my immortal was the friends we made along the way
But what if my friends are preps?
@@sadvec6328 no
@@sadvec6328 i huld up mi medle fingur at dos preps
The ending of one piece in a nutshell
This is so beautiful!
Honestly Huge respect to the original author who managed to keep her identity completely hidden on the internet for so many years, i hope she's having a good life and sits on a comfy throne like an absolute queen she is.
Maybe the author died some time after finish write,what explain that he never said who he is until now,we don't know who is,so is possible that we wouldn't know that he died.
Okay but let’s be really honest here if someone came out and said i wrote my immortal do you really think anyone would believe them without proof?
I mean for all we know it very well could've been a guy, anyone really
@@Marisu_Prada maybe it could be the author of the harry potter book series...hahahaha it can't be..right?
If this was done today, people would’ve doxxed her. Modern internet sucks.
At this point the real author of My Immortal could come forward and no one would believe them lol.
my best guess is the real author did try, but got buried under the fakes so we'll never know
"Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?" Fifteen men of varying ethnicities stand up. "I said the REAL Slim Shady".
@@XvXHaruhiSuzumiyaXvX see, people thought the same thing of Boxxy, until she popped up on youtube, now everyone knows who she is (Catie Wayne)
That sounds like something the real author would say...
I mean they would be able to stand out among all the others if they answered all the possible questions
You know, there's a kind of comfort in knowing that the author of "My Immortal" maintained anonymity after so many years, a symbol of a long dead era of the internet immortalized through a piece of fiction.
It is kinda funny and also contradictory to what usually happens. When something gets famous that usually makes people find you. But because they kinda hide themselves decently well through it's peak and had that weird finish, they kinda spawned people trying to be imposters. And through all those imposters it kinda helped basically make it impossible to prove that you are the original author.
@@Mirro18 Which prove that the best way to hide information, is to obscure the fact itself lol
hehe immortalized
"long dead"
Tara is the 21st century equivalent of all the women who came forward claiming to be the lost duchess Anastasia Romanov.
Does that mean there's going to be an animated feature film about Tara that is adapted into a Broadway musical?
@@mirandabee2323 I hope so
@@mirandabee2323 God I hope so.
@@mirandabee2323 that would be the dream
Only less money was involved, and it was trying to take credit for something shitty.
"Why can't I have the fruit?"
"It's for Biden"
Bad bum psstt
Hi dad
It's ok, Biden is willing to share his "throbbing lavender man-fruit thing" with you
Well, he IS the president now.
I honestly want a cringey Joe Biden Twilight fan-fic now.
Another thing that points to it being a satire is that the author definitely did read the HP books. Professor Sinistra basically doesn't exist in the movie adaptations and yet she's a character in My Immortal
My theory is that it was written by an adult man
@@Nova-il8qe nah my immortal nailed how teenage girls from that time period behaved too much for an adult man to have written it
@@Nova-il8qe why not an adult woman?
Well, just to play devils advocate, there's always the possibility that the author read other fanfics which mentioned a character like her and adapted it from there. Quite unlikely, but still a possibility, I think.
Likely. Though I suppose the author could have learned about the character from someone else.
Cringe culture is dead and we should all just write our self-indulgent mary-sue fanfics
Hell yeah
I agree with this statement.
a fanfiction website but its just self indulgent mary sue fanfics
You can pry my self-indulgent SIOC reincarnation fics from my cold dead hands
Fuck yeah,
Maybe, in a way, the real author was inside of us all along.
Well if the real author is inside me, I want it out.
but you can't! It's to make sure all the disgusting preps don't get near you
Maybe the real author were the friends we met along the way.
The author's treasure was knowledge. Knowledge was their treasure.
as well as the friends we made along the way
How you can tell Wake Me Up Inside is a fake: The descriptions of the clothes are misspelled. In Tara's original fic, the only thing that was immune to spelling errors and grammar mistakes is her paragraph long descriptions of the character's clothes.
Now you're onto something
Do you think she copied and pasted the names and or descriptions of the clothes and that's why they're not horribly misspelled?
That's not true there was plenty of spelling mistakes in those too. I read the whole thing after watching this video a couple months ago
actually, a lot of typoes come up even for clothes. I.e. 'stilton bo-ots' (stiletto boots), leather facets or jacksons, shirts being misspelt as 'shit' more than once, 'panamas' instead of pajamas...
The black leather bar tho
I’m usually not one to nitpick, but she’s definitely introduced as Enoby, not Ebony.
I cannot stress that enough.
ENOBY.
_ENŌBY_
eboby.
Enoby
@Edy enoby
General Enoby
"Hi my name is Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way"
I mean who are we to tell her she's not
Im gonna quote this religiously
That quite literally is the worst name I have ever heard in my life.
"Oh we are using our made up names, I'm Spiderman."
Oh, I'm in no position do deny that the person that named her is stupid and a bit insane. Because no reasonable parent looks at their child and says "let's name her after darkness, the disease that kills you by making you slowly lose everything that you are and know, and that road sign over there!" And no reasonable writer gives their character 6 names, all of which are immensely idiotic.
Are you an Alt of Scott the Woz? Just asking, cause that fells like a Scoot the Woz joke.
My Immortal is officially old enough to have written My Immortal
Cue Inception base.
Oh no. GOTH SKYNET. NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
I legit forgot this fanfic existed.
@@darklord884 My inception
@@imshook6565 My immortion.
Imagine being the writer of My Immortal, you're a young teen and your cringy fanfic through your Emo/Goth phase got sensationalized over the internet and now you're just never allowed to live it down
I could only imagine her kids finding this video or the fic itself and go ask her about it. Kinda like MCR fans joke about Bandit finding all of the videos of Gerard on stage..doing things...
As someone who was an early 2000s emo..... Some of those "spelling errors" aren't.... Errors. They're just..... That's how we wrote back then. I'm not proud.
(Not talking about the "sequel" tbc)
Same, I was this dumb lol
It gives me the same energy as early late 2000's to early 2010's "le epic memes" culture with all the people who would type as if they were in a lolcats image. "im in ur house, stealin ur foodz" and stuff like that.
@@HotCoco_ That's what I was thinking. Even stuff like Tom Bombadil and the part about Voldemort being called Darth Vader reek of the "Lol random" humor that was prevalent back then. Hell, Tara could have simply got Tom Bombadil from LOTR fanfiction, which was also popular at the time. She didn't even have to read the books.
Lolspeak?
BUT I AM PROUD
If 50 shades can get a live action movie, so can my immortal. Make it happen people
I imagine there would be a problem of rights, since a) the author of My Immortal is unknown and b) it's heavily based on Harry Potter, so you may then also need JK Rowling's permission, and I *HIGHLY* doubt she would want to have My Immortal gain even wider notoriety than it already has.
internet historian covered it 😂
@@alestrius there's an off-broadway show that was wildly popular and VERY obviously set in the HP universe and they survived, so there's potential for my immortal to do something similar
shhhh dong give them ideas
Hey Pajamapants Jack how are you?
Everyone saying they were trolls have never met a teenage girl from 2006. This could have be written by any girl I went to middle school with.
even "lonken prak"?
Or a really good writer. A lot of writers will create entire characters to play online, especially on sites like Reddit. I wouldn't call it trolling if the intent is to entertain the audience instead of anger them.
Literally every time I look at my immortal I think about a friend from middle school that wrote an (entirely unironic) fic where Harry and voldemort were both twins AND lovers. It began with Harry deciding not to take anyone's shit because he got an emo makeover at the mall. I think it mostly got positive reviews too
I see that as the problem with claiming that Forbiden Fruit is related. Part of the reason it's hard to determine whether or not it's satire is because of how common these elements already are. Particularly in fan fiction, but even outside of it.
Back in 2006 me and my friends used to make horrible horrible sketches for class. They were absolutely cringey but we did it to make people laugh. They turned out to be nonsensical because we would all write bits without really bothering to read what the others wrote. So I can totally believe My immortal might have been a group troll project.
As someone who was goth in middle school/high school, lemme tell you that we all had our preppy guilty pleasures. I, for one, LOVED the Lizzie McGuire movie. So I wouldn't necessarily take Tara's love of Mean Girls and Cinderella Story as on inconsistency with her character. If anything, I consider it to be evidence in favor of her being genuine when she wrote it. The Tom Bombadil thing, however, is pretty damning.....
@Stuff She did. I guess what I'm trying to get at is that comes off as her being embarrassed of her guilty pleasures by doubling down on calling Hillary Duff a "prep". Again, this does all feel like something I would have done as a goth in MS/HS who secretly loved Lizzie McGuire.
A parent could have read it to them?
She could have got the name from LOTR fanfiction. She didn't necessarily have to have read Tolkien.
maybe she just had a friend who was a lotr nerd who mentioned tom bombadil and she confused the two because honestly she doesn't seem knowledgable on harry potter anyways so it would have been plausible for her to just misremember the name
Confessions of a teenage drama queen was my preppy pleasure lol
I feel like "Getting hacked" was Tara or whatever her name was looking back at the hellfire she created and thinking to herself "What the bloody hell did I write and why?" but I also know the more likely possibility is just _she got bored of it_
My immortal, much like the Bible, is going to be remembered forever while the authors will never be found
But out of curiosity, what would the conversion ritual look like?
@@crancourt1789 evanescence mosh pit at the hot topic
...
We actually know a lot of the authors of the bible, but y'know whatever
The authors' names are literally the title of most of the books fucking what?
@@thanatoast yeah, I probably should've assumed that instead of just thinking they all put fake names on the books, that was genuinely my bad
"I cried sexily"
“I jumped in front of the bullet SEXILY”
“I changed my clothes sexily”
"I ate macaroni sexily"
Me when I cry tbh
@@chikari123 tbh me too lol
I feel like L trying to figure out Kira’s identity
Hmm... I think there's a 5 percent chance that you are xxBloodyTearz666xx.
L, Do you know mary sues of edgy fanfics hate preps
*frantically scribbles notes to make my “coming out as Tara” post as believable as possible*
As someone who has written TONS of purposefully bad fanfiction i can guarantee that it's definitely NOT "too much effort" to write troll fics with multiple chapters. Hell, when you're purposefully writing badly, it doesn't take nearly as much time as trying to write something that actually has quality. Especially if you've thought of the plot beforehand, you can absolutely write multiple chapters of typo-filled bs with no real effort or thought
Yeah, I had this same experience. Bad fanfic is insanely easy to churn out. If I had posted an intentionally bad fic and it got the traction My Immortal got I would gleefully pump out 50+ chapters lol
Do you have any advice on writing purposely bad fan fic? I'm currently writing a script for a short film that plays out kind of like one. I think I'm doing pretty good with the "aesthetic" but I don't know where to take the plot.
@@moviefilmstudios9828 The thing that makes badfic so easy is that plot flow doesn't really matter. Basically you can just string together a bunch of scenes without caring about where they're leading or how they contribute. Whenever I wasn't sure how to end a scene I had the protag dramatically pass out. It's sooooo much easier than seeing a scene through to it's logical conclusion lol
They could have even been writing multiple chapters at one time and just staggering the releases. I used to write troll badfic, and you really can churn out like 10 chapters of that kind of stuff in a night. As well, many of the earlier chapters were very short. I feel like the author/s would probably sit down and write a few at a time then release them over the course of a month or two. Not a ton of work at all.
link the fics
mmmm that voice sounds familiar .......
why must dumbledoor spook me so?
I knew that was your voice.
I can't believe that I never heard of the dramatic readings you were a part of until now. Man, it's a joy!
**EDIT**
Oh wait, never mind. Those readings were originals for this video in particular. Still, I'd love to hear ya do more dramatic reads in the future if ever you get the time. I'm betting the results would be hilarious. ^_^
Read some stories for us. Please!
I need all of you guys to do a full dramatic reading of My Immortal. I never knew how much I needed that in my life until now.
But seriously: the Tumblr My Immortal discourse is fucking prizeworthy. I specifically remember a thread that began after the emergence of the alleged second Tara account, where some seven or so people were all... idk accusing (I guess?) each other of having written it.
Basically a Mexican standoff, but with goths/ex-goths on Tumblr. Fucking amazing.
Absolutely golden
It’s like killing someone and then framing all the police officers that show up for the murder
There is one impostor among us.
latin standoff* :)
@@hanyuukawaiinanodesu No
According to Sarah z it was all one guy who argued with himself to create fake drama. Funny thing is he's the best candidate to have written my immortal as he's the only one with real connections to the original account.
Things from My Immortal that will never go out of print:
"Fangz Raven 4 da hlep"
"Stop fleming prepz"
"I cried tears of b'lood"
"The next morning I woke up in my coffin"
The clothing descriptions
Professor Sinatra
"She opened her red eyes"
Everything else
"I gasp"
"I said angrily"
"Voldemort gave me a gun"
"His red whites"
""You f*cking bastard!" i moaned"
and
(I couldnt find the exact writing sorry)
Something along the lines "I ran suicidally"
"voldemort gave me a gun"
don’t forget “a blak lonken prak t-shrit”
"I hath Telekinesis!"
As a former child of that era, I can safely say that it is definitely not outside the realm of possibility that this was an earnest piece of writing that, eventually, became satire. Back then, us goth kids would:
- Type like that without any irony
- Have attention spans about as long as an ant's nasty
- Rebel against the preps (normies by today's nomenclature)
- Write terrible fanfiction because we all thought we were special edgy artists that thought we could write
I don't think it's accurate to call it full-blown satire, because I don't think the author(s) had a plan that concrete, but I don't think it's entirely earnest because there's no way the negative attention went unnoticed. Again, I can guarantee you there was no plan here. Just a couple of goth kids (or possibly just one) with an internet connection, microsoft word, and a whole lot of time to waste.
The tom bodil thing tho
The negative attention definitely didn't go unnoticed, she references the bad reviews and negative comments throughout. I think she would put it something like "stop flaming my story, preps!" Lmao. Hard to tell if that's just part of the character though
@@conorcasey4233
Could have been just a coincidence
@@mksabourinable I mean I guess but the chances are lower to be honest. I dont see what train of thought someone like the writer could possibly have to type tom bodil besides it being a joke.
@@conorcasey4233 didn't she mention liking LOTR in one of her profiles?
My favorite part is when she calls Sirius Black, Harry's "dogfather".
I mean, they're not wrong?
Pogfather tbh
Surprisingly clever, ngl
that's what made me suspect it's satire haha
they have a point though.
Honestly I’m thinking that my immortal was never intended to be “truly” concluded, and that the unfinished cliffhanger as well as the authors inactivity is the actual real ending. It would fit into the idea of this story being a fanfiction-parody, since many fan stories abruptly end in the middle of the plot or shortly before the ending, usually without any warning or after the author says they’re on a small break and will write again later, only to be never seen again. Which is exactly what happened here.
The fact that this is a genuinely wonderful use of Schrodinger's cat philosophy is marvelous.
Anyone could have written My Immortal but also /no one/ could have written it; it could have been a primitive word document AI for all we know -- the only way to know is to open the box but we can't because the box is locked and no one knows where the goddamn key is.
Multiple people claim to have the key but none tried have worked on the box.
Maybe the real My Immortal is the friends we made along the way
@@SephTheHuntress
The real My Immortal was the dead body out by the creek.
And honestly, at this point, if the real "Tara" or whoever was playing her character came out, the key wouldn't work on the box because of how many fake keys have worn the locking mechanism
This is totally how locks work do not fact check me
@@ParadigmRiki
Hmmm....
That does sound right.
"These 14-year-old questions" The questions about My Immortal are now the target demographic of My Immortal.
magnitude 7 bruh moment
the target demographic is *immortal*
Wtf, why did you do this to me.
It's like... poetry.
I want to like this comment but it's at 666 likes and I'm not going to destroy this.
I've said this before and I'll say it again: "My Immortal" is "Catcher in the Rye" if it were written by Vladimir Nabokov. Tara (character or not) is relentless in reminding you that you are reading a self-insert fanfic. However, despite how much it describes her feelings, her thoughts, her opinions, her interests, her outfit down to a thread, it takes great joy in the fact that you do not know a single thing about the author(s?) and never will. It's a modern-day "Pale Fire" that deftly lampoons early 2000's zeitgeist, goth counter-cultures, and rabid fan culture. The question of "is this real or is this satire?" is integral to the reading experience.
i read catcher in the rye in HS MAN was i pissed off i finished it in a couple days went to class and asked my teacher "why the hell was this banned the worst thing he does is hire a hooker and talk to her?"
"oh poor me i got kicked out of another boarding school so i bought a hunters cap and bitched for 2 days" THAT'S THE WHOLE BOOK
Shaun Swain Oh god I really want to believe that but I'm not sure that I can, I mean, having been pretty much the exact demographic for it at that time, there's a certain level of cynicism I have, but at the same time, that's pretty much the best take I've ever heard. In fact, my cynicism is likely just evidence for it, so once again this fanfic accomplishes its cosmic purpose and gives me an existential crisis.
dude...
@@WardNightstone Some adults are uncomfortable around edgy teenagers. Or possibly they don't understand the altered slang. "Saddler was sexy!" (IIRC)
I got introduced to Catcher at the wrong point in life and when that happens, instead of loving the book, it hits like sitting on a damp towel. I've given up on trying to understand how people find it a good book and just sort of nod along, pretending it's this cornerstone of an experience, when all I want to do is scream "Green Day did the entire point of this book in a three and a half min song!"
A few recent updates to this saga:
1. Todd reached out to Sarah Z (another RUclipsr who made a video on MI in 2019) not too long after this video was posted. I reached out to Sarah, and upon learning that it was Todd who reached out to her, told her about how I believed that Todd was (secretly) operating several sockpuppet/alt accounts--including the one used for making the "BatMan" confession. We dug deeper down this rabbit hole together, and she posted a (fantastic!) video about our findings. Honestly, it's a story that's at least equally wild to MI's. Here's the video:
ruclips.net/video/MWEgD1PVFNg/видео.html
2. Almost 2 weeks after the aforementioned video was posted, Todd reached out to me, and confessed that he didn't write My Immortal. You can see the email he sent me here:
twitter.com/RedBardIsCool/status/1314944151050506241
3. Under the username of RavenIsAPoser, Raven, the Acid Bath Princess of Darkness, returned on January 2, 2021 to confirm to the internet that the bloodykiss videos were just trolling, and yet again, that she and Tara didn't write My Immortal. Raven is currently working as a professional dominatrix, Tara doesn't have an online presence, and Azer (NeutralOneder on Instagram) is a musician and uses they/them pronouns.
ruclips.net/video/Q_qKwSiN4Uw/видео.html
At this point, the whole Toby/Todd drama should be made into a film
I am trying to search out what this "My Immortal" is
/-My only reference being
The pop-goth song my immortal..
Re:
I am not ok with this
/-I f**ing love the soundtrack
This story is wild...
@@FlorenceDays they have. It was Secret Window.
I honestly don't want it to be satire, there's this weird part of me that loves the bizarre insane concept of this being real. I've had some amazing times with this fic with my friends, I'm just not sure I'm ready to let this weird hope it's real go away cause man, what a ride.
Yeah, and at the very least I have to believe the writer was a teenage girl that had a fanfic and goth phase and not just like a man in his 30s that hates anything that appeals to young people
@@adamdawson6700 it strikes me as being similar to the sort of phase a lot of young teens online go through, where they recently realized their OCs and stories were cliché, "cringe," nonsensical, etc, and then they flip and start making fun of the tropes they loved literally last month.
Also adds to why the Acidbath sisters seemed like such a plausible candidate, they were doing the exact same thing.
Tara Gilesbie is the Zodiac Killer of fanfiction
ted cruz wrote my immortal
oh the irony
I think we know about the Zodiac than we know about Tara honestly
Except some Aussie dude worked out who the zodiac killer is, so we’ll wait another 200 years for some random Aussie dude to just find it out
We found the zodiac killer.
This is becoming a season of Gravity Falls, except it’s not “who wrote the journals,” it’s “who wrote the Harry Potter goth fic”
If that means Red Bard is Dipper I'm absolutely here for it
Journal 4 contains the answer
@@satsfallingdown Then who's Mabel?
@@samt3412 Sarah probably, since they’re working together on this
I think you underestimate preteens. The whole "diz is da laif" speak is absolutely something I would have written like on forums and stuff lol. And the bits of referencing Lord of the rings, ik I would often reference obscure shit I've never personally read bc I either knew someone who did, ran into a teacher that taught it to me or something else.
Odds are, it was written like a story I wrote with my friends. Sitting around a laptop, narrating out loud, laughing at our own jokes but with a level of seriousness of like "this is *actually* cool. Badass and my comic relief is sooo gud"
So not exactly self aware parody, but I can totally see someone writing this with mixed ideas of what the purpose is (funny or serious?). Objectives of what the tone of a story is likely a foreign concept for many people, and I could see this happening here.
As for the "hacker", probably an attention seeking moment (like this whole thing was).
This is my belief of the story.
Maybe with time they started making it funnier after the attention it got, out of spite or because they thought it was "AWESOME".
SO i think it's real.
I can attest; when I was young, I was on the internet scene between 2011 and 2013, and old meme culture and "derp speak" was common with kids around 12 and 15 years old, to try and be funny or to try and be a troll. There were users who were intentionally trying to roleplay as kids who only posted in "baby talk" too. Kids liked to have fun and be silly back in the day.
That shorthand way of typing was the norm during AIM/MSN messenger days. The fic sounds exactly like how you described it, two teenagers typing out a story together on a computer for laughs without any concern for plot or grammar. The attention they got would have been incentive enough to keep going, and then they got bored and stopped. The internet really made it bigger than it probably was to them.
Man, got hit with some nostalgia here. Back in high school, a friend of mine would read sections and chapters of My Immortal to me and another friend during our first period Entomology class lab time because cringe was way more interesting than bugs at 8 am.
Those sound like really good days...come to think of it, My Immortal brought light to a lot of us, when I felt sad I used to read some lines of it and they immediately made me feel better. So grateful to the author
Said no one ever!! Bugs are awesome! Like why take entomology then!
I did this with friends, but in history
Plot twist: Red Bard wrote My Immortal.
I mean what else did you expect?
THE META or superbutterbuns and red bard 🙀
The rumor come out
@@RavenLotz yes
She is the ultimate troll
I want "I wrote My Immortal" to be the new "No, I'm Spartacus".
I do think of Tara Gilesbie whenever I see that scene, ngl.
No, I'm the real Santa Claus!
Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?
i'M rAdiO rEbeL
no, I'M radio rebel
Did I wake up today thinking "let's go get the deep lore on My Immortal?"
No.
Yet here I am. Excellent video.
Same with me lol
Honestly, if I wrote it, I would never tell anyone. I would just sit back and laugh at the internet's obsession of it.
Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way is the ultimate Big Tiddy Goth Gf
I think you mean Enoby. Or was it Eboby?
no no no its TaEbony
Eternity.
this is the worst comment i have ever read. i love it
@@VainGuardian thank you
God Dumbledore in My Immortal is the role SuperButterBuns was born to play
Don't you mean Red Bard?
(They sound the same, hint, hint.)
HONESTLY THOOO
@@Circ00mspice this is now my new conspiracy theory even though we know what they both look like and they look nothing a like
We stan the Butter queen
Hands of Asclepius indeed my friend indeed.
Whenever I see my girlfriend, my heart beats like a subway train
"Her real name was Jenny" oh my god Jenny Nicholson is not only horse famous, she is the author of my immortal
I want to believe this
My favourite quote from My Immortal will always be:
“I luv u TaEbory.” he whispred sexily and den we fel aspleep lol.
Yes, Tara half-typed her own name before her Mary Sue self-insert and forgot to delete it.
I love at one point she spells Dumbledore correctly and then immediately spells it dumblydore
My favorite is "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!".
“Snape gave me a gun”
“It was..... Vlodemort and da deth deelers!
She did? That's actually hilarious omg
This made me want to write a Joe Biden fanfic, called For-Biden Fruit.
"my name is Joe "dementia" Biden"
Do it
PLEASE DO IT.
Written by Tara... Reade
It would be like a car crash, horrific but impossible to look away from
"Too much effort for a troll." That's like the bare minimum hours you have to put in for an obscure ARG. That's the community service hours of trolling.
who's here after Sarah Z video on all the Toby's
How do I know you ' re not Toby?
@@Luna312ful hmm how do I know you're not toby? you seem a little suss. -.-
@@rosadeneer3783 don ' t call me Toby, Toby.
plagveskvll then why are you talking like a Toby. Toby!
@@rosadeneer3783 i ' m not talking like a Toby, you realised they ' re onto you and stopped!
"...they completely disregard the harry potter canon"
well.. JK rowling does the same thing now....
...plus every and any moral lesson to be learnt from that series. JKR is cancelled, the fandom says TRANS RIGHTS!
Shots fireddd
"Now"? What do you mean "now"? I don't think she ever particularly cared for consistency, she just ran out of good ideas.
Oh snap!
Anyone in the comment section could be the author of “My Immortal”.
thinking about stuff like that is fun, like "you could walk right past a murderer on the streets and never notice"
@@noteless1 still get chills down my spine that a guy who drove me home from my first day of work murdered someone a few months later (allegedly I think).
Me! I wrote it. I forgot what I wrote though 😂
Hello.
It was actually my boss and lover *Charles Montgomery "Monty" Burns.*
The first person I'll ask to meet when I get to the afterlife is the author of My Immortal.
I came here after Sarah's latest video and honesty, your description of Tara and Raven, their fighting publicly with eachother, their suspiciously similar writing style; It doesn't seem that crazy that maybe Toby was the real author after all? Tara and Raven certainly seem to fit his MO.
That would be hilarious if it were true. It'd turn this Sherlockian mystery into The Big Lebowski.
It seems less likely given everything else from that video, especially that the timeline of the chapters given here (late 2006) predates the Book of Seamus drama per the post date on the comments from Todd (Nov. 2007) and the whole Prayer Warriors thing.
It feels more like Toby was a fan of My Immortal and he took inspiration from the trolling in the fic.
Counter-point: As someone who was actually writing fanfiction back then, yeah, there was an unbelievable amount of teen writers that lacked self-awareness. I was constantly getting messaged and requested to write people fics of their terrible ass Mary Sues and Gary Stus. Spelling errors and ridiculous descriptions abounded. It was honestly something I was constantly laughing over. Also, it's not unfathomable to see two friends having similar, if not identical, writing styles at that age. You'll typically see it in one mimicking the other. I had a friend who would mimic my style to a point it was shocking. The only difference was she would literally pull a thesaurus to write because she wanted to sound more intelligent. Because obviously using words like "golden-red hair" is better if you say "hair that was flaxen yet as auburn as the setting sun" and not just pretentious af.
So yeah, don't set today's standards of visibility and writing to that time period. Generally, Mary Sue writers of today know they have a lot to prove, so even though that doesn't dissuade them, they will typically try to know how to string a grammatically correct sentence together, or get beta readers to help them. Back then, beta readers were very rarely used, and more people would 'round robin' fanfics if they were going to involve someone in it at all. Meaning, for those who don't know what that is, where you would write some, then pass it to the other person and they would write some, then pass it back or pass it to a third person, and the whole goal was to make it look seamless while still ensuring your own little flare was in there.
Eh, IDK dude, I spent entirely too much time on forums dedicated to finding and making fun of bad fanfic and I just don't buy it. Many of the elements are believable (the mall goth Mary-Sue, the clothing descriptions, the general poor quality, etc), but the little things like the Tom Bombadil reference and the weird way she goes out of her way to describe Hagrid as being a student are just gilding the lily, you know? Like, I get that she is supposed to have not read much less understood the books, but no other character repeatedly describes themselves as being a student so why would Hagrid?
I agree that there are genuine works of fanfic from that time that are just as bad, but the funny details that made the fic entertaining feel fake to me.
Yep--I've read/encountered a lot of fanfic of that era and slightly earlier, and...what all you said is why I STILL think there's a chance that "My Immortal" could in fact be real.
This video is very well-written, but...if you haven't spent time on old MSTing sites like "Web Site Number Nine", you don't KNOW how bad it could be.
I was paid to write bad smut fanfic. Shits wild.
i've seen my share of terrible fanfics, but i think it has to be satire when you look at I'm Not Okay, which sounds more like a bad fanfic than a satire.
I legitimately got flashbacks when you talked about round robin fics- I was in my fair share of those and boy do I cringe at some of that stuff that I wrote as a 10-13 year old
I like to imagine that Ms. Scribe was Tara's mom. She got grounded for fan-fiction crimes.
INCAHOOTS
Thats quite good. I like it.
All early internet urban legends exist in the same fictional universe.
Not grounded, sent to boarding school
@@myettechase in Dubai.
It’s my 3rd rewatch and I just now noticed the subtle brilliance of the phrasing at 9:06 ......she’s goffik, so “a pentagram between” rather than “a cross between”
The writer of My Immortal was a comedic genius
She fixated on Hilary Duff because she was jealous of her relationship with Joel Madden.
I wonder how the real author feels creating the most legendary masterpiece in the history of the internet?
Probably terrified, is my guess. Imagine you were the author of a fanfiction like this...
Mission accomplished.
But does it even compare to that smash bros fanfic that happens to be the longest piece of literature ever written
No one really cares about the real author
In my opinion, I feel like the original author would be terrified to come forward and in a very weird way it reminds me of the story behind The Eye of Argon, one of the worst written books in a lot of people’s eyes. Perhaps it’s dissuaded her from writing ever again because she would forever be known as the author of My Immortal. Who knows for sure though.
I took psychic damage when I heard you say "biblical fan fiction"
I think my brain short circuited but unfortunately it didn’t erase “biblical fan fiction” from my mind
I mean.... Dante
Also C.S. Lewis, whose Narnia books are AU Jesus fan fiction.
AtThatDaniels Really? I’ve never read the Narnia books so I wouldn’t know haha
@@mizuamia827 Yeah Aslan is pretty much Lion Jesus
That Rose Christo book seriously needs to be released, leaked, something. I just have to, HAVE TO know how the hell My Immortal was secretly a code to find her brother in the foster system. That mystery is nearly as worth being solved, and someone actually has that damn manuscript.
if you pause around 41:53 the post is claiming that even the lamest 16-17 y/o has better things to do than write my immortal but during my senior year me and my friends wrote a scooby doo/dragon tales crossover epyllion about an child oracle named äb̈s̈ïn̈ẗḧe all in dactylic hexameter _and_ we were relatively cool
"He took off my *cloves* sexily" is actually pretty goth lmao
With that she's basically saying she had garlic on her body when they had sex so they both probably stunk after.
@@Xehanort10 I was thinking of clove cigarettes but...TY for that image : :)
No my cloves
Ah yes, he took off my [Spice rack]
But what if he takes OF your cloves, is it still goffik?
It is honestly astonishing how almost accidentally the author of the My Immortal fanfic has managed to avoid the spotlight for nearly 15 years just thanks to the, "Boy Who Cried Wolf" factor that has plagued the mystery of the identity of this person/people as one unreliable source after one claim to be the writer. At this point, I highly doubt their identity will be revealed for certain due to how many oddballs have already tried to take the position of author that the masses will likely not accept a simple answer at the end.
I think thats why Rose Christo tried to make it seem like people found her rather than just plain old coming out as the writer.
Best part of My Immortal is when Enoby shoots Voldermort off of his broom. He starts crying and begging for mercy and she goes "I felt bad for him. Even though I'm a sadist and I stopped."
That part had me laughing for a while.
All I'm saying is, in My Immortal, it's mentioned that Snape doesn't like Ebony and Vampire because he's a Christian, and in Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles Snape is a devout Christian man who hates non-Christian things and has many long descriptions of himself.
I am mildly impressed with the fact that the author actually knew Billie Joe Armstrong had dyed blonde hair in 1989-1990. Could it be unintentional, most likely, but I give her the benefit of the doubt.
I could just imagine her googling (or whatever was the times search engine) and just finding a pic of blonde Billie and running with it intentionally or not
Tweek Tweak google was deffo the times search engine. yahoo was a close second.
Billy Joel Armstrong*
I have a theory: members of Hot Topic's marketing team wrote My Immortal and I'm Not Okay... especially since basically every canonical character got described as basically being powerbombed through a Hot Topic
Did it work though is the question.
@@callofkarrenboomerops3262 I went into a hot Topic a couple times before the virus
This is my new head canon
Hol up-
I’ve went to Hot Topic before; I was shocked to find the merch wasn’t as edgy as I thought. I brought a Sonic wallet there.
"... We were at Hollister."
god the delivery is amazing, theyr'e comedy geniuses and i respect and fear them
Ah yes, the musical stylings of Lonken Prak.
if this IS a satire imagine being the absolute legend behind this all. over a decade and people still talk about it, all the fancfics it spawned and re-tellings etc. it's honestly quite the accomplishment lool
And if it is serious the person who wrote it probably keeps a low profile online because if they did reveal themselves they wouldn't be able to walk outside without creating a scene.
My Immortal is actually a sentient cosmic entity that possesses writers in order to physically manifest in our reality as mind-bending pieces of literature.
It's most recent known incarnation is the backstory of Old Man Henderson.
Im stealing this
I cant believe that my immortal is an scp
This is just Hermaeus Mora's books in Skyrim but irl
can this be an scp please, forget all the others. this one tops them all
HASTUR HASTUR HASTUR
Baffled that Tara apparently knows the word limpid, is Tara smarter than me? Probably honestly she’s a genius
"Throbbing lavender man fruit thing" had me laughing for like 5 min straight. 😂
It brings me peace knowing that the author of this fic will go down in history as an unnamed god of a dead religion
Honestly tho
"An unnamed god of a dead religion" is a sentence that is way to metal to be in a discussion about My Immortal and I love it
I still think that the most hilarious thing about My Immortal is that Enoby's middle name is Dementia, it is just so ridiculous
One line of dialogue states that Dumbledore has Alzheimer’s as well
Coincidence? I think not!
Haha 😂 I think they meant demented but fricked it up. I fully believe this was a parody tho. At least…. I think 🤔 😅
@@ezrastardust3124 that is the best part of the whole fan fic, that and Ebony asking why satan had to make her so beautiful.
And reason number 1 why it could not possibly be anything other than satire
As a dusturbingly pale person into alt fashion, i would like to tell y'all that we aren't as obnoxious as My Immortal would have you believe
18:54 "But honestly, I know that sounds like a lot of work for a troll[...]"
after that sarah's videos with all the tobby alt accounts, the extend of my immortal's accounts and content doesn't sound like much work at all....
I am now convinced that Toby wasn`t lying when he claimed to write it.
Plot twist: Red Bard wrote My immortal and made this video to throw us off her trail
You may be joking, but that is actually a legitimate possibility.
I mean yeah at this point anyone could've written My Immortal
the people who wrote my immortal, later cleaned it up, reformatted some of the things, and published it as The Cursed Child
@@kenzieduckmoothe cursed child has the same reputation as the pjo movies
😂
"My immortal is equivalent to the Canterbury tales" is THE hottest take i have heard in a while
I like to imagine that centuries later kids in school will analyze things like My Immortal and wonder what kind of language is it. :')
Well Chaucer was a poor speller
@@pussthepupanddonkeythedog5135 To be fair so was everyone
Can you please drop a timestamp? I think i missed it
I’m kinda concerned for all the mentions of self harm in my immortal, and I do hope whoever wrote it, if they were feeling those thoughts, is doing better.
There was a bit of a weird glorification of self-harm in the emo scene, it was often treated as part of the "aesthetic" (even a lot of songs from the time mention SH while the author of the song would be like "oh I've never done that I just know my fans relate")
So what I'm saying is she might not have ever done it
The reading of Wake Me Up Inside sounded like a computer reading Old English.
I seem to recall Dumbledore being spelled a different way each time, seems unlikely to be an accident.
My favorite misspelling of Dumbledore from my immortal would probably have to be Dumblydore. If I remember correctly, Mcgonagall's name was similarly butchered in a number of different ways.
On the last page he seems to be called "Dumbledark". DUMBLEDARK.
I haven't read this thing though, so maybe it's not him. Could be a mirror universe edgy clone or something, you never know with fanfics. But still, DUMBLEDARK.
And that's part of why I say it's got to be parody. The sheer Consistency of failure.
She doesn't make the same mistake over and over.
She doesn't get it right from time to time.
She Always gets it wrong, in new and unique ways.
Reminds me of another great fic, 30 H's (if you don't know, its basically the polar opposite of My Immortal, having better grammar, more competent writing and seemingly being written by a testosterone-poisoned teenage boy), same thing happens there to Scrumblegort's name being different every time.
@@Polarpancakes It reminded me of how my mom used to call him Dumbledoriss... I miss her T~T
Game Theory: Was My Immortal written by Tera and Raven from Teen Titans?
As long as it's not anywhere near the TT Go versions.
Teraven
Shouldnt that be Film Theory for teen titans.
(Guess whos pedantic)
More like hornet is void lolx
Valen ayyyy mossbag reference
Hot take: My immortal was written by Msscribe
The people who think that My Immortal could not have been intended seriously clearly didn’t swim the depths of Quizzila and My Yearbook before discovering more legit fanfic websites. I wish I could have such optimism about the world 🤣
I remember quizilla dang that was long ago
Oh god I remember a long ass second(?) person present self insert naruto fic on Quizzilla that I legitimately printed out and read and hid under my pillow so my parents wouldn’t find it 😂
YEAP I remember my quizilla days. This was not satire.
Oh my god I cannot convey how desperately I wish Quizilla still existed, people talk about Wattpad and ffn and simply NOTHING can quite stack up to what Quizilla was like
How would writing a bad Harry Potter fanfic help one find their long-lost sibling?
we will never find out 😔😔😔
We will never know 😔
Its the plot man!
She claimed she wrote it so that it would become famous so that she could later write a book about it... I genuinely dunno why people bought this.
the publicity would give her a bigger platform to find him with i guess? a “do you know this person”-type post could benefit from that
the greatest mysteries of all time:
What was lost from the Library of Alexandria fire
What happened to Jimmy Hoffa
Did Atlantis actually exist
Who wrote My Immortal
My Immortal is a transcription of atlantian scrolls, previously stored in the Library of Alexandria, made by Jimmy Hoffa. (?
Atlantis did not exist. Even Plato says it's an allegory. It's the platonic ideal of an... ideal society, essentially.
ConscriptDavid issa joke kid
@@pootoobaby738 shhh lemme have my fun
We got Hoffa figured out already too.
This fanfic, resumed in song lyrics:
*_CAN YOU SEE ALL OF ME, WALK INTO MY MYSTERY, STEP INSIDE AND HOLD ON FOR DEAR LIFE, DO YOU REMEMBER ME, CAPTURE YOU OR SET YOU FREE, I AM ALL- I AM ALL I AM..._*
Alternatively;
*NO MORE GODS, NO MORE GRAVES! ARE YOU FRIEND OR FIEND?! NO MORE LIFE, NO MORE DEATH, SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN!*
I always forget how obscure usernames were in mid 2000s , like bloodytearz666 would not be considered weird or cringe back then
“I went into the common room thinking of Satan.” As one does.
I knew nothing about this Harry Potter fanfic and it hurts.
you can enjoy a dramatic reading on internet historians channel
Read it. Do it. It's so worth it. It's painful but not even dramatic readings can fully encapsulate the experience.
I actually recommend dramatic readings over reading it with your own two eyes. Reading it normally just leads to your brain eventually shutting down out of self defense, which means you miss out on some of the glory. So stay up late, gather some friends, find an unabridged reading that pronounces the misspellings, and buckle up for the ride, my friend.
It was mcr's marketing team that wrote my immortal.
Whilst most people just think this is all just terrible, I’m mad that they didn’t call Harry “Vampotter”. IT WOULD BE SO GOOD BRO
When you really look at My Immortal critically, and not taking it at face value, to me at least it becomes very hard to take seriously. Mostly for the reasons in this video, but also, certain things really feel too 'bad' to be true.
Firstly, there's how playfully self harm and suicide is treated. It seems odd to be that Tara would treat slitting ones wrists so casually, as it it was just a gothic hobby one does even when excited (or just slightly depressed). Raven's FF profile claims a friend of hers committed suicide this way, and you'd expect Tara to be aware of this, yet she treats suicide and wrist slitting so casually. Heck, Ebony goes 'lol, I totally decided not to commit suicide when I heard Helena' and Tara in an AN lols while telling us she couldn't update because she was in hospital for slitting her wrists. Someone with actual suicidal thoughts or self harm issues would be very unlikely to laugh about it this way.
Also, she claims she went to Transilvania for 3 days. Considering how far either Dubai or the US (where Tara seems to be from, since she directly references 'American schools') are from there, it seems unlikely she'd only spend 3 days there. And she claims she saw the castle where Dracula was filmed. No Dracula movie was actually filmed there, however.
There's also her love of supposedly gothic bands, yet neither of the music she likes is actually gothic. She also claims Gerard Way has blue eyes, which...he doesn't, his are more brown or hazel.
The beauty of My Immortal is that I don't think it's an honest work either, but all these reasons are ones that I find more convincing for the argument of it being real 😂