hey I keep seeing these “2017 Tumblr” compilation posts and it seems like everyone is deliberately leaving out the part where we all thought the author of My Immortal was finally found and that she was a Native American lesbian author who wrote the fanfic as part joke and part desperate attempt to find her long lost brother while she was in high school and that she was going to publish a memoir in 2018 and Buzzfeed covered it and everything but then some people, one who was supposedly her aformentioned brother, on fucking Kiwifarms of all things, started poking holes in her story and then she deleted and dropped off the face of the earth. because it seems like everyone is trying to pretend like it never happened but it happened.
the year is almost over and I’m not letting anyone forget about this.
the my immortal author turns out to be an indigenous girl raised in the new york foster system who spent her teenage years searching for her little brother from whom she was separated and she wrote my immortal with her “beloved” foster sister as she looked for her brother and held on to herself in a life that couldn’t have been easy and the only reason she’s come out as the author of my immortal is because it plays such an important role in her childhood in the memoir she’s about to publish called “under the same stars”
and honestly of ALL the possibilities we’ve all ever considered surrounding this fic…… .
my friends and I passed the fic around in college after poetry class every day and read it laughing having no idea what we held in our hands.
I JUST.
I’m LITERALLY awe-stricken. I love her and want her to have everything good in the world.
I guess nobody remembered that I was on FictionPress, too.
So, hi. I’m the girl you all knew as Tara. My FF.net account really was hacked (twice!), once in 2006 and again in 2009. As of 2017, Support still doesn’t answer my requests to regain it, although I can’t say I blame them. They’re probably scared I’ll flood their site with poorly written sex scenes again.
I’m lucky the hackers never migrated to this account, considering it had the exact same login credentials. (They’ve since been changed, don’t worry.)
I’ll let the account’s creation date speak as to whether it’s legitimate or not.
Thank you all so, so much for keeping My Immortal alive over the years. You fill my heart with so much love. (Preppy moment, oops.)
That’s about all I have to say for now.
—
Because I’ve received several messages asking this, and predict I may receive more, I’ll answer it here. No, I am not Lani Sarem. Really bad fiction simply tends to read the same. No, I’m not on Facebook. Or Deviantart. Or MySpace. Or Youtube. (Etc.) I am on Tumblr. But I use my real name there, and it’s not Tara.
She’s okay!
You know, you almost had me here. This is good. There’s some audacity in what you’ve done, because it took me longer than it should have, and the help of talking to blackflirtlarping on Discord in panic mode, to discredit it, and usually when a “real Tara” pops up I’ve identified eight problems with their story in the span of like a minute. I was legitimately ready to send off a PM to this account asking if the story was fake or not, because I have a 14,000 word essay on why it’s fake that if disproven would destroy my life and reputation. But, mm, no, this. This isn’t right at all.
So for one, this fictionpress account. This “nostalgia”. Interesting that I have never seen or heard about a fictionpress account before. It’s never come up anywhere in any of the accounts or infoposts or links of accounts or anything of the sort. Even the My Immortal wiki, which gives a lot of time to the proven-not-real Youtube channel, only has new mentions of this fictionpress account in the wake of this post. They’ve never seen it before. This fictionpress account that is for you apparently a nostalgic enough part of this saga to want to revisit and look at. But, nobody has talked about it seemingly ever, and it’s not actually listed anywhere on the internet, so I’m just curious as to how you found it and know about it, and the convenience of this account that nobody has ever seen before being the hot get only days after an update.
But wait a second. How did you even find this? Because in trying to search for this, a funny thing comes up
XXXblodyblaktearz666XXX didn’t fucking exist until a few days ago, it seems. Nobody was talking about it, nobody was linking to it, nobody knew it existed until this post came into being. Even Google’s spiders didn’t find it, but fictionpress isn’t spider-proof; find a writer with a distinct enough handle, punch them into Google, and their FP account will come up just fine. So, how is it that this account with no activity or stories or favorites or anybody talking about it fell into your lap?
Well, I think it’s because despite being from March of 2006, the account had on it a very different name until recently. This is not a known account of Tara Gilesbie and it never was. Nobody knew about it, nobody talked about it, and that’s because this is another fake. A well aged fake, I’ll give it that; a fake that at least used an old account and didn’t start throwing around lots of inconsistent stories and reveals that don’t mesh with anything. But one that’s coming about to cash in on the popularity of the Lani Sarem debacle in what is a too sweet, too perfect coincidence to make this sham any less transparent.
The only way that this is the real Tara’s profile is if you are in fact the real Tara herself.
Dammit I fell for this
I KNEW IT. THERE WAS NO WAY. THE MYSTERY LIVES ON. this is my generations D.B. Cooper
I guess nobody remembered that I was on FictionPress, too.
So, hi. I’m the girl you all knew as Tara. My FF.net account really was hacked (twice!), once in 2006 and again in 2009. As of 2017, Support still doesn’t answer my requests to regain it, although I can’t say I blame them. They’re probably scared I’ll flood their site with poorly written sex scenes again.
I’m lucky the hackers never migrated to this account, considering it had the exact same login credentials. (They’ve since been changed, don’t worry.)
I’ll let the account’s creation date speak as to whether it’s legitimate or not.
Thank you all so, so much for keeping My Immortal alive over the years. You fill my heart with so much love. (Preppy moment, oops.)
That’s about all I have to say for now.
—
Because I’ve received several messages asking this, and predict I may receive more, I’ll answer it here. No, I am not Lani Sarem. Really bad fiction simply tends to read the same. No, I’m not on Facebook. Or Deviantart. Or MySpace. Or Youtube. (Etc.) I am on Tumblr. But I use my real name there, and it’s not Tara.
Given that I think “My Immortal” is a troll (with the reason generally being that author Tara references both Marty McFly and TOM BOMBADIL), I just reread it and I’m astounded by the effort put into it.
The spelling and grammar gets steadily worse over the course of the story, messing up simple words and even the main character’s name (variations on Ebony include Enoby, Enony, Eboby, and my favorite Enopby). The author gives frequent shoutouts in the A/N at the beginning of each chapter to someone called Raven, who she considers a friend and apparently functions as a beta. In chapter 16, Tara severs ties with Raven, expels/murders Raven’s character Willow, and changes Ebony’s full name to Ebony Dark’ness Dementia TARA Way. It’s suggested that they fought because Tara stole Raven’s poster of Gerard Way. By chapter 17, they appear to have made up and Willow is brought back with no further explanation.
The plot, of course, is just insane, but the story was obviously being read; Tara begins each chapter furiously ranting about “flamerz” leaving bad reviews, terribly misspelled. At one point, Ebony was referred to as a Mary Sue and she immediately tried to shut that down, citing “Satanism” and “depression” as flaws. She held each new chapter hostage, demanding a certain number (usually 5) good reviews before she would update. Assuming the spelling and grammar mistakes were intentional, the natural progression of them getting worse and worse is incredible. The difference between Tara’s A/Ns and Raven’s edited text is also astounding, although chapter 16, during their supposed rift, is not noticeably more poorly written than the chapters immediately preceding and following it.
The misspellings of character names and general slipups get worse and worse to the point that once, “Enopby” is referred to as “Tara”, and at another point, “TaEnby”, further to emphasize that Ebony is, in fact, the most obvious self insert in the history of literature. The reference to Marty McFly (he appears at the end of chapter 35 to spirit Ebony into the future) confounds me; Tara does not seem like she’d been aware of pop culture enough to have seen “Back to the Future”, given that she describes “The Nightmare Before Christmas” as this serious, depressing, Adult movie. She’s young enough to consider “he put his thingy into my tool” an accurate description of sex. Further, she references Tom Bombadil, a character in “Lord of the Rings” who I believe just shows up and sings for a while and is strongly implied to be God and then disappears, not really relevant to anything. He’s not even in the movies. Would Tara Gilesbie have read “Lord of the Rings” when she admits she’s never read the Harry Potter books?
Read through that lens (that this was an elaborate hoax), can you believe the rest of it was so organically terrible? Even now, 10+ years after the fact, no one can agree on whether this story is a troll, and until anyone finds out who Tara Gilesbie really is, it’s going to be impossible to know for sure. This is just crazy to me.
I have done extensive digging on this subject, and there is a lot more to My Immortal than meets the eye. Read as a troll, this story is a brilliant piece of satire on fan fiction. It incorporates so many cliches of the genre, especially those from the early to mid 2000′s. The obviously self-inserted Mary-Sue (mentioned above) along with unnecessary and unexplained crossovers, nonsensical sex scenes, and allusion to scene culture and pop punk music. Not to mention the story outside the story, Tara and Raven’s falling out, critiquing the culture of A/N’s and reviews. The tropes and cliches are far too obvious and overplayed to be sincere. I am a true believer that Tara was not only a troll, but a genius of satire. After all, if it was truly so bad, it would not have survived mixed in with ten years of equally terrible fan fiction. The legend of this story is so *ehem* immortal it has sparked heated debate in the online community for years, and was even made into a web series. (https://vimeo.com/70381882) Whether you believe it was satire or not, there is something about My Immortal that is inherently fascinating. Even if it was not her intention, Tara has created the bad fan fiction. It is a perfect storm of chaotic, nonsensical drama spiraling around the least original character ever written. Story lines are dropped and picked up again seemingly at random, characters and names are inconsistent to the point of being unintelligible, and there is no consistent overarching plot. In a sense, it is the anti-story, because it so decidedly defies every literary rule in the book. Either we are drawn to My Immortal as one watches a car wreck in awe, or because it satirizes the worst aspects of every story we have ever read. Regardless, the legacy of My Immortal will live on, either as a warning, or a work of pure genius.
just moving along like everyone else 