Disclaimer: mentions of sexual assault, suicide, and self harm.
greetings earthlings! today I’m reviewing my immortal by tara gilesbie!
so i know it’s not December but it took a little bit longer to do my explained video and then a lot happened now it’s June and we are going to have to live with that. I then got a job, started school, had to quarantine because my dad got covid, left said job, finished school, got a new job and overall my mental health was shit. Any way welcome to my immortal review. now i took notes while reading this because it was such a shit show that i needed to. I will mention some notes but all of them will be on my goodreads and on my blog so check them out if you want to read them. my immortal is a fanfic that has become known for being terrible. If you don’t see my explained video then I recommend checking it. I actually worked hard on it but I go over the history of my immortal and the mystery behind on the author so if you want to know everything about Tara then watch that. But this is just going to be a review so I may mention things but not really go into depth about them.
So any my immortal in short summary: it’s bad. And that’s my review. Looking at it and knowing nothing about it, I can tell you that it is bad. I’m going to discuss the satire/ parody theory later because even though I touched on it in my explained video I still want to talk about it. Right now we are just going to focus on the story as it is. My Immortal follows a girl named Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way which is the worst name ever but like its also the most I’m not like most girls names out there. She is in a bisexual love triangle with Draco and Harry who goes by vampire in this story and there are so many plot lines in this story that make no sense. There is also a lot of dark content in this that I wasn’t accepting. So even though I already gave a trigger warning I’m gonna repeat it. There is a lot of sexual assault, sexual harassment, sexual content, suicide, and self harm in this story so if that could be triggering then I recommend leaving. I read this whole thing in like a night because its short which I liked because it’s best for bad things to be short because after a while it’s stops being funny and starts becoming annoying. That’s one of my problems with fifty shades it’s five hundred pages long so at the end It’s not funny just stupid.
There were moments were I did want to stop reading because holy fuck this story is just a cluster fuck. Like Ebony time traveling to stop lord Voldemort, her meeting up with satan who looks like Brendan urie, and so much more. I don’t how to discuss this so let’s go in order. The beginning of this is the most fan fiction opening ever. It’s here’s my name and what I look and a bit of my back story. Like I said I hate ebony’s name. First off ebony is a type of wood. I will be naming my kid birch. Also darkness? Seriously? And then we have dementia which should be obvious why this is a terrible name. And then she has a normal last name. She is named after Gerald Way who is the singer of mcr and if you didn’t don’t worry the story brings him up all the time so you can clue things together. She also mentions that she wishes she was related to him because he is so hot and all I have to say is SWEET HOME ALBAMA! She also compares herself to Amy Lee which is so fucking self center in my opinion. Like I look actually like iconic singer but no big deal.
here are so many moments that are the most fanfic thing ever. To the over the top description of her outfit to the messy bun to the I’m not like most girls at like extreme mood. Like it’s so funny. Also random thing so when I was young, my emo friends and I would call these group of girls who always wore pink the preps and Tara and Ebony do the same in this so was that a thing everyone did? I thought it was just me and my friends but maybe not. The mood changes between the characters were they go from being really angry to happy in like five seconds to the plot just being fucking random, this story is a fanfic at heart. Now I would just like to say that I think that fanfic is great. I have always loved fanfic. It has a special place in my heart and I have cried over many fanfics. But a lot of people have this idea, that fanfiction is terrible and I think that this story is key factor in that. Now stories like fifty shades and after are to blame but I do that whether or not this story is satire or not, this story has created this idea that fanfic is like this. There are fan fictions that are like this but not all of them are.
While I believe that Tara wrote this for fun, I honestly think this is a parody of both goth culture and fanfiction and not a satire. To me, a satire is something like scream and parody is scary movie. Both are horror films that mock horror films but both are different. Scary movie makes fun of those tropes by doing them to the extreme. Scream does this by adding commentary and criticism towards these. My immortal doesn’t add anything to these tropes. It just makes them more extreme. So in my opinion it is a parody but not a satire. Maybe that’s just me. There are a lot of author’s notes in the middle of the story which I don’t love. One it ruins the flow while I’m reading and two Tara is too aggressive. She calls her haters the f slur, talking to Raven or talking negatively about her, and start up talks about her self harming. I felt uncomfortable reading them. I felt like I was reading someone’s diary and I guess that kind of fits with what Rose Christo said about why she wrote My Immortal because she was trying to find her brother and get help but it also doesn’t work because nothing for Rose’s story is mentioned in the author’s note.
I keep getting off track. Honestly the drama with this story is more interesting then the story in general. There is so much of this story that is just laughable. Character names were changed to something really really dumb like harry is now vampire and Hermione is now bloody mary and she has a weird backstory where she was kidnapped and her parents were vampires and Voldemort killed one of them. Also apparently you can change houses which I don’t think is a thing. Also Draco has a car and it’s like a regular car and they go to see a bunch of real bands that perform at Hogwarts so I guess good Charlotte are wizards. I’m not even gonna try to make sense of this story. It’s too much work. There is a love triangle with draco, ebony, and vampire aka harry and I guess its not a love triangle because they all love each other. Draco dated Harry at one point and got a tattoo with his name and he is now dating Ebony but harry and Ebony have a thing and it’s weird. Anyway at one point Ebony tells Draco that he probably has aids which is fucked to say. What a healthy relationship. They fight and make up every chapter it’s real repetitive. There is a lot I didn’t like about this fic but the sex has to be one of the worst parts of it. But in this It’s so badly written. I was so uncomfortable reading. When it comes to sex in stories, it’s pretty hit or miss for me. Sometimes it’s good but then sometimes seeing the word manhood and womanhood just because laughable. This doesn’t even try to make up words for dick, they just use like ‘his you know what’ and ‘my you know where’ and I just hate it. It’s so uncomfortable. I hate it.
Truth be told even though I don’t like this story and definitely lost brain cells reading it, I respect it. It’s a terrible fanfic but will forever be marked in history. It’s had more of impact on the world than I have and to this day I still see people talking about it. I still think that tara was just a young girl who posted something but is too embarrassed to own up to it now but even if she wasn’t I can’t be mad because she played me. She wrote a terrible story that I read and have now made two videos about. So I have some respect for this girl and the story. But she did say the f slur and say a lot of other problematic stuff so maybe don’t Stan her that much.
Let’s wrap this video up. A quick update from my last video, the two girls who ran the channel xxbloodyxkissesx have started uploading again. Right now it’s just Raven who has been posting and it’s been her just posting bloopers, reacting to old videos, and posting old videos that they never posted. They are pretty cute videos in my opinion. They even had one of their old videos become a popular tiktok audio which is cool. Let’s move on to questions.
Is a satire/parody or just bad?
Honestly I have no idea. I think that it is up to you. I go back and forth on it all the time.
Will we ever find out who Tara is?
Probably not. Tara will probably join the club of the unknown people with DB Cooper and others. She is a mystery! I think that people will continue to say that they are Tara and they will probably lying.
Overall thoughts?
Even though this story is really really bad, it was fun to read (at times) and research. Reading it reminded me of my early teen years where I wrote terrible harry potter fanfic and Ms. Terfing didn’t make any transphobic comments. I think my immortal honestly shows that fans can be the best part of loving something. Sometimes.
I hope you enjoy this post. as always i posted rants like this every once and a while. look out for more reviews and other random posts. like, comment, and follow for more rants like these! also make sure to follow my social media links.
you know you love fiction,
Grace
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