#why does the cut placement keep changing if I try to edit

[cellsshapedlikestars]

while bridgerton is classic regency romance, i’m also really partial to mary balogh. her westcott, bedwyn, and survivor’s club series are all really good

I'll admit, I've only read one Bridgerton book. I mostly liked it until the end when she tried to deal with trauma and it felt very clunky and poorly done. It was the second book, with Kate & Anthony, who I... didn't hate like I did in the show 😂

Funnily enough, Mary Balogh wrote the book I just finished. Someone to Love from The Wescott series, and you know what. I actually NEED to talk about this book so I'm using this golden opportunity to ramble and I'm sorry.

I'm gonna preface by saying that besides these two points, I very much enjoyed the plot and was very engaged by it

Let's get this out of the way first: very often I come across issues in romance books where something makes me real uncomfortable. In this one, it was the main dude finding some mystical Chinese man to teach him kung fu and make him all powerful or whatever. Like... YIKES. And this was published in 2016

Now that that's out of the way, the thing I REALLY need to talk about (though much less serious/important).

So the main guy's whole thing is that he's small? Like he gets teased as a kid for looking like a girl and he's weak, blah bah blah. And that doesn't magically go away with some growth spurt, which is kind of nice! I appreciate what the author was trying to do, the male love interest doesn't have to be crazy tall & built to be sexy. Great message! But I think she just... overdid it or something? She just talks about how small he is CONSTANTLY (he's still taller than the female protagonist, so I think this is maybe why it sticks out so much? It's always from the female's POV saying how small he is (but don't worry, he's sexily lean & powerful with his kung fu muscles)). She makes mention of it in seemingly every paragraph as we lead up to the sex scene (which was disappointing and boring and awkward, I have been ruined by fanfic smut). The female protagonist is also described by the man as very stiff/proper/no frills/etc. So by the time we get to the already awkward sex scene, all I can picture is Lord Farquaad with Jaime Lannister hair trying to sensually fuck this girl who just LAYS THERE stiff as a board, and I lost my actual shit and laughed my way through the wedding night scene

*to be fair to this book, I take medical marijuana every night to help me sleep and it uh really does make everything funnier & more ridiculous. some of my best fic ideas & my most rambling tumblr posts are because of it (like now!)

**sorry to anyone who was into show Anthony Bridgerton but dear god was he a misogynistic ass and I stg that actor took the Joey Tribbiani school of smell the fart acting. no I will not be taking any notes

#cellsshapedlikeasks #romance novels #lets file this one under: i have too much time to think #also #why does the cut placement keep changing if I try to edit

[moon-riverandme]

And in the Beginning There was... Light, Film Rolls, and Controversy.

Watching old movies has always been one of my favorite pastimes. I love the cracks in the film, the oddly tinted placements of color, the quick, scattered movements of the actors, and the slice of an intertitle. It all just makes sense when I think of those first filmmakers who were trying to make sense of their new medium. In my journey through film, I will start at the beginning. Well, sort of the beginning. Our main topic of discussion takes place in 1903. So we’ve skipped over a few years… 15 to be exact. I’ll sum them up now because if I miss a beat I’ll ruin the scene.

Let's start in October of 1888 when Louis Le Prince has just recorded the very first film. It’s short yet scenic; his family gathers in a garden and for the first time ever - they move. A man walks across the screen, the rigid bustles and day dress of two women sway as they turn away from the camera - ergo we have a moving image years before Edison would invent the kinetoscope. Of course, most don’t know of Le Prince and in school I never heard his name mentioned. In fact, I only heard of him through a Buzzfeed Unsolved video. So what happened? Why did history remember the names Edison and Lumière but not Le Prince?

There were many entries in the race to create the first film. And of course, there are arguments as to what cinema is in comparison to a bunch of still photographs played one after another. Strange, I think is this argument. For film is a series of stills or frames played one right after the other. Nevertheless, in 1878, we have the famous images of a galloping horse caught by twelve cameras set up by Muybridge to capture motion and to study animal locomotion. Motion but not a movie. What we needed was a camera that had a single lens capable of capturing a point of view. That’s what Le Prince did. Unfortunately, as history would see it, he mysteriously disappeared on a train to Paris in September 1890 right before his first public screening in New York carrying luggage that contained all of his work. Neither Le Prince or the luggage has ever been found. Quite the coincidence.

There are a few theories: Le Prince committing suicide, Le Prince’s own brother killing him, Le Prince fleeing due to his sexuality being outed but none have stuck... except one. Le Prince’s widow, Lizzie, believed Edison, his biggest competitor in the race, had him assassinated. The evidence? The discovery of Edison’s journal containing the following entry, which has been proven authentic. It read:

“Eric called me today from Dijon. It has been done. Prince is no more. This is good news but I flinched when he told me. Murder is not my thing. I'm an inventor and my inventions for moving images can now move forward.”

Take of that what you will.

Today, we are taught that Edison’s kinetoscope launched the novel medium of moving pictures into our familiar. When it was invented in 1891 by Edison and Dickson, the kinetoscope was a peepshow-like device with a "sight opening" on top that one viewer at a time could look into and watch a moving picture. Think about it like looking into a microscope - very different from how we view films now both in method and price, it was 50 cents for access to all films at a given venue.

In 1897, an improvement on Edison's device arose. Invented by the Lumière brothers, the cinematograph contained both a camera, projector, and hand crank. Now, audiences could sit and screen films. I'll circle back to Edison as he connects to our 1903 topic. But first, let's take a stop with the Lumière brothers.

Auguste and Louis Lumière are credited as the first filmmakers. Their documentary-esque films Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory and Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat are milestones in cinema. Known as travelogues or actualités, they showed the casual and working life of people in the mid to late 1890's. These shorts were even screened to audiences who jumped out of their seats at a train onscreen because they thought it would actually hit them. The Lumière Brothers took their screening all over the world, from Paris, to India, and China.

Watching these films, it's hard not to put yourself in the shoes of a passerby, a random person whose name we don't know, who exists in a few frames before disappearing to time. Like a fossil, it's interesting to examine what life was like back then. I love seeing the clothing. Everyone is so formal, at least compared to the laid back air of today. Even so, in the 1890’s people were moving away from the Victorian Era and into the “New Woman” Era. High necklines and longer sleeves were replaced by the open neck and short sleeves as morning turned to dusk. High chiffons under feathered hats were popular as was the shirtwaist style for work. All of these visible in the Lumière films.

Where we jump from reportage to fiction is where we jump from Lumière to Porter. And back to Edison, who had Porter working for him. Projectionist and electrician turned director, Edwin S. Porter was the brains behind many of the mechanics and techniques that have become so highly engrained in the making of films that the idea of them being novel seems almost impossible. In 1899, Porter became head of moving picture production at the Edison Manufacturing Company and throughout his career, which spanned about 15 years, he made more than 70 short films. So lets look at a few of them in detail.

Jack and the Beanstalk (1902)

You'll see that a lot of the narrative ideas for these early films spun directly out of fairytales. For an audience, fairytales were a familiarity. Thus, they were able to stitch together what they already knew about the characters and stories and better understand these new moving pictures. And Porter knew this from his work as a projectionist. He knew what engaged the audience most. And that wasn't just story, it was technique. Porter's films were revolutionary for what would become known as editing, at that time just cutting film. Simplistic and impactful, he knew how to compact time and create magic. Objects and people appear and disappear in a single cut. The camera remains still, a wide shot, and on a tripod but what's in front of it changes slightly, making for magical realism. For example, once Jack makes it back down to earth after descending the beanstalk, he grabs an ax and starts chopping it down. He's got to do this or the giant chasing him will make it down too. So he swings the ax a few times with all his might. From a large beanstalk, ripe with leaves, reaching up to the sky, we immediately cut to a destroyed one. The fact that we end one cut with Jack in the same position as we start the next, keeps from disrupting the audience even though everything else onscreen has changed. We've condensed time, Jack has saved the day, and the Giant has fallen to his death. Porter would expand on this editing style, perfecting it, discovering cross-cutting.

Life of an American Fireman (1903)

Cross-cutting or parallel action is so integral to editing that it happens in just about every film. Simply, two separate events are occurring - say, a woman trying to escape a fire inside of her house and firefighters rushing in a horse carriage to save her. These two events, perceived to be happening at the same time, are stitched together through editing so that the audience experiences both. Cut to the woman in her house as the fire inches closer to her. Cut to the firefighters rushing up the stairs. Will they get there? Will they save her? Cross-cutting serves to create tension and set the rhythm of a scene. Eventually, the two spatial points of view merge and the conflict should be resolved. This originates in Porter's films and Life of An American Fireman is the first one that shows it off.

Let's cut back to the first shot of this film, it's a trick shot. A sleepy fireman dreams of a mother putting her daughter to bed. Abruptly, the fire alarm is set off and he wakes up. Instead of cutting from the fireman dozing off in his chair to a separate shot of the mother, which would create confusion on whether the fireman was dreaming, Porter uses double exposure to frame the dream above the fireman shoulder. Double exposure had been employed by photographers since the 1860's to produce dreamy situations in otherwise ordinary places but in film, it first appears in Georges Méliès Four Heads are Better Than One. When we see the house aflame for the first time in Life of an American Fireman, the same mother and daughter from the dream pair reappear. The fireman's premonition connects back to the main drama of the story.

The Great Train Robbery (1903)

In this film we take the leap from a theatrical approach to cinematography, where the camera simply watches the action at a long-shot or observing eye, to being involved in the action. One way that Porter does this is by integrating the pan.

Panning is a technique that moves a camera side to side in a fixed location. We haven't taken the camera off of a tripod or stepped forward in anyway, we are simply turning left or right on the horizontal axis. If we took a step forward and followed a character or action we'd have a tracking shot. But we aren't there yet so plant your feet in the ground for now. Porter uses pans to reveal. The first pan is executed about six minutes into the film. The robbers jump off the caboose with their stolen goods and make a run for it. But where are they going? Queue the pan and we find out it's down some steep hills and into a forest. The subsequent shot is them in the thicket of a forest. Running passed the camera until all but one have exited camera left. But how will they get out? Queue the second pan to reveal horses - their getaway plan. This pan is masterfully done. I love the way Porter keeps his camera static and just observes the tumbling, running robbers until only one is left onscreen. Then and only then does he pan left to reveal the horses. By leaving only one person onscreen, not only does the audience have less to track but so does the camera. Simplifying the frame down to only the necessities of the action, one robber running away in a forest, amplifies the pan and makes the reveal feel complete - we reunite with the group of robbers and horses.

Depending on which version of the film you watch, you might be surprised by waves of color among a sea of black and white. Tinting whole films blue, amber, or sepia has been around since the origins of moving pictures, but in The Great Train Robbery, Porter selects specific actions or objects to tint. This was all done by hand.

Color is one big manipulator. Think of light blue and you'll likely picture endless summer skies; an air of calm. How about Green? I picture the tangled tree webs of a jungle - adventure, growth, the smell of dew on fresh leaves, nature. Now red. Explosions, fire, burst of emotion. Yellow? A bright, morning sun, a blooming sunflower, happiness, positivity, a new start. Early filmmakers used color to bring attention to specific objects, people, and actions. They used it to draw out an emotion from the viewer. They used it to connect themes of violence, love, and happiness. And they used it to spice up their frame.

Porter hand paints the explosion of a train lockbox bright orange and a deep red. The smokey pops from gunshots are also a fiery red. The dress of a dancing woman is bright yellow. The coat of another girl is a rich purple. The addition of color cultivates realism but also gives the film a flair of the imaginary.

So, we have the creative process of tinting to enhance the visual characteristics of a story and we have panning to push forward the important aspects of a narrative. Let's add a few more ingredients to our recipe.

Because the story cuts back and forth between the robbers, the operator, and the posse of men who will eventually hunt down the robbers, it has parallel action. Three separate storylines, integrated through the edit, that coverage at the end. Now that we have the way in which the story is cut and delivered, how about some specific effects?

In shots where the action occurs inside the prop train, which is not moving but the audience is meant to believe it is, Porter uses double exposure to ground his location in reality. He filmed exterior, moving shots and layered them onto the static train shots. In the '30s this would become known as "rear projection".

Additionally, Porter creatively placed his camera in new ways to produce frames that diverged from the typical wide shot; bringing the viewer closer into the action. For example, at about 2 minutes and 50 seconds in, the camera is propped on top of the engine car roof while a sneaking robber crawls passed and kills a fireman.

At last we arrive at the final shot. Diverging from the narrative, Porter set this up to look like a wanted poster. It is filmed in a medium close-up, which serves to focus all attention on the subject by filming them waist-up, having them fill up most of the frame, and blocking out the surrounding environment. The robber points his revolver right at the camera and shoots six times. If you've ever seen Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese recreates this at the end with Joe Pesci. Seemingly, the purpose was to shoot the audience. To tell them even though all of these robbers were killed in the end, their spirit doesn't die. It says "I'm warning you- it's still dangerous out there." Funny enough, this wasn't even the original intention. The shot was promotional and where it ended up in the film was entirely up to the projectionist. It could've just as well been placed at the beginning if they wanted. Even so, the break in the fourth wall and punch of dramatics that ended the film still prevail through cinema history today. Completing the recipe for one the first Westerns, ripe with shootouts, chase sequences, bandits, and suspense.

The Kleptomaniac (1905)

When moving pictures are void of sound and spoken dialogue it's a bit difficult to understand what characters are doing onscreen. Heightened emotional and physicalized acting made up for this. Through facial expressions and over the top, exaggerated body movements, audiences could connect the dots to figure out what was going on in a scene. But in 1903, Porter directed Uncle Tom's Cabin and introduced intertitles, words that would appear printed onscreen. Early iterations of intertitles read like book chapters. They described the main action that was about to take place in the scene. In Uncle Tom's Cabin some examples include: "The Escape of Eliza", "Rescue of Eva", and "Tom and Eva in the Garden. In The Kleptomaniac, intertitles state location and give context to where we are, which is helpful because without them, I don't think I could follow what was going on - at all.

Location is such a main element in this film that intertitles are practically non negotiable. "Leaving Home", "Arriving at the Store", "Home of Thief", and "Court Room Scene", prepare us with the information that is necessary to fully understand the purpose of each scene. The department store shot isn't clear-cut. It could've been a mail room or an office. If we miss that it's a department store that our main character is visiting (and stealing from), we miss the connection to the thief stealing food later on in the film and thus miss the whole theme of class disparities. The intertitles supplement for lack of onscreen information and sound. They would be used regularly in the silent era, branching into dialogue intertitles and expositionary intertitles before dying out with the advent of sound.

[monimmortal]

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.

Preamble: People Who Are Young And Alive

For the purposes of best understanding everything I’m about to talk about, I suggest going and reading My Immortal first. ‘Context’ might not be the best way to explain what you’ll get by knowing what I’m referring to, but familiarity with the source material will make this a much easier read. Due to it having been long-since purged from fanfiction.net, you can find it reposted across the internet, in particular here. It is quite a read and I greatly reccomend it, although I do so as somebody who has read through countless times and liked it enough to write thousands upon thousands of words about it.

However, it’s certainly not an easy read for some people due to its clusterfuck of misspellings and incomprehensibility, so in addition to the quotes and excerpts I will provide to illustrate my points, I will briefly give a quick rundown of the major players in our tale.

Our heroine, Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way’s own words sum up her existence better than I ever could:

Hi my name is Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way and I have long ebony black hair (that’s how I got my name) with purple streaks and red tips that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like Amy Lee (AN: if u don’t know who she is get da hell out of here!). I’m not related to Gerard Way but I wish I was because he’s a major fucking hottie. I’m a vampire but my teeth are straight and white. I have pale white skin. I’m also a witch, and I go to a magic school called Hogwarts in England where I’m in the seventh year (I’m seventeen). I’m a goth (in case you couldn’t tell) and I wear mostly black. I love Hot Topic and I buy all my clothes from there. For example today I was wearing a black corset with matching lace around it and a black leather miniskirt, pink fishnets and black combat boots. I was wearing black lipstick, white foundation, black eyeliner and red eye shadow. I was walking outside Hogwarts. It was snowing and raining so there was no sun, which I was very happy about. A lot of preps stared at me. I put up my middle finger at them.

This paragraph is the first of the story, and it is also the longest of the story, saying so much and yet so little about our protagonist. We know almost nothing of the personality that she is alleged to possess, but we do know that she wishes to be familially related to Gerard Way because she finds him attractive, and presumably has an incest kink that will never be touched upon again in the story. The rest of this thesis will touch on all of the other woeful elements of this monstrous violation of ‘show, don’t tell’, but now you have the definitive look at who and what Ebony is.

Ebony is in love with Draco Malfoy, who save for a few minor elements remains largely unchanged in My Immortal. The same cannot be said for Harry “Vampire” Potter;

In the Great Hall, I ate some Count Chocula cereal with blood instead of milk, and a glass of red blood. Suddenly someone bumped into me. All the blood spilled over my top.

“Bastard!” I shouted angrily. I regretted saying it when I looked up cause I was looking into the pale white face of a gothic boy with spiky black hair with red streaks in it. He was wearing so much eyeliner that I was going down his face and he was wearing black lipstick. He didn’t have glasses anymore and now he was wearing red contact lenses just like Draco’s and there was no scar on his forhead anymore. He had a manly stubble on his chin. He had a sexy English accent. He looked exactly like Joel Madden. He was so sexy that my body went all hot when I saw him kind of like an erection only I’m a girl so I didn’t get one you sicko.

If nothing else, it’s certainly a nice change from the usual traits about his mother’s eyes and taped-up glasses. In this story, Harry goes by ‘Vampire’; he used to date Draco Malfoy and they got tattoos with each others’ names, he is gothic and now part of Slytherin for reasons never elaborated upon – these two traits go hand-in-hand for every character in the story– and resembles the lead singer of Good Charlotte for some reason. Thankfully, our author also notes that the character who was born, raised, and lives his entire life in Great Britain happens to have a “sexy English accent”.

“Satan” is the name that Tom Riddle went by when he was a Hogwarts student. In the 1980s. And gothic. We’ll touch on him a little later. There’s a lot of trainwreck going on here, in case you haven’t noticed.

The two meta players to what is one of the greatest internet performance art pieces ever created are our author Tara Gilesbie, and her best friend/beta reader Raven, noted in the story by her own self-insert Willow. I have a lot to say about these two, who are characters in their own ways and who the understanding of is vital to seeing My Immortal as something greater than it appears to be. Tara is a budding teenage writer, Harry Potter, and goth, who doesn’t like that people keep ‘flassing’ her story and threatens self-mutilation as retribution for it, because if there is one thing the mid-2000s internet was, it was caring and serious about such issues. She plays it rather loose with things like literary devices or the English language, as we shall see.

Part 1: Bigmouth Strikes Again – Matters of “Da Story and Spelling”

Upon reading My Immortal for the first time, one of the most egregious and clear issues with the story lies within the spelling and grammar: they’re fucking abysmal. You can see it in the author’s notes right away, and it slowly trickles into the story itself. It starts with ridiculous run-on sentences that seem more like lists than the placement of words into a coherent and complete thought, delivered in a halting and completely jarring cadence. Allegedly, Tara’s friend Raven is editing the story until chapter 15 – more on her later – but even under her tenure as beta, little slips become more frequent. The job of trying to edit something so terrible would certainly be taxing and likely require intensive rewrites of whole chapters at a time, and it’s understandable that perhaps someone would simply be past the point of being able to handle this, and would get sloppier in their job. Chapter eleven, where the author’s note explicitly stated Raven helped, contains of the most infamous and brilliant mistakes in the entire work; ‘Loopin’ 'masticating’.

Once Raven leaves as Tara’s editor, the story nosedives even further into a death spiral of spelling and grammar. Typos become common and any lip service paid to writing words out fully is discarded. Without a beta, we see the depths of Tara’s unfettered lack of shits given for her story to come off as anything resembling presentable. And it needs to be this way, because one of the hallmarks of bad fanfiction is being incomprehensible. Not quite as much as it once was in the days before My Immortal shook the scene up, but it’s a clear indicator of the writer being unprincipled and very young, which are all vital to the character of Tara. The story needs to be poorly written, because if it isn’t, a site like fanfiction.net which, let’s be honest, doesn’t have very high standards–or really any at all–won’t react with all the venom and vitriol the story is meant to induce. It would merely fly under the radar as another mediocre story in the ever-swelling Harry Potter section, which even years after the fandom has cooled off, still moves faster than any person can possibly read through completely. That’s why the author’s notes are so terribly formatted; the very first thing a reader will see upon opening the story is, “Special fangz (get it, coz Im goffik)”.

And it is that word 'goffik’, my darlings, that marks the first place in My Immortal where Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

Everyone who types regularly can see certain little flubs and bad habits develop in their words; muscle memory kicking them in the ass and accidentally writing an incredibly similar word, or having some consistent errors that come through very clearly. And she does have a few, such as “jacket” as “jackson” (chapters 26, 37, 41, 42) and “converse” as “congress shoes” (chapters 24, 39, 41, 42), but they are few and far between in a dizzying array of random misspellings as chaotic as the story itself. They’re just layered beneath what is already a no-shits-given typing style that was back then incredibly commonplace within the subculture presented in the story, but they can be made out clearly if looked for beyond using Z in place of S or 'da’ for 'the’.

The easiest case to make in this regard is with names. Nobody has their names consistently spelled correctly, but they aren’t even consistent in their incorrectness. Our main character, Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, is referred to as Enoby, Enony, Egogy, TaEbory, Ebony, and Evony, among others. Hagrid’s name is spelled correctly a grand total of zero times, but can be noticed as Hargrid, Hairgird, HAHRID, Hargirid, etc. Is her boyfriend Draco, or is he Drako, Darko, or Drago? Voldemort has almost as many misspellings as he does appearances; Volfemort, Vlodemort, Volxemort, Voldemint, Volremot, and Darth Valer, to name a few. Sirius Black becomes Serifs, Series, Sodomize, Socrates, and my personal favorite, Spartacus. Professor Slutgorn, Cornelia Fuck, Dumblewhore, Preacher McGongal are also highlights.

But there’s  perhaps too much convenience in how words become other words so easily. From Loopin’s mastication and the pointing of his womb, to being sent not to Azkaban but to Azerbaijan, to recording a sex tape on a caramel, to Dracon being hung like a Stallone, the story is littered with mistakes that seem almost too good to be true. Not all of this can be explained away as just a stray finger. Some of them defy keyboard logic in how they came to be, and somebody who could be that sloppy with a keyboard would be incapable of making sentences that could even be pieced together by someone intent on understanding what was meant by them, which as it stands is already how much of My Immortal is written. Sort of like Finnegan’s Wake, except the analysis of it is performed by significantly sadder people.

Matters like Azerbaijan and caramel might be explained away by spellcheck, if there was even the slightest evidence that Tara spellchecked any of this. It’s very, very apparent that she didn’t, because these passages are surrounded by misspellings that have gone unedited and unfixed, which means that she had to type out these words to the full extent manually.

Could it be some kind of celestial alignment that leads to there being so many absolutely perfect typos? It could be. But I believe that the typos not in fact  the meanderings of someone who doesn’t care, but in fact a labour of love from someone who cares far, far too much. Poor typing habits and a lack of care for what’s being put down are hallmarks of bad writing, and My Immortal strives to push it to heights that become almost impossible for an actual human being to accidentally make. Words are put into the story that aren’t even in the same neighborhood as the ones they’re supposed to be, and names steadily spin out of control in ever-escalating insanity like a Fibonacci sequence from hell.

In the chapter 4 author’s note, Tara notes “her name is ENOBY nut mary su ok!” In chapter 12, hot off the heels of Loopin masticating is the line, “Who MASTABATED (c is dat speld rong) to it he added silently.” What are the odds that she misspells the words on the two occasions where it matters most? In particular the latter one, where you’d think she would bother looking the word back over first to make sure it wasn’t, in fact, misspelled. Raven doesn’t pick up on it either, even though as we’ll see later she is most certainly capable of spelling words properly. It highlights the character of Tara’s hubris and incompetence, that she points out that she spelled a word correctly when she in fact had not. Someone who cares enough to show up the haters mid-story, but not enough to make sure they’re actually doing so.

Accompanying the more clearly intentional mistakes is the steady clumsiness that grows with the word count. Misspellings become more prevalent and less attention is put into trying to look like words, and while the tipping point is certainly Raven rescinding her service as an editor, it’s also a measured and slow degradation. We’ll go over this in more detail in part eight, but it is rather damning that the story doesn’t just plummet right through the floor once Raven isn’t working on making it presentable, as it reasonably should. Instead, it s a careful and measured breakdown. For comparison’s sake, let’s take the opening of chapter 15, which is the final Raven-edited chapter before the breakup:

“Ebony Ebony!” shouted Draco sadly. “No, please, come back!”

But I was too mad.

“Whatever! Now u can go anh have sex with Vampire!” I shouted. I stormed into my room and closed my black door with my blood-red key. It had a picture of Marylin Manson on it. He looked so sexy in a way that reminded me of Draco and Vampire. I started to cry and weep. I took a razor and started to slit my wrists. I drank the blood all depressed. Then I looked at my black GC watch and noticed it was time to go to Biology class.

And chapter 16, where their relationship reaches its peak and Raven has left as editor:

We ran happily to Hogsmede. There we saw the stage where GC had played. We ran in happly. MCR were there playing ‘Helena’. I was so fucking happy! Gerard looked even sexier than he did in da pictures. Even Draco thought so, I could totally see him getting an erection but it didn’t matter cuz I knew know that we were da only true ones for eachother. I was wearing a black leather minidress and black leather platinum boots with red ripped fishnets. Draco was wearing a black baggy MCR t-shirt and black baggy pants. Anyway, we stated moshing to Helena. We frenched. We ran up 2 the front of the band to stage-dive. Suddenly, Gerard pulled off his mask. So did the others. We gasped. It wasn’t them at all. It was.,……………………….. Volsemort and da Death Dealers

There are certainly a few more typos in this sample, and we see 'da’ and 'cuz’ slip through without Raven’s guidance, but overall they don’t seem too far apart. 'Volsemort’ is the only thing that is clearly down to a typo rather than laziness. But let’s jump into Morty McFli’s “tim machine” and see how chapter 26 opens:

A few mutates later Vampire came 2 da tree. He was wearing a blak leather jackson, black leather pants and a Good Chralotte t-shirt.

“Hi Vampire.” I said flirtily as I started to sob. Draco hugged me sexily tryont to comfrot me. I started to cry tears of blood and then told them what happened.

“Oh fuck it!” Vampire shouted angrily. He4 started to cry sadly. “What fucking dick did that!”

“I don’t know.” I said. “Now come on we have 2 tell Dumbledor.”

We ran out of the tree and in2 da castle. Dumblydor was sitting in his office.

“Sire are dads have been shot!” Draco said while we wipped sum tears from his white face. “Enoby had a vision in a dreem.”

Dubleodre started to cockle. “Hahahaha! And How due u aspect me to know Ebony’s not divisional?

It’s night and fucking day. Raven’s presence was clearly not the only thing keeping Tara’s spelling in check, because she started off just fine without her, but somewhere along the next ten chapters clearly lost her way. But hey, just for comparison’s sake, let’s see if ten more chapters supports my claim. Chapter 36:

I loked around in a depresed way. Suddenly I saw Profesor Sinister. B’lody Mary, Socrates and Draco, Vampire and Willow were their to.

“OMFG Sorius I saw u nd Samaro and Snip nd everyone!11111 I kant beleev Snap uzd 2 b goffik!111111”

“Yah I no.” Serious said sadly.

“Oh hey there bitch.” Profesor Trevolry said in an emo voice dirnking some Volxemortserom.

Hi fuker.” I said. “Lizzen, Satan asked me out to a gottik cornet and a movie so I need a sexah new outfit for da date. Also I’m playng in a gothic band so I need an ootfit for that too.”

“Oh my satan!1” (geddit lolz koz shes gofik) gasped B’lody Mary. “Want 2 go to Hot Topik to shop 4 ur outfit?”

“OMFS, letz have a groop kutting session!11” said Profesor Trevolry.

“I can’t fucking wait 4 dat but we need 2 get sum stuff first.” said Willow.

“Yah we need sum portions for Profesor Trevolry so she wont be adikted 2 Volxemortserum anymore nd also………….sum luv potion 4 Enoby.” Darko said resultantly.

It’s almost difficult to believe they’re from the same story we saw twenty chapters ago, and it’s sure as hell not because Tara has improved her craft. Within the confines of the story itself, it seems so gradual that you might not even realize it, but laid out in chunks like that, can you really say it’s not someone trying their best to destroy as many words as they possibly can?

Part 2: It’s Gruesome That Someone So Handsome Should Care – Matters of Identity and “Goffikness”

At the very core of My Immortal is what Tara believes being a goth to be. From the very first sentence of the first author’s note we learn this fact, and the first paragraph in the story, which is also the longest, is devoted to showing that Ebony is as well. Whether or not one is a goth becomes the most important character trait for the entire cast and defines their relationships with one another. Throughout the story, we are regaled with all the evidence of band fandom and other ultimately superficial traits that assure us that these characters are indeed true goths. The only things that receive anything approaching description are the clothes Ebony wears, all black and leather and band t-shirts. Nothing matters more than being a goth.

In this strange world, Ebony’s lifestyle is supported in ways that are beyond belief. Merchandising is so invasively ever-present that you can buy just about anything branded with her interests. In chapter 38, Satan smokes a Nightmare Before Christmas cigar (over a decade before The Nightmare Before Christmas came out), capes can bear Avril Lavigne’s face on them without anyone raising an eyebrow, and cars have pentagram decals all over them. Although band t-shirts are perfectly normal – and if I’m anything to go by, having pretty much nothing but band shirts isn’t unheard of – Ebony also has a wide range of band-branded everything, like skirts that have 'Simple Plan’ written across her ass.

Ebony looks like Amy Lee, and any boy she thinks is attractive will invariably be compared to the lead members of bands she likes, because those positive associations are marks of her dedication.

In the world of My Immortal, being a goth or a prep is not down to musical choices and circles of friends, but instead a sweeping statement about where you fall in matters of good and evil. Everyone she approves of fits her lifestyle whether it makes sense for the character to or not, radically changing their personalities to fall into the box she wants them to. The Golden Trio, alongside Ginny and Neville all goth up and convert to Slytherin, because as the 'dark’ house it is the only logical place for goths to go be. She does not have any friends who aren’t goths, because to not be a goth is to a prep, and preps are evil. Preps have middle fingers put up at them when they do nothing wrong, because on mere principle they must be hated and despised.

Which forms one of the many problems with the plot, but one that is not specific to the madness of Tara Gilesbie. At almost no point do characters coded as preps actually do anything wrong. Britney is consistently insulted and called a 'fucking prep’ in every appearance she has as though 'prep’ is an earth-shattering slur. Her presence consists entirely of being in a room, sometimes with middle fingers put up at her, and in one case, singled out by Professor Trevolry to do extra homework, because Trevolry is a goff teacher, which means she punishes preps for being preps. The only time Britney does anything wrong is in the final chapter, when it’s revealed that she released Snap and Loopin from Azerbaijan.

Britney is also the only actually preppy character in the story. We know this because she wears pink and little else, due to the lack of dialogue or character shown. But other people are referred to as preps constantly, including Snoop, Lumpkin, and Valmont. As are everyone who criticizes the story. We receive no indication for these, and often they are completely baffling for how decidedly un-preppy these characters truly are, but it’s vital to the narrative and the division of the cast that everyone Ebony does not approve of is a prep.

It’s not an uncommon attitude among teenagers, especially those with interest or belonging to subcultures out of the approved mainstream, to draw lines and assume everyone who falls into divisions other than them are inherently opposed to them. The idea that anyone who isn’t different must assume that difference is bad is so pervasive that it often comes to define works of fiction taking place in high school, even when written by grown-ass adults, because it provides cheap and easy conflict. Most teenagers grow fairly quickly out of this, but because of its convenience as a device, it persists. Tara is far from the only person to ever believe this, but the degree to which she takes it is a little further than most do, lumping the world into only two categories, but defining 'them’ as a one-dimensional army of preps even when they’re the opposite of preppy.

Which makes it an incredibly mockable and therefore desirable  angle to write her plot through, doesn’t it?

Once again setting herself up for incredible failure is the fact that she’s completely off the fucking mark about what a goth is. With favorite bands ranging from My Chemical Romance, Evanessence, and Linkin Park, to a bizarre interest in pop punk through Simple Plan and Good Charlotte, her taste in goth music is a lot like her taste in klezmer; it doesn’t fucking exist. This is not the musical taste of a broody, dark goth, it’s the stock standard taste of a teenaged rock fan in 2006, which is exactly what it’s supposed to be. To believe this is all to be pure, gothic music is to be so disconnected from the entire concept of the goth subculture that Tara would have to have not even given it a cursory Googling to discover what sort of music goths listened to.

This 2006; 'emo’ was already a word so pervasive that it was insufferable, but had TaEbory identified as emo, she would have lost one vital piece of the puzzle. Merely being wrong or incredibly forward about one’s identity isn’t enough; she had to be both simultaneously. Her fervid defense of what it is to be a goth, paired with being so off the mark, turns her into a hypocrite and a fool, a strawman whose every word is only making worse her whole case. It makes her stand out as a special and egregious case, an author so wrong about everything and whose self-insert only looks worse off for it. And this is how My Immortal rose to the top of an ocean of mediocre, bad, and downright terrible fanfiction.

Dubious musical categorizations aside, another element of the gothicness that pervades the story is authenticity. Among the more snobbish and elitist of any subculture since the beginning of time, the desire to be seen as authentic and real is an incredibly pervasive element that My Immortal predictably lingers on quite heavily. “Poser” is a word loaded with as much venom as prep is, because in the false dichotomy Tara instills upon the world, to have airs of goffikness while not truly being a goff is just as evil as wearing pink is. Perhaps even more so, because these fakers are infiltrating her circles. When Tara and Raven cease being friends, Raven’s stand-in Willow is referred to as a poser. When Draco feels betrayed upon discovering that Voldemort has tasked Ebony with killing Vampire, he refers to her as a “poser muggle bitch”.

While we can’t hold My Immortal to a rigid understanding of proper Harry Potter canon, it does explain a lot about Tara’s worldview. Draco Malfoy has spent his whole life of privilege being taught about the importance of blood purity by his parents, who — we’re all adults here, right? We can accept this? — are fucking wizard nazis. A lot of his early character is specifically centered around his beliefs on blood purity and his use of slurs like 'mudblood’ toward Hermione and dismissals of families like the Weasleys as blood traitors. Such traits are so surface level and blatant that even someone like Tara could pick up on them, which makes the inclusion of 'poser’ in his insult, a triple threat along with fantastical racism and straight-up sexism, into something very telling about just how important it is in her version of the Harry Potter universe to be seen as genuine.

You can’t simply become a goth, you have to already be one. You have to shop at the 'real goth stores’, which are known only to goths. Any attempt to learn of them is met with derision, because goffikness is not something you can attain, except for all the characters who are noted in their new backstories to have become goffs in their transfers over to Slytherin.

Simmering underneath this obsession with being seen as authentic, with a narrative that constantly asserts with very insecure undertones just how much Tara wants to be seen as a real goth, is how shallow her interests really are. She prattles off lists of the clothing she and her friends wear like she’s Patrick Bateman, a laundry list whose obsessive detail forms the only proper description anything in the story receives. And much like in American Psycho, the narrator’s obsession with clothes comes off as remarkably phony, a desire to fit in with a group they desire to be a part of through a series of checklist points, although while Patrick Bateman is deranged within the narrative, you must go one level of abstraction away from the character’s portrayal in the universe, to look on a metafictional level into the delusions of Tara to see where she gets it all so wrong.

We’re told in the narrative that Ebony is depressed and suicidal time and again, but despite slitting her wrists in lieu of an afternoon snack, we never truly see actual depression. She uses 'depressed’ in ways that don’t really make sense, such as to describe the movie Corpse Bride, coloured contact lenses, and makeout sessions. Chapter three even contains the passage, “'Hi Draco!’ I said in a depressed voice.” Given how wonderfully the entire world caters to Ebony and the fact Tara seems to not really understand what it means, it comes off not like Ebony is a character that actually has depression, but instead that since depression is gothic, she must therefore possess it. She isn’t somebody who wears black on the outside because black is how she feels on the inside, she just says she’s depressed because it’s all a part of the goth package.

As is Satanism, which Ebony is apparently an adherent of. Much like being depressed, a vampire, listening to Simple Plan, and being a Slytherin, it is vital to the gothic identity that you are a Satanist, even if you don’t know what Satanism is. That you sometimes refuse to acknowledge the words 'cross’ and 'god’. It’s so casually mentioned and without even the slightest bit of conviction that it feels thrown in by someone who doesn’t really care, but, once again, wants to fit in.

The end result is an all-encompassing, story ruining obsession with ensuring the reader know and believe that Ebony–and by extension the author she is an avatar of–is the most true and devout goth in the world. Setting herself up to be so very, very wrong on this account is an easy way to discredit Tara and add another layer of pure mockability to the story. She is truly the greatest poser of all, and her entire worldview comes crumbling down around her under the slightest scrutiny, all by design.

Part 3: Just a Miserable Lie – The Impossible Mistakes

This news may shock and surprise you, so make sure you are very securely strapped your seat.

My Immortal is not entirely consistent.

Certain little things creep out of the woodwork in both the narrative and off to the side, hidden amid all of the craziness around them, that I believe are little winks at the camera on the part of the author. Hints meant to clue you in as to the fact that this whole thing is, in fact, one big joke. A lot of them have gone rather unnoticed, it seems, but let’s start with the most noticeable of all.

In chapter 31, we meet Tom Bombadil. I’m not fucking with you, here, it really does happen.

Suddenly I was in fornt of teh School. In front of me wuz one of da sexiest goth guyz I had ever seen. He was wering long blak hair, kinda like Mikey Way only black. He had gren eyes like Billie Joe Amstrung and pale whit skin. He wuz wearing a blak ripped up suit wif Vans. It was…………………….Tom Bombodil!1

Now, some of you may be asking who the balls Tom Bombadil is, and that is my point entirely. Deep in the first half of Fellowship of the Ring is god of the forest and walking filler arc Tom Bombadil, whose three-chapter appearance leaves most readers wishing for a violent end to existence for how long it all drags. For the express reason that his appearance is so incredibly pointless, he appears in no major adaptations of the series, which means for Tara to know about him, she’d have to read Fellowship of the Ring, a book that is done no favours by Tolkein’s incredibly dry and long writing style, not to mention an entire chapter chronicling the genealogy of Hobbiton.

To be a teenager at a reading level high enough to tackle Tolkein precludes you from being capable of doing something like My Immortal genuinely. Tara would know how words are spelled and that, hey, stories are considerably better when you give a quarter of a crap about typing them properly. The levels of literacy involved in Tom Bombadil and writing My Immortal are so far removed that these two traits are mutually exclusive, impossible for Tara to possess if she’s genuine. After all,

I dntn red all da boox! dis is frum da movie ok so itz nut my folt if dumbeldor swers!

But wait.

Among the many baffling changes Tara makes to the canon, one of the weirdest and most damning to me is Professor Sinister/Trevolry/Sinatra/Siniater/Relory. This bizarre composite of professors Sinistra and Trelawny is a half-vampire, half-Japanese goff, and the only teacher in the school Ebony likes, because she dresses like her and assigns the preps extra homework, complete with a pun about doing an 'exorcise’ in the book. Her presence is bizarre, for being the only positive authority figure in the story, and for the utter perplexity involved in picking the two professors as a composite goth character at the expense of more conventional fanfic fodder like Snape and Lupin, who are both obviously villainous preps in this story.

Professor Trelawny is a strange choice whose incongruity I feel is another one of those expectation-defying twists meant to seem strange as an indicator to the audience where a more mainstream and believable choice would have been to romanticize Snape as so much of the fandom has, but the real headscratcher is Professor Sinistra. Her presence in the canon is entirely off-screen, mentioned by Hermione as a teacher for a course that Ron and Harry don’t take; she has no lines or purpose anywhere, and even in the movies is only a background character identified by virtue of there being an actress credited as her. Her absolute lack of lines makes her presence here troubling, because if Ebony’s reference base for this is the movies, where this dialogueless character coming from?

Of course, there’s also the aspect of how fluidly she switches between names bastardized off of the two professors which, unlike the matter of Hagrid being Cedric but not really, is so consistent and ever-present that it again seems like a level of sloppiness entirely beyond human capability. Two completely disparate names that are way too far removed to be keyboard fuckery, with bastardizations of both used in each scene she appears as though there is a quota on how many of each get used in a chapter for full effect. Because there absolutely is; here’s the introduction of the professor in chapter 24:

Well we had Deviation next so I got to ask Proffessor Trevolry about the visions.

“Konnichiwa everybody come in.” said Proffesor Sinister in Japanese. She smelled at me with her gothic black lipstick. She’s da coolest fucking teacher ever. She had long dead black hair with blood red tips and red eyes. (hr mom woz a vampire. She’s also haf Japanese so she speaks it and everyfing. she n b’loody mry get along grate) She’s really young for a teacher. 2day she was wearing a black leather top with red lace and a long goffik black ripped dress. We went inside the black classroom with pastors of Emily the Strong. I raced my hand. I was wearing some black naie Polish with red pentagrams on it.

In the tweet-sized morcel from “well” to “Japanese”, Tara has already methodically sank this character’s introduction, making someone paying even the slightest attention to what’s in front of them look back up to that previous line to see if they lost something somewhere. Trevolry is used to refer to her next, and then Sinister again, which are the only four mentions of this character in the chapter. Tara’s handle on the chaos of her own story is perfect, and the entire existence of the professor in this chapter serves as a massive wink to the camera.

Also a strange decision is to note that Professor Sinister and B'loody Mary “get along grate”. They don’t interact, as is expected from a narrative that marginalizes everybody except for Ebony and her love interests, relegating all of the friends to satellite roles where they interact only with her, but it’s perplexing for the way it’s made note of out of nowhere. I feel it goes beyond a strange decision to include more female friendships in the background of her story, and serves as a one-two punch of running afoul of “show, don’t tell” and of the canon itself, as in the original series the teacher that Hermione clashes with the most, to the point of dropping the class altogether, is Professor Trelawny. And yet here they are, besties in gothhood. Another subtle note that indicates how carefully woven this entire mess is.

For someone with the reading comprehension of a microwave-made baked potato though, she has an oddly prescient view on the series endgame in chapter 42’s author’s note.

AN: omg da new book iz kumming out rlly soon I kant wait!!!1111. I fink dat snap will be really the same person as Volximort koz dey are both haff-blood so dat will explain y he kild dumblydore and he hated hairy!!!!!1111 nd den hairy wil have 2 kommit suicide so voldimort will die koz he will rilly be a horcrox!!!!!111

On one hand, the idea that Snap and Volximort are the same person is so unfounded and bizarre that you kind of dismiss what comes next, but despite retaining nothing beyond the most surface-level details about the canon, she somehow managed to make the connection of Harry’s abilities and scar as evidence of him being a horcrux. It’s not a massive leap, and many in the fandom saw it coming, but for someone whose grasp on the canon simply doesn’t exist, it’s suspect.

I’ve unfortunately already blown the “big deal of a revelation that is fairly obvious” joke, so I won’t bother setting it up again, but this revelation is genuinely a noteworthy one. Contained within My Immortal is one reference that is unambiguously and inarguably gothic. Not one of the borderline cases like Marilyn Manson where it depends on who you ask, but a genuine reference to a piece of gothic music. From chapter 28,

We went in2 a blak room. The wallz were blak with portraits of gothic bands lik MCR, GC and Marlin Mason all over them. A big black coffin was in the middle. Red vevlet lined da blak box. There were three chairs made of bones with real skullz in dem. I wuz wearing a blak corset bar wif purple stuff on it, fishnet suckings and a blak leather thong underneath.

It’s so subtle and unexpected a reference that even if you know what it’s from, you may not pick it up. “Red velvet lines the black box” is a lyric from Bauhau’s 1979 song Bela Lugosi’s Dead, which is generally considered to be the very first gothic rock song ever written, thus making it the only genuinely gothic sentence in this entire tale. However, devoid of teenage angst or guyliner, it makes no sense that such a reference would be in the repertoire of somebody who believes that Marilyn Manson was a band from the '80s. In fact, it is impossible to believe that a Tara taken at face value would have ever so much as encountered the song, because the collision of matter and anti-matter annihilates both. However, it would be the fodder of somebody who, baffled at how easily people have accepted their work as a genuine offering, got bored and decided to throw a wink to the camera that couldn’t have possibly slipped under the radar.

Littered among the litany of showy, “look at how goffik” I am references to things, as though My Immortal were a PSA about the goth cred of Tara Gilesbie, are a few rather suspect notes. Tara is somebody who can’t mention certain names without indicating her undying hatred toward them, and yet,

“I love you!” I said and then we started to kiss just like Hilary Duff (i fukin h8 dat bitch) and CMM in a Cinderella Story.

We are apparently to believe that Tara, somebody who is so slavishly devoted to her identity and to a dichotomy that has coloured the entirety of a fictional universe, not only watched A Cinderella Story in spite of her hatred of Hilary Duff, but then drew a comparison to it in how she and Draco kissed? Drawing comparisons to things the author is interested in is a rather frequent amateur move for young fanfic writers who merely draw the blunt comparison to something rather than learning to describe the individual features themselves. Tara is not a good enough writer to describe the facial features of her favorite band leads, so she just mentions that people look like Gerard to indicate that the absolute pinnacle of human attractiveness is this.

The only comparisons she ever draws are to her favorite things, because it’s a way to prove that her life is so goffik that everything around her draws its existence from her interests. And yet she cites a Hilary Duff movie that she quite frankly should not have even seen, if she is so diametrically opposed to being perceived as a prep, which veering so far off of the beaten goff path and into would most certainly indicate. Something doesn’t add up about this.

On what I believe to be the intentional cliffhanger that chapter 42 ends on, we hear another mention of goffik cinema right before the very end of the story.

“Save us Ebony!” Dumbledark cried.

I cried sexily I just wanted 2 go 2 the commen room and slit my wrists with mi friends while we watched Shark Attak 3 and Saw 2 and do it with Draco but I knew I had 2 do somefing more impotent.

“ABRA KEDABRA!!!!!!!!!!!11111” I shooted.

For those not in the know, Shark Attack 3: Megalodon is a phenomenally bad direct-to-video monster movie whose sole claim to fame is in being so laughably bad that it’s found an audience in bad movie circles. And while one could make the fairly weak argument that on the basis of some super edgy “I love watching people dying” attitude, a movie like Shark Attack might appeal to Tara the same way slashers and gorn like Saw and “Hoes of Wax” appeal to her, it’s so bizarre in its sudden presence at the very end that I believe it yet another wink, but this time a more final one. The second-to-last sentence in the story makes mention to a notorious bad movie to draw the connection to the story, a final and overt declaration of a joke that you’re supposed to be in on. The last punchline before the music hits and Porky Pig bursts from out of the big drum to say, “That’s all folks.”

Part 4. What Difference Does it Make? - The Desecration of Canon

Calling out My Immortal for distorting and twisting the Harry Potter universe into something unrecognizable and monstrous is like calling out a bear for shitting in the woods, but it’s impossible to explain how carefully crafted a piece of perfect trollfic it is without examining just how many 'liberties’ Tara took with the canon.

All of the characters that Tara seeks to lionize convert to Slytherin, because apparently people can just do that if they decide they really like black lipstick. But that’s not enough to make them more 'like her’. Backstories are revised to include a quite frankly startling volume of sexual abuse backstories and characters secretly adopted by abusive parents. Vampirism is not a trait anybody received through the narrative, but instead a species inherited by birth that somehow, people don’t know they have, showing no signs or hunger, until they learn about their parentage. Characters all receive new, gothic nicknames like B'loody Mary, Vampire, and Diabolo.

What Tara has done is remove everything about the characters one may think noticeable about them in the slightest. Everyone now resembles Tara’s favorite artists. Harry’s iconic lightning bolt scar, a symbol of the series, has been changed by makeup and magic to instead be a pentagram, because that is a design change of her choice, visually reclaiming the character from Rowling. The only character whose visual traits at all line up with the canon is Voldemort.

Then all of a suddenly, an horrible man with red eyes and no nose and everything started flying towards me on a broomstick! He didn’t have a nose (basically like Voldemort in the movie) and he was wearing all black but it was obvious he wasn’t gothic.

But then it gets stranger. Hagrid becomes a member of Ebony’s band Bloody Gothic Rose 666 and a “little Hogwarts student” (chapter 11). Although she appears to retcon that in chapter 12 with,

AN: stop f,aing ok hargrid is a pedo 2 a lot of ppl in amerikan skoolz r lik dat I wunted 2 adres da ishu! how du u no snap iant kristian plus hargrid isn’t really in luv wif ebony dat was sedric ok!

Although she seems to take a strange “whatever I want” approach to her own retcons like the most hackish of comic book writers, since we get in that very chapter,

Anyway I was in the school nurse’s office now recovering from my slit wrists. Snap and Loopin and HAHRID were there too. They were going to St. Mango’s after they recovered cause they were pedofiles and you can’t have those fucking pervs teaching in a school with lots of hot gurlz. Dumbledore had constipated the cideo camera they took of me naked. I put up my middle finger at them.

Anyway Hargrid came into my hospital bed holding a bouquet of pink roses.

“Enoby I need to tell u somethnig.” he said in a v. serious voice, giving me the roses.

“Fuck off.” I told him. “You know I fucking hate the color pink anyway, and I don’t like fucked up preps like you.” I snapped. Hargrid had been mean to me before for being gottik.

Hagrid is in this canon simultaneously a pedophile and presumably grown-ass adult, but also a Hogwarts student who may or may not be Cedric Diggory, who not only survived the events of Goblet of Fire, but also managed to fail two years at Hogwarts to join Harry as a seventh-year. He is also a poser who is mean to Ebony for being 'gottik’, but is also in her gothic rock band which sounds like “a cross between GC, Slipknot and MCR”, which as we all know would make it the most authentic gothic rock band since Mungo Jerry.

Except in chapter 14 a Death Eater is referred to as “the fat guy who killed Cedric” so maybe HAHrid really is Hagrid after all?

Then there is the odd decision to align Lupin and Snape as pedophilic voyeurs in the service of Voldemort while bizarrely championing Professor Trelawny, in stark contrast to a fandom that especially in the golden days of Harry Potter fandom, where people would dick ride Severus Snape all the way to the moon on the weight of how 'misunderstood’ he was. A pale man who seems conventionally 'dark’ in his interests and mannerisms is the perfect place to begin projecting on when you’re telling a story about how you’re the exact same things, but it seems almost too obvious a decision. Like the rest of Professor Siniater’s composite existence, she’s so odd a choice that it startles you, and I believe within that shock value is the decision to buck expectations.

A trip to the past begins to paint an even more bizarre picture, as apparently the parents of our heroes all went to school in the 1980s, alongside Voldemort and Hedwig. They were also all Slytherin goffs who at some point seem to have just turned into poser preps whose children had to re-convert out of Gryffindor and into gothhood. This timeline yet again causes a great many headscratching tears in the fabric of space and time, but the most vital and important of all is Hedwig.

In the canon, Hedwig is Harry’s owl, female and not much of a doer, speaker, or goth. But in the horrible alternate universe that My Immortal takes place in, Hedwig is a bisexual human male who is very much a goth, the ex-boyfriend of Tom Riddle, whose dumping of the boy starts his descent into becoming Volxemort. It is a change that is so wrong, so removed from not only the canon but from the possibility of anything ever being accurate to the canon, that it can’t be accidental. One cannot fuck up that badly by accident.

Voldemort himself is a great many things. In the past, he is Tom Riddle, gothic musician at Hogwarts and love interest to Ebony, but also Tom Bombadil, the master of wood, water, and hill. But in the present time, he is both the Bark Lord, as one may expect, but also potentially a young, thoroughly goffik employee at a “punkgoff” store in Hogsmeade, Tom Rid. Tom Rid is described as “OMG HOTTER THAN GERARD EXCEPT NOT CAUSE THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE“ and, like every other guy in the story, is “bisezual”. Tom Rid is never the setup for Voldemort’s secret infiltration of the goth subculture, but nonetheless seems to be a template earlier in the story for the later time travel storyline and Tom Riddle as a love interest. It’s another nonsensical “mistake” thatjust doesn’t mesh with any fathomable stupidity. It would be like introducing a character called Harry Pot and having him be completely disconnected from Harry Potter in any way.

Littered with iPods and anachronistic pop culture that manages to miss its mark in two different time periods, the only reason we know that this is the same world and not just one with suspiciously similar names is the fact that it’s fanfiction. Not a deep AU that interestingly adapts elements into a different world to see how they work out, or which shows characters and how they might develop under different circumstances. This is a mangled mess where muggle bands play concerts in Hogsmeade, seemingly well aware of wizards’ existence. There must be panic on the streets of London.

The big question is “why”. Why would somebody do this bad a number of canon, accidental or not? And the reason is simple.

Part 5. Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want – Wish Fulfillment

By changing the context of everything except for the most basic connections of who the characters are 'supposed’ to be, they cease to be J.K. Rowling’s. They instead become Tara’s playthings. The canon is so distorted that it may as well not be fanfiction for how few things that remain intact, and yet it is vital that the world be the world of Harry Potter, at least nominally. Tara needs to turn a world that she loves, as off the mark as she may be, into a wonderland in which to self-insert, to mold into a countercultural paradise that centers completely around her.

We can’t speculate on the life of Tara – who this entire paper of course serves as a document meant to disprove the very existence of – but we can very clearly see the desires of this alleged person. Ebony is the single most important person in My Immortal, supplanting Harry as the only one who can kill Voldemort, whom every attractive character and even many unattractive ones profess their love to and fight for without provocation. Her interests are catered to on an unrealistic level and divine karmic justice makes those who sit culturally opposed to her suffer undeserved retribution solely for existing.

Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way is, even by those who see her as an entirely genuine creation, often held up as the ultimate self-insert. On top of very clearly existing as an author avatar who holds the exact same interests as her creator, her very presence distorts and twists the canon around her like an eldritch abomination tearing the very fabric of the reality she occupies. One of the more criticized elements of self-inserts in fanfiction is of course the ease with which a narrative becomes wish fulfillment for the author, and My Immortal has this in droves. Ebony is the most important character in the world not because she’s the protagonist or the narrator, but because she has supplanted Harry as the only person who can stop Voldemort, and whom everybody’s 'motivations’ center around.

Ebony is loud, angry, and has access to a time machine. When Ebony isn’t on-screen, all of the other characters ask, “Where’s Ebony?”

The love triangle between Ebony, Draco, and Vampire begins with Vampire solely wanting to reconnect with his ex-boyfriend Draco, but as the story goes on that element is lost and replaced with him instead lusting after Ebony, as evidenced by the time they had sex right in the middle of Hair of Magical Creatures. One of the only connections that two different characters had with each other is slowly replaced with an attraction to Ebony that they fight over, because everyone in My Immortal is defined by how Ebony perceives them. Their own attractions to one another take a backseat to their lust for Ebony, save for occasions where she permits them to have sex for her enjoyment, at which point it is presented as titillation for her.

Also among the characters with stated romantic interest in Ebony are Tom Rid, Hairgird, Snope, Lumpin, Tom Riddle, and Snaketail.

Everybody who has things in common with Ebony is Ebony, essentially. Every character is so interchangeable due to the pre-packaged identity she assumes is the only authentic way to be gothic that nobody feels like an actual character. Willow and B'loody Mary both occupy the role of female best friend for Ebony, save for a brief period where Willow is killed and Lupin has sex with her corpse before her resurrection one chapter later. In fact, the only time a character Ebony isn’t sexually attracted to is complimented is when she tries to lay on really thick her attempt to suck up to Raven in the hopes she’ll return to editing. The only difference between Vampire and Draco is how many times Ebony has sex with them, and that’s not getting into the masses of other goff guys who may as well be nameless, such as Diabolo (Ron), “Crab”, Goyle, and “Dracola” (Navel). In the past, Tom “Satan” Riddle proves to be just as generic a love interest as the other two, and then more faceless characters in Hades (“Serious Blak”), Lucian Malfoy, James “Samoro” Potter, and Hedwig.

Nobody has any character, save for Ebony, because they’re not meant to be characters, they’re meant to be imaginary friends for Ebony to play with, to fawn over her and have everything in common with her. If we buy into the belief that Tara is a rather lonely teenage girl who has apparently pushed away her only friend over a My Chemical Romance poster, then her decision to basically strip away everything that makes the Harry Potter world what it is so that she could rebuild it from the ground up into her gothic paradise makes a lot of sense.

Of course, she isn’t that at all, but first we need to look at all the other things that Tara is and isn’t.

Part 6. Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before – Raven

Fifteen-year-old Eternity Demen'tia Johnson warily took a seat on the Hogwarts Express. As she did so, she heard many giggles in the air. Ugh. Stupid preps. Eternity had hoped she wouldn’t see any when she came to Hogwarts. They had made her life in Los Angeles High School miserable. Now she was supposed to put up with them here? She sighed sadly, and stared out of the window. In her mistery, she took her iPod out of her Emily the Strange bag and blared on some My Chemical Romance (A/N: Don’t they rock?). Oh great. Now even more preps were giving her dirty looks. Eternity tried her best to ignore them. It wasn’t because Eternity was dirty or deformed or anything. Maybe it was something to do with her black leather corset, or her ripped black miniskirt or her black combat boots or the metal music she was listening to. Eternity hated how people judged her like that just because she was a goth.

The above is a snippet from I’m Not Okay, written by Tara’s friend Raven. And in it, you can see a lot of the same themes present in My Immortal. Anachronistic technology, a misunderstanding of what the goth subculture is, preps hating her on mere principle, authors notes spliced in mid-sentence to herald the glory of her taste, and more description offered up for her clothes than for anything else. Throughout I’m Not Okay, we see Draco Malfoy as the gothic love interest, comparisons of characters to members of bands the author likes, and canon Harry Potter characters becoming gothic and taking on nicknames like Dracula, Sea, and Darren.

Good sense and suburban decency run screaming at the sight of a dark name like “Darren”.

Rather than shit all over preps of her own design, Luna Lovegood and Hermione Granger, two characters so far removed from the stereotype of an American high school “popular kid” that it’s almost infuriating, are turned into the superpreps to be hated. Slytherin is still so gothic a house that their common room password is “bleeding kisses” and the portrait is a woman described as the “splitting image” of the lead singer of Sisters of Mercy, an actual goth band whose frontman Andrew Eldritch is most certainly not a woman and not even particularly androgynous.

The same out-of-place theme of sexually abusive adopted parents that plagues My Immortal’s side characters returns in Eternity’s backstory. She sticks her middle finger up at preps unprovoked and veers off course to call out the shittiness of preps. Really, Eternity is in every imaginable way just Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way with a marginally better writer, as is to be expected from the editor of Tara’s disasterpiece.

The authenticity of Raven’s works isn’t in doubt, in my mind. It predates the memetic nature of My Immortal by a great deal, they co-wrote a story entitled Ghost of You that, again, features the exact same terrible tropes and bad ideas, albeit this time with Hermione Granger as the parentally abused goth hated by preps and now in love with Draco Malfoy, And, the fifth and final chapter of I’m Not Okay has,

a/n: TARA IS DA BIGGEST FUCKING BITCH EVERY AND BY THE WAY I’M A BIGGER MCR FAN AND GERARD IS MINE 4EVA SO FUCK U

Eternity was so happy. She went to class with the other fifth-years, Sea, Draco, Shadow, Darren, and Satan. That fucking retard Elvira (whose real name was Lindsay like that fucking ho Lindsay Loan) had gone all the way back to first-year and they put her in Gryffindor where all the retarde4d preps were because she couldn’t even write properly and she had to get her friends 2 do it for her.

Hot damn. That’s a far more scorching burn than being the offscreen victim of Lumpkin the necphilak.

Raven’s stories being the template for My Immortal is no coincidence. Tara aped everything she saw with gusto, imitating her friend who, while not a very good writer, could write sentences properly and gave description to things. Hell, as far as fifteen-year-old fanfic writers go, Raven is actually pretty decent, just entrenched in some terrible themes–again, pretty typical for teenagers–and does things like describe Eternity 'sadly putting her hair up’. On some level, Tara is trying to be as good a writer as Raven is. She looks up to her and, immediately after in a fit of anger killing off the character meant to be Raven, brings her back and guiltily sucks up to her with as many compliments as she can give.

Whether she is the same person as 'Tara’ or a friend in on the joke, I believe that Raven exists as sort of a proto-Tara, a precursor to the real juicy fun. Her story isn’t very good and she writes the exact same things Tara does with marginally more writing ability. They’re identical in every possible way, with the same interests, attitudes, and bizarre writing sensibilities. Almost no differences in the presented persona emerge, but as much as their obsessions with clothing and iconography bordering on disingenuous poserliness would imply that the pre-packaged nature of their identities is to blame, I believe it was all meant to deepen the character, provide a more grounded contrast to her and help make her seem more real.

Rather than existing as a nebulous beta reader who also has no prior internet history, existing solely through the character of Willow and authors notes that let their ongoing drama spill through into the story for us to see in what I feel is a brilliant piece of meta performance art, she has her own stories that make her very much a real presence in the extended saga of My Immortal. I believe that in the long term, she was meant to continue onward as a developing foil for Tara, someone whose existence helped back up her own. But, as evidenced by the way I’m Not Okay stops at chapter 5, which on the timeline of My Immortal would place it somewhere around chapter 16, this didn’t go as planned.

If “Raven” were a co-conspirator to “Tara”, it’s possible they got bored, didn’t have the insane devotion to a multi-layered and quite frankly absurdly deep prank. If Raven and Tara are one and the same, then perhaps the pressure of developing two 'different’ personas proved too much work, and decided to focus on the big one. After all, Raven’s stories are only notable through her association to Tara, the Art Garfunkel to Tara’s Paul Simon. Mediocre but ultimately harmless stories that by and large flew under the radar and aren’t even well known by people who know My Immortal. I’m Not Okay was never going to draw the same level of interest or vitriol that My Immortal did, thus making it a joke with far less payoff, even if by virtue of not being as poorly written, it was likely easier to write. This is helped by the immense disparity in productivity between the two; whether the primary actor or personality, Tara is more prolific, something that ties directly into the return on investment when it comes to how people reacted to either story.

And as it turned out, she wasn’t needed. The My Immortal Extended Universe has long since been forgotten, and yet people fell for the joke without it. People bought very easily into My Immortal as a genuine piece of work, or at least were so willing to enjoy it as a mockable distraction that nobody ever really asked. Raven became a redundant cog in the machine, and removing her freed up the effort to focus full time on making My Immortal something even more incredible than it began as.

More evidence of this lies in the fact that even once Raven allegedly returns to her role as editor, the spelling only gets increasingly worse; she’s credited as helping in many chapters, but her former sensibilities are gone, and no edits are ever made, as illustrated in the snippets detailing the degeneration in part one. It’s possible that this was meant to convey that Raven wasn’t actually helping; that she quit writing fanfic due to her fallout with Tara, and Tara merely went on pretending she still had a friend in Raven as she sank deeper and deeper into her wish fulfillment paradise. Raven never managed to gain the established foothold that Tara did, so nobody ever questioned it, and everyone was too busy having a good time to wonder how the chapters ever qualified as being 'edited’.

Curious is the fact that even though they made up, Raven never came back. She didn’t continue writing her own stories, the drama between them never resurged, and aside from her supposed beta services to Tara, is absent from the bulk of the saga in its entirety. This is in spite of the fact that in all apparent ways, Raven is not only the more skilled writer, but the one with a clearer passion for it. Her prose may be nothing special, but the bar should not be set too high for what is allegedly a teenage girl writing Harry Potter fanfic. She falls into a lot of the common holes, but her style is that of someone who loves stories and wants to write their own, and for her to so quickly vanish and never return is, to me, evidence that she was always a character too, and that her place in the 'real life’ layer of My Immortal was simply deemed irrelevant.

Part 7. Girlfriend in a Coma – That Time Tara Got Hacked

In chapter 38, a time-displaced Tara opens for Marilyn Manson in Hogsment, which is what Hogsmeade was called before they changed it in 2000. In Hogsmint, a store called Hot Ishoo will change its name to Hot Topic in the year 1998. Tom Riddle possesses future knowledge of both of these events, as well as the certainty that because amnesia potions haven’t been invented yet, he will not be affected by the one being used on his cigar branded with a movie that hasn’t come out yet, which is a shame because he wanted to use the potion on Ebony so that the time-traveling girl he loves will forget about her old life and her romantic entanglements in her own timeline with the sons of two of his bandmates sothat only her love for him will remain. His prescient, almost accepting knowledge of seemingly everything about his future up until his fall is almost tragic; he must know that Ebony’s involvement in his life is going to ruin it

On top of being the Dark Lord and Tom Bombadil, Tom Riddle may also be Doctor Manhattan. But that’s not the point of this part.

After xBlakXTearX performs its first big gig, the band immediately falls apart as, due to Lucian Malfoy playing the wrong song by mistake, Samaro Potter decides to shoot his arm off with a knife. Those of you attempting to follow the bizarre, Ebony-centric take on the universe may be surprised to learn that she is not the Yoko Ono of the band in what may be the only important conflict in the story that isn’t about her. However, since everything has to be about our goffik darling, Ebony jumps in front of the bullet–that, again, has been shot from a knife, like this is the second-worst Final Fantasy game ever made–and enters a coma.

Bear in mind, she does this knowing that Lucian survives this attack, going on to find love, have Draco, and despite two stints as a wizard nazi manages to avoid jail time and lead a life of incredible luxury and comfort. This also requires her to ignore her very important mission to prevent Tom from ever becoming Voldemort and the insane repercussions of dying in a timeline that isn’t her own, leaving behind all of her possessions that are even more anachronistic in the 80s, including a time machine that anyone could suddenly begin misusing.

All in all, an incredibly stupid decision with no purpose other than to insert Ebony and her useless ass selfless heart into conflicts that she has nothing to do with, because she’s the 'hero’ of our story.

Before we could see the resolution of that nail-biting cliffhanger, Tara’s account was allegedly hacked by a 'guest writer’, who claimed to have been able to crack her password with incredible ease. While there, the password cracker gives her own take on My Immortal, involving the death of Ebony, which undoes all of Tara’s damage upon the universe and returns everybody to their proper states, while sentencing Ebony to a terrifying ironic hell where she is doomed to an eternity of wearing infinite layers of preppy clothing brands.

While there, the hacker also shares with us the real chapter 39 as an act of kindness to those of us who were clinging onto the saga for dear life and wanted to know how Ebony was going to survive jumping in front of the knife-propelled bullet. Allegedly, this chapter was already written and waiting to be posted in the document area. It ends up being such a bizarre element of time travel that even the Terminator franchise never went there.

“What the fuk happened?” I asked dem. “Oh my satan!11 Am I lik dead now?” I gosped.

“Enoby u were almost shot!11” said Serious. “But da ballet could not kill u since u were form anodder time.”

“But fangz anyway!1” said Lucian holding oot his arm. I gasped. He had two arms!

Which opens up a lot of questions, then shoves them aside so I could wonder for a second if Lucius Malfoy was missing an arm in the canon. He wasn’t, making this another perplexing note of Tara’s that rewards a familiarity with the source material by highlighting all the ways in which it’s wrong. But then, after being told that Snap was Death Dealer, despite being the classmate of a Tom Riddle who hadn’t yet gone dark, Ebony comes across Snape raping Draco, and is so distraught by her boyfriend’s betrayal in this act that she runs to her room, takes out a steak, and uses it to slit her wrists.

Neither steaks nor stakes work like that.

The next chapter begins with her “back in Tim” due to her suicide, but the endgame plot batshit of My Immortal isn’t something we can even tackle in full yet.

There is a lot about the hacker that’s peculiar, and that’s because I believe that the hacker is Tara herself. A lot of minor elements of the breach of her account actually betray this secret, and it’s one of the few things in My Immortal I’m unsure about in regards to its intent.

The way that fanfiction.net handles posting a story involves uploading the story file to a document area, and then from the story menu selecting the relevant document. I always found it kind of clumsy personally, but what stands out about it is the fact that the chapter was allegedly written and left online for an indeterminate amount of time. There aren’t many reasons to upload a completed chapter to the website and then not post it. For someone like Tara, who does no editing and is clearly no longer sending the story off to Raven to be edited, there seems to be absolutely no reason for the story to be sitting idly in the documents area. I imagine Tara finished each chapter and immediately shoved it online in a frantic hurry to get it out there, as opposed to leaving it online to age like a fine vintage of toilet moonshine.

The original posting of the chapter was actually from the original document being copy/pasted into the one that contained the fake chapter nine. However, chapter 40 is then posted some time later as, “Chapter 40. LOL! Someone has taken my account over” by what seems to be the hacker. Which is odd, since they already pasted it into chapter 39, and posting it again from the document area seems rather pointless. It even includes an addition of, “THE IDIOT’S NOTE: Well… this was in the doc area… might as well let the whole world see what the real Tara wanted to show us… Have a nice day!” that the chapter 39 version lacks, meaning this hacker allegedly went into the doc, copy/pasted it into a new file with her chapter and Tara’s, but then edited the original document and posted it too. It’s an odd thing to do, like someone went in with very little idea of what the plan actually was and stumbled redundantly over ideas as they went.

But particularly odd about this whole thing is that Tara does nothing about it. She doesn’t delete the insulting notes or remove the fake chapter, she leaves them both there even though the author’s note of chapter 41 makes it clear that she’s very aware of her account being compromised, not only letting the mockery of herself remain, but even letting it effect the numbering of subsequent chapters. Which may seem like just Tara not caring enough and going with the chapter numbers listed by fanfiction.net, until you look back at chapter 10.

Chapter 10 was posted twice, and Tara never removed the second, identical version of it. It remained on the site up until the day the story was purged by site moderators. And yet, Tara always remained consistent in her renumbering of the chapters, always subtracting one from the chapter count when she posted it; what the site claimed was chapter 12 was really chapter 11. For a story with only the barest minimum of shits given, to properly compensate for this numbering accident for almost thirty chapters is a surprising amount of misplaced effort, but it establishes that she does care about the chapter numbers, and makes the sudden slip a lot more suspect. Why only go halfway in on her effort by continuing to count her double-posted chapter, but not this fake one that she’s allowed to remain as a part of the saga?

Part 8. That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore – Bringing it all together

I’ve prattled on for well over ten thousand words now about a myriad of My Immortal’s issues, but you could look at each individual flaw of the story and say that on their own, they hardly form evidence of trollery afoot, even if some of the more glaring issues are harder to explain away. But surely I’m going to show how they connected to form the cohesive peak of my argument, right? “How soon are you going to get to that?” you shout into your screen, not knowing how computers work.

Well how soon is now?

Tara Gilesbie wrote a story that set her up as the ultimate caricature of a teenaged fanfic writer who is just the worst in all of the best ways. All of the elements of bad writing on every level came into a perfect storm that only grew more powerful over time as it sank further and further into its own madness until it didn’t even resemble what it had started out as. From the self-inserted wish fulfillment to a startlingly creative use of the English language, it hits every hallmark of a bad fanfic one would think to roll up into one neat and tidy little ball, save for perhaps a massive panfandom crossover of everything the author has ever liked.

There is a clear story arc in My Immortal, but it isn’t Ebony’s tale of romance and destiny, it’s Tara’s slow descent into gibbering madness, like the story she had created was an eldritch being that she was unable to comprehend the sight of. As I went over in part one, the writing style breaks down steadily over time, becoming more typo-ridden, filled with more and more casual abbreviations and chatspeak until it’s become apparent that she simply doesn’t care, and while the decline in writing 'quality’ certainly begins with Raven’s absence, it is a steady drop for many chapters afterward. Tara’s character is not one that seems like she has a grasp on subtlety or moving slowly, but that’s the pace with which the boundaries are pushed.

Let’s look at the plot in a rather brief rundown. The story starts out fairly simply, with Ebony and Draco falling in love and having poorly written sex in the forest. Vampire comes in to complicate things in a love triangle that is surprising for leading to attraction angst in all possible directions. Voldemort’s introduction adds to the melodrama of the story, and it weaves in and out of slice of life romance angst and the Voldemort subplot rather strangely. Then, in chapter 17, my favorite part of the story occurs, and it signifies the moment where My Immortal jumps the shark in a way nobody would have ever dreamt of.

Gerard was da sexiest guy eva! He locked even sexier den he did in pix. He had long raven blak hair n piercing blue eyes. He wuz really skinny and he had n amazing ethnic voice. We moshed 2 Helena and sum odder songz. Sudenly Gerard polled of his mask. So did the other membez. I gasped. It wasn’t Gerard at all! It was an ugly preppy man wif no nose and red eyes… Every1 ran away but me and Draco. Draco and I came. It was…….Vlodemort and da Death Deelers!

“U moronic idiots!” he shooted angstily. “Enoby, I told u to kill Vampire. Thou have failed. And now……….I shall kill thou and Draco!”

“No no please!” We begged sadly but he took out his knife.

Sudenly a gothic old man flu in on his broomstick. He had lung black hair and a looong black bread. He wus werring a blak robe dat sed ‘avril lavigne’ on da back. He shotted a spel and Vlodemort ran away. It was…………………………………DUMBLYDORE

It’s important here to note that this is very soon after Raven left the story. and remember that this is around when the story began to stop caring about spelling and typing. After this point, everything in the plot goes off the rails. The melodrama ramps up, Ebony is revealed as the only one who can stop Voldemort, time travel is introduced, despite supplanting Harry as the chosen one who can defeat the Dark Lord she instead tries to seduce a teenaged Tom Riddle… Everything goes completely off the rails.

And that’s the plan all along. The angle of Raven and Tara’s feud never went anywhere, probably because nobody really cared much about two teenagers yelling at each other on the internet. At least, not until 2015 when some asshole would examine the shit out of it for very little discernable reason or gain. I believe that when it was scrapped, the brain trust behind My Immortal decided to go in a different direction. Readers may not have took the bait of their public dispute, but they were buying the troll hook, line, and sinker. People genuinely believe, or at least want to believe, that the story was written in earnest. Even a lot of the people who have doubts about it have them on the grounds that they don’t want to accept that someone could write a story so terrible. The unexpected appeal of the trainwreck that was My Immortal itself, rather than the meta saga of Tara Gilesbie, terrible writer and object of mockery, drove the project into a different direction.

The story and spelling both degrade at the same time, steadily creeping further and further into the most ludicrous things the author thinks they can get away with. As the readers continue to accept what they see as genuine, the author pushes further, which is why we see new elements constantly introduced into the story where they make no sense. It’s not Tara throwing the kitchen sink into her story in a misguided belief that a lot of everything will make her story good, it’s Tara setting the narrative on a trajectory of the most ludicrous thing she can think of, and watching as people believe it. Because they do, completely.

Sex is introduced into the story, because of course it is, through the most unappealing of ways possible. Genitalia are referred to by 'thingy’ as though using the word penis is too embarrassing for her to handle, even though later she refers to Snap’s 'clook’ without issue. To further the wish fulfillment, she must be having sex with her love interests, and it must be terrible.

We went on the bed and started making out naked and then he put his boy’s thingy in mine and we HAD SEX. (c is dat stupid?)

I believe they call that docking.

I’ve already explained how I believe Tara Gilesbie to be just as much a fictional character as Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, and what I feel that character is meant to be is the most mockable and stereotypical fanfic writer one could ever dream of. A teenage emo girl delusionally believing she’s a goth, who’s into boys kissing but has no problem throwing homophobic slurs around, who violates the Harry Potter canon in every way possible for the sake of creating her world of wish fulfillment where everything centers around her. Every bad writing trope wrapped up into sensibilities that set themselves up for mockery. Throw on a tragic lack of self-awareness that opens her up to be laughed at as she smugly highlights her mistakes, and all the pieces fall into place.

Tara Gislebie is a parody of fanfic writers.

Before My Immortal hit the scene, bad fanfiction was not as popular a fandom passtime as it is now, owing largely to new forms of media allowing us to better share the stories and our mockery of them than we had access to in mid-2006, but also because it was always rather contained within fandoms or specific LJ groups meant to deride them. But My Immortal crossed boundaries and spread far outside the reaches of the Harry Potter fandom, to become more than just a story. It was a sensation, a fic so notorious that even people who weren’t around back then have still at least heard of it, even if they haven’t gone out looking for it. While bad writers are nothing new to fandom, My Immortal set off a slew of imitators and tributes, fake sequels, adaptations using its basic setups in different fandoms to produce interesting results, and with more attention suddenly on badfic with the intent to mock it, troll writers came out in droves to try and reproduce the magic.

Some succeeded. Many failed, and I believe one of the main reasons is that people continue to take My Immortal at its word. They just whip some typo-heavy dreck up in their word processor, and ignore all of the subtler elements of My Immortal. It gets so much wrong from the very beginning, but it had to slowly stew in its own crazy long enough to become the poorly written train wreck we’ve come to love. For a story so over the top, that combines all of the elements of a bad story into one perfect package, it does it cleverly enough that it continues to fool people almost ten years later.

You may believe that this is all way too much work for anyone to put into a stupid fanfic. That if it’s meant to be a joke, that it’s a long way to go. Developping characters, faked account compromises, and an active effort put into writing as terribly as possible. And it is a lot of effort, which is meant to throw you off, because it’s the greatest trick the devil ever pulled.

Haha. Wondering why this post isn’t where it’s normally found?

Well, my friends, ask no more!

On a dark lonely evening, sweat drips through your hair

Warm smell of your butthurt, rising up through the air

Up ahead in the distance, see the laptop’s blue light

Your head grows  heavy and your sight grows dim

Gotta stop for the night

There my posts on the display

Rang the warning bell

And you were thinking to your self

Give it a week and I’d surely quell

Then I flamed all the posters and I showed you her name

There were voices ringing in your head

Swear you’d heard them say

Welcome to the Hotel Tarafornia

Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place)

Such a normal place

Plenty of room at the Hotel Tarafornia

Any time of year (Any of time of year)

I can smell your fear

Her mind is Tumblr-addicted

She got them means behind ends

She got a lotta commie, commie kids

That she calls friends

How they dance in the Discord

Sweet doxxing rush

Some post to remember

Some troll to forget

So I called up the admin

“Please bring my ban”

And he said

We haven’t had that spirit here since GC toured Japan

And still those voices are ringing from far away

But still those posts are comin’ from far away

Wake you up in the middle of the night

Just to hear me say

Welcome to the Hotel Tarafornia

Such a lovely place  (Such a lovely place)

Such a horrid face

Living it up in the Hotel Tarafornia

What an awful lie (What an awful lie)

What an alibi

Mirrors behind mirrors

Men behind the man

And she said: “We are all just copycats here

Of a copy of a fake

Among the moderators

They gathered for a feast

They stab it with their steely knives

But they just can’t kill the beast

Last thing you remember, you were

Grasping for your mouse

You had to find the permaban

To restore what was before

“Relax”, said your bete-noire

“I am

Programmed to deceive

You can ban me any time you like,

But I will never leave!”

[ober-affen-geil]

There’s something about Roswell that’s truly magic. I’ve been over several elements of it that make it absolutely unique to me in how it handles certain topics and writing techniques, but I have yet to give credit to a specific element that usually flies under the radar, especially on TV. This is a post where I want to talk about the music editing.

Because it is, pardon the pun, out of this world. Not only in the song choices but in the timing over scenes and especially in the lyric placement. There are many, many examples of it in the show (literally every damn episode) and I could spend hours talking about them but for the sake of brevity I will narrow it down to three scenes. 

The scenes I’m going to talk about are ones that I’ve chosen because they use the same song for multiple characters/plot points. There are some really great moments that are more focused (the Echo kiss in 1x09 gets a shoutout because the chorus of “Iris” is literally perfect for that scene) but to me the true genius of the music editing is on display where the choices have to be more versatile in order to have multiple meanings.

*A note before I get started. I’m doing three scenes so in the interest of space I will try to let the lyrics speak for themselves. If you want a more detailed breakdown of why I think specific lines over specific moments are worthy of note, shoot me an ask or a dm!*

The first one I want to talk about is “God of Wine” by Third Eye Blind used at the end of 1x02 over Alex going to talk with Michael and Max going to talk with Cam. (And their respective hookups.) 

This is already a great choice because the song is name-dropped earlier in the episode. (”Fraudulent zodiac” is the lyric Rosa has written on her hand the night she dies, Maria tells Liz in this episode what song it’s from.) The main points are these:

The lyrics under Alex telling Michael that it’s a “problem” for him that Michael still looks at him like a love-struck teenager are “I can't keep it all together/And the siren's song that is your madness/Holds a truth I can't erase/All alone on your face“ (What’s also interesting is that in the lead up to this talk, when Alex is approaching the trailer, the lyrics are “We can’t get back again”)

This is where things get truly inspired. After Michael and Alex go into the trailer, the POV switches regularly between them and Max and Cam.

We go to Max hooking up with Cam in her kitchen with the lyric “And I said no, no, no, no, no”. It goes instrumental for the switch to Michael and Alex, then when it changes back to Max and Cam the lyric is “I can’t keep it all together”. Back to Michael and Alex for the line “I know, I know, I know, I know”, and once more to Max and Cam for another “I can’t keep it all together”.

The final line for Michael and Alex is “And there's a memory of a window/Looking through” while the last lyric for Max and Cam (with only Max’s face fully in view and as the center of the shot) is “I see you/A sadness I can't erase/All alone on your face”.

Subtle. Very subtle.

The second scene is “Can’t Love Me” by Novi (featuring Tyler Blackburn because why not fucking murder us some more huh Tyler) used in 1x12 over Cam telling Max she’s leaving and Alex trying to get Michael out of Caulfield before it blows sky high.

What’s truly extraordinary about this example is that it manages to use one line in the song (repeated naturally as part of the lyric structure) to apply to three different situations. The line is “Yeah, but you can't love me anymore”. (I’ll do a little explaining in this case to help with understanding my reasoning.)

It first plays over when Cam is telling Max she is leaving Roswell after confessing that she has deeper feelings for him than what she let on. Cam can’t love Max anymore because he’s involved with Liz. Max can’t love Cam anymore (platonically) because she’s leaving.

We next hear it when Michael is trying to get Alex to leave without him, trying to convince him that he doesn’t love him and he should stop trying to hold on to the past. Alex can’t love Michael anymore because if he does he will die with him.

The last time we hear it is when Michael and Alex start moving to the exit, leaving the shot as the camera stays on Michael’s mother trapped in her cell. Michael can’t love her anymore because it would get him killed. She can’t love him anymore because she’s going to die.

Motherfucking ouch. They didn’t have to do us like that. But I’m glad they did.

The third and final scene I’m going to touch on is the end of the pilot, with “When the Truth Hunts You Down” by Sam Tinnesz over Michael and Alex’s moment and Max with Liz/Isobel. This one gets extra credit points for not only fucking stellar lyric placement, but also for using the rhythm in the song to emphasize physical moments (mostly in the Alex/Michael part).

First, Michael and Alex. The lines we hear as the camera pans over Alex looking at his teenage self are these: “You can run, but you won't make it far/You can't hide from who you are” We then move to an instrumental section as Michael reveals himself in the doorway and they exchange a few words. 

Subtly, Michael is swaying a little from side to side as he moves closer to Alex and his steps more or less match up with the back beat. Less subtly, on two occasions the movement of Michael’s eyes flicking up to look at Alex is matched with a cymbal flare in the music. And least subtle of all, the lyrics kick back in as they crash together; their lips meet on the first “run” of the line “You can't run, run, run, from the smoking gun” which is exactly where the down beat is. 

Then we switch to Max looking at Liz for the next line “Caught in the crosshairs of the things we've done”. This is the point when Isobel makes her way over to where he is watching Liz dance and they have a cliffhangery conversation about how Liz can “never know about what happened to Rosa.” The rest of the verse plays under Jesse Manes trying to brainwash Kyle and repeats over Max joining Liz on the dance floor. “There's no hiding place, not a secret safe/What is lost will be found”. Until we cut to black and we hear the final line over the end title card: “When the truth hunts you down “.

I mean wow you guys. And these are just three examples. The whole damn show is like this. Is it any wonder all of us fell so hard?

Music is one of those things that can make or break scenes, but it’s lowkey enough that most of us don’t pay attention to it (unless it’s badly done). Like so many other things about the show, Roswell has proved itself to be surprisingly masterful in its use of music. I was floored by it several times throughout the first season and I continue to discover new subtleties as I rewatch. I am so very much looking forward to hearing more as we go into season two; I cannot wait to get murdered on a weekly basis again.

#roswell new mexico #rnm #my roswell meta #you guys are picking amazing prompts #roswellweek19 #rnmweek19 #day three #music #music editing #the amount of thought that has to go into this is #literally mindblowing #list #a riley special

[notlucy]

Hi! I hope you're enjoying a slow week after recent busy times . I'm curious about your process. You seem to have many discrete steps, including, I think, writing, rewriting, line edits, and uploading. I've also seen you mention an out-loud reread and grammer edits as a separate thing. What exactly do each of these steps include? Do you do it all for everything you write (including nonfan stuff)? How long do they each take, relatively? big fan of your work! TY for all the effort and time :)

Hi! Thank you so much for this question, and also for the compliments about my work. I’m happy to talk about my process, but I want to preface it with the fact that I firmly believe that every single writer and creator is different, and that just because something works for/has helped me, does not mean it will work for or help everyone. In fact, some of the things I do might hinder other people, and that’s okay! A big part of doing this has been figuring out my own weird little idiosyncratic crap, which can be a fun part of everyone’s journey.

Another thing is: this is supposed to be fun! Yes, I’m attempting to pursue writing professionally, which is why I have developed this convoluted, nonsense process. However, I wouldn’t do any of it if I didn’t get some joy or enjoyment out of the crazy hoops I jump through for a final product - I really, really love doing all these ridiculous things, and it’s part of what makes writing fun for me. So if the thought of doing this is exhausting and you think I am a glutton for punishment, please don’t do it. Be smarter than me. Love your hobby and let it bring you joy however it brings you joy!

So, my process (my own, my precious)

Writing - This is the stage where I just spew everything out into Scrivener or Google docs. My outlines are sparse to none, and while I might have a single document with a numbered list meant to loosely correlate to eventual chapters, it’s more of a guideline than any definite thing. (For example, my outline for merBucky chapter 1 was the line “Steve leaves home”.) My first drafts are usually messy and incomplete, with ideas that aren’t quite fully formed, and the gist of a lot of things, without the meat of them.

The “don’t poke the bear” stage - where I try not to touch the story for 3 weeks to a month. Longer if possible. This allows me to forget what I’ve written entirely.

Rewrite - This is something I’ve been doing since Family Placement, to a certain extent, but didn’t really formalize until I was doing Small Star. Basically, I take that first draft, put it side-by-side with a blank document, and retype the entire thing from scratch. This allows me to take what I already had, read it fresh, and try to figure out what I actually wanted to say. During this phase, I tend to find a lot of those half-formed ideas, or areas where I was over-explaining, or places where I hadn’t quite gotten the characterization right. (I keep picking on merBucky, but a lot of the rewrites involved going, “who is this guy? I know it says Steve Rogers on the page, but uh…this is not Steve Rogers!”) The story usually grows between 15-20% during this phase, too, as I’m expanding a lot on basic ideas.

Line-edits - I have no idea if this is the official term for what I do, and I only started doing this when I got my new printer (the first story I did it on was Go Fish, I think), but I print the entire story out and go over it with a red pen. This is, I think, the biggest change to my writing process since I started, and I honestly have found it the most helpful. Seeing the work in a different medium helps me catch so much more. I tighten prose, I spot odd sentences, I see where I’m reusing phrases and words, etc. etc. Please don’t get me wrong, it’s a pain in the ASS to do it this way, but (for me) the results are worth it. This is also where the story shrinks back down another 10-15% as I’m cutting out a lot of extraneous shit.

Regretting everything - This is the part where I’m faced with a million red pen slashes to put back into the Scrivener document and I start crying. But it’s fine, it’s fine!

Beta - Self-explanatory. Story goes to between 1-3 betas at this point. (Note: this is not the first time other people have seen the story, usually, as I have some alphas I brainstorm ideas with, but this is usually the first time I’m asking for crit and not just cheerleading or brainstorming). Once the beta edits come back, I make the necessary changes.

Out-loud - Also self-explanatory. I read every single word of everything I post out-loud to myself. This is the final step to catch weird sentences, odd word choices, or things that just don’t sound naturalistic in dialogue. Or if, say, your one-armed assassin suddenly has two arms. Just lil’ things that the final once-over helps to catch.

Grammarly - I have a premium membership to Grammarly, and if you’re a SPAG nerd, I can’t recommend it enough. It catches a LOT of shit. Real pedantic shit that I never would have caught otherwise, and SPAG has never been my problem. It’s also good for catching where you’ve accidentally inserted two commas, or forgotten to throw in a period, or little tiny things your brain might jump over when you’re doing it yourself. Granted, it also points out a lot of things where I’m like “no Grammarly, you don’t understand my prose,” because at the end of the day it’s just a tool, and it’s what you make of it.

AO3 (if it’s fanfic) - I post, then I spend the next hour fretting, and then like months later I catch additional mistakes. So, you know. It’s a living.

To answer your question as to whether or not I do this for everything, the short answer is yes, the long answer is: yes if I give a shit about it. I will always do it for fic, or for fiction writing. When I’m writing for work or for school…eh, depending on the class/paper, I’ll do a lot of this, but not the whole process. And as far as how long each step takes me, it depends on the length of the story, but I reliably write around 1,500 words a day, same with rewrites. If I’m editing, I can get about 20 pages of line edits and/or inputs done in an hour-ish?

I hope that was what you were wanting when you asked! I feel like this entire thing is a cautionary tale. Mwah!

#notlucy's stupid process #notlucy writes #great question #nerding out about shit #notlucy answers

[theswiftarmy]

#6 - A Helicopter Ride To Oak Felder’s Spaceship

“Well, this is great, Taylor and that swift attorney of hers now have even more leverage to use against us to get Taylor’s masters.”  Scooter sneered.

           “I miss Sushi.”

           “You can get more when we land.”  Scooter said back.

           “My cat.  Scootsy B, not the food.  I’m actually pretty full, which is surprising, because usually sushi doesn’t always fill you up.  You know?”

           The Carlyle Lawyer met eyes with Justin.  I know exactly what you mean he thought. They mentally agreed.

“Why did you have your cat in the office anyway?”

           “It was bring your cat to the office day, Scooter! Remember?  Last time I brought Tuna, so this time, it was Sushi’s turn.” He sent a quick text to Hailey to give her the news on Sushi.  At least Tuna was still safe with Hailey.  For now…  

The moment Justin pushed the tiny icon to send his text message to Hailey he immediately received another.  It was a message from Ed Sheeran offering to take Tuna to a safe place.  “That’s weird.”

“What?” Scooter asked.

“Ed just asked if he could come get Tuna.”

“Maybe he’s just asking you for a can of tuna?”  Scooter shrugged.  “To make a tuna sandwich?”  He offered. Everyone but Scott shrugged.

“Don’t reply to him.”  Scott said in a very Jeff Goldblum-ish way.  Someone had to be that Jeff Goldblum voice of reason, and Jeff isn’t here at the moment, so Scott got the gig.

Justin looked up from his phone, “But why not?  Ed is totally cool with me I really don’t think—Whoa.  This is even weirder.  He just sent me a little heart, and a cat emoji out of the blue.”

“It’s a phish.” Scott said unsympathetically.  Again with the Jeff G voice.

“No, Tuna is my cat, not a fish.”  Bieber responded.  No one responded back.

“They’re trying to figure out where we plan to land.”  The Carlyle Group legal rep eventually added.  

Scott nodded in his direction.  “Precisely.”

Scooter lost his patience.  “This is ridiculous!  I mean, all this over, what… Some music?  Guys, IT is JUST music!  This is crazy.”

Scott turned and locked eyes with Scooter.

“You don’t know what you’ve bought, Scooter, do you?” He said in a very serious tone, a Jeff Goldblum serious tone.  The corporate helicopter engines and blades hummed away in the background as they flew through the air.  The cabin of the helicopter felt like a war room now.  The cutting edge modified Bell 525 Relentless was custom built, a boardroom like interior, extra long flight range with multiple tanks of gas.  They sat in fancy seating facing one another with wide views through the windows of the world outside, this big machine was a traveling fortress and a businessperson’s dream.  From up here, one could keep a whole company going, even if it were under siege.

“Well, I mean, is there something you’re not telling me, Scott?”

Scott closed his eyes, meditated for a moment, “It’s more than just music, it’s so much more than you even know, Big Machine is… something special…”

           “Spare me the story, you told me that when you sold me the label.  Remember? And I ran the numbers, liked what I saw… He was there.”  The legal rep nodded.

           Scott opened his eyes and his gaze became hypnotic. “Taylor’s catalog is… something special… Taylor Swift’s catalog is REALLY special.  More than you could even know.”

           “Yes.”  Scooter stared at Scott incredulously.  “It’s catchy music that sells!  It sells REALLY well, that’s WHY I bought your label.  That’s all it is!”  He threw his hands in the air, “Catchy songs!  That’s how we make a living, Scott.  We make fun little musical hooks that people can’t get enough of, catchy songs that people listen to and dance to over and over again… THEY have a good time and WE make money—”

           “Oh, Scooter, catchy songs?  That’s cute.  Yes, that’s cute, Scooter.  I’ll say it again.“  He paused to stress every word.  “You, don’t, know what you’ve bought, DO you?”

           “Okay Scott,” Scooter sat back in his chair, “Enlighten me.  Enlighten all of us here.  Because, to me, it was just a business transaction, I bought some catchy music recorded on hard disk; I bought ownership of melody, notes combined with chords that people enjoy. They listen to it in the morning at the gym, on their way to work or school, maybe afterwards to unwind, have a good time, or dance the night away! I bought MASTERS.  IT. IS. JUST. BUSINESS.  If I didn’t buy Taylor Swift’s masters, then what exactly did you sell me, Scott?”

           Scott smiled and sat back in his seat.

“You guys never figured it out, did you?  All those catchy Taylor Swift songs, every time you sang along, and you never figured it out?”

“Figured what out, Scott Borchetta, figured WHAT out?”  Scooter Braun grew impatient.  “WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO HAVE FIGURED OUT!?!?”

Scott stared through the window of the hovering helicopter moving slowly away from the Big Machine offices, a giant Taylor Swift banner had been dropped over the front hanging from the roof and extending all the way to the street, the same concerned facial expression he had just a short time ago looking out that now covered office window returned.

“Have either of you ever heard of a Porter Pyramid?”  he looked over at the Carlyle lawer and then back to Justin and Scooter.

“What on earth are you talking about Scott!  A pyramid?  Like, Egypt? What does that have to do with anything? You’ve lost your mind.  Heck, I feel like I’VE lost MY mind.  What on Earth is going on right now, you know? We’re flying through the air in what might as well be a military grade corporate helicopter after nearly having lost our lives at the hands of a bunch of obsessed Taylor Swift fans!”

“Bill Porter.”  Scott repeated, again in that smooth Jeff Goldblum voice.  “He worked in RCA Studio B, in Nashville, Tennessee from 1959 to 1964.”

“Are you even listening to me Scott?  What does this have to do with anything?”  Braun turned to Bieber.  ��I’m talking about a life or death situation here, and he’s talking about pyramids.”  

Justin shrugged.

Scott laughed.  “Do you want to know what you’ve bought, or not?”

Scooter fell silent.  “Fine.” He shook his head, “Sure, whatever.”

“Bill Porter.  He created something called a Porter Pyramid. ”

Scooter rolled his eyes then nodded begrudgingly.  “Annnd…”

“It was nothing more than a piece of fiberglass cut in the shape of a triangle, and hung from the ceiling using a string.  He made a bunch of these and put them around the studio.  They changed the resonant modes the room naturally created.  He was a true audio engineer pioneer.”  Scott paused for a moment to make sure he had Scooter and Justin’s full attention before he continued, “Basically, they SHAPED sound.  Frequencies captured by the microphone were different with the Porter Pyramids installed.  Bill Porter considered the studio's acoustics problematic, with resonant room modes creating an uneven frequency response.  Through careful experimentation he found spots in the room where resonant modes were minimal—”

“Wait, wait, stop, stop, okay?”  Scooter interrupted.  He sat a little closer to the edge of his cabin seat, intrigued. “Interesting stuff and all with the music history lesson, but can we skip ahead to the part where Taylor’s masters come in to all of this?”

Scott waited a few seconds, and continued unfazed, “What he didn’t tell anyone, was that shortly after he took the job in June of 1959, he was mixing a song called The Three Bells.  While editing the master to be sent to New York for pressing, Porter accidentally hit the wrong controls on the tape recorder and stretched the tape at the beginning of the song, this distorted the pitch.  Without telling anyone, he spliced in a different take with a good intro at the beginning, and sent that version instead.”

“Oh snap!”  Justin exclaimed.

           “What he ALSO didn’t tell anyone, was that he made recordings during his resonant room modes experiments.  One of those recording contained nothing more than silence in the empty room.  The sound of a blank space.  He didn’t note on the recording where the microphone was placed, or the arrangement of the Porter Pyramids within the room.  All we know, is it was recorded at RCA Studio B at some point between 1959 and 1964. We have strong suspicion it was actually recorded the same morning that Elvis recorded the song ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’  Elvis recorded the song at the request of his manager Colonel Tom Parker, at Four AM on April Fourth, the studio was completely dark while the recording took place. This recording may have been made right after that.  It may not have been his first, though, we have reason to believe he made a secret earlier recording for Elvis when RCA acquired his recording contract.” He looked over at the legal rep, “He might have been experimenting as early as maybe 1950? He graduated high school in 1949, studied electronics at the University of Tennessee and served in the US army reserves in the early part of the 1950s.  Chuck Berry, Alan Freed… Rock and Roll, it was all about to happen—”

“Okay.  Wait hold up, why would someone keep a recording of an empty room?”  Justin asked. “If it was for experimenting with microphone placement to record at Four in the morning, then why would you keep it? If you figured out how to make the recordings sound right, why keep a recording… of nothing?”

Scott looked around the interior of the flying boardroom aboard the Bell 525 helicopter cabin, first at Scooter, and then back to Justin, his face very serious, “I wondered that too.  I found the tape I’m referring to at the bottom of a box of used studio equipment that I had purchased from a close friend when I first founded Big Machine Label Group.  Not having the proper equipment to play it back on, I set it aside.  During Taylor’s first recording session, she saw it and inquired about it.  It had Bill Porter’s name on it and was simply labeled ‘Easter Egg’.  Taylor was obsessed with knowing what was on the old tape, so I made a few calls, and was able to borrow a machine to play it back on. We went personally to pick the machine up.  We brought it back to the studio and set it up.  She was more excited than a kid on Christmas morning.  Of course, when we finally played the tape back… Nothing. Just the sound of a empty room.”

“Weird.”  Scooter and Justin commented in unison from the edge of their seats.

“We sat there in the studio at Big Machine and listened to the whole tape, ready to hear a piece of Nashville history.  But Taylor and I heard nothing, a whole lot of nothing.  When it finished, we rewound the tape, and listened to it again. A little way into our second listen we forgot we were even listening and felt… Strange.  You remember that scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, when Grandpa Joe and Charlie sampled the Fizzy Lifting Drinks?  It’s just before the ‘Goose with the Golden Egg’ scene.”

Scooter and Justin shook their heads yes, completely captivated.  “It was THAT feeling.  Floating, almost drunk on something.  Drunk on something stronger than drinks at the bar. That’s how I describe it, and it’s what Taylor would probably say now if you asked her. Her word for it then was ‘wonky’… It reminded me of something out of the Willy Wonka movie.  Right after that feeling, came another, all of a sudden—and this is going to sound odd, but the best way I can describe it is that my ears had… hunger pangs.  As though, you want to hear a sound or melody SO BAD, that ‘Easter Egg’ sound made you WANT sound, NEED to hear music.  Almost, like, as you listened to it, you longed for a melody, for notes to hear anything in your ear—And as soon as you heard music, you would then feel relaxed, hypnotic. Satiated.  Some kind of sonic fullness is the best I could guess at the time—Like the end of Thanksgiving dinner.  Taylor shouted out, ‘I NEED to play something.  ANYTHING.  I NEED to hear music!’.  I shook my head swiftly yes… The craving for music was undeniable, absolutely unbearable. We couldn’t take it any longer.  Taylor dove for her guitar and began to strum a few chords and sing a few notes, she then sang a song she had recently written, Tim McGraw.”

Scott wiped his eye, the beginning of a tear.  “I couldn’t take it.  It was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard.  It sent shivers down my spine.  Taylor actually started to cry and teardrops fell on her guitar.  We wouldn’t know at the time, but it was that Bill Porter sound that did it to us.  And I immediately said it sounded like the best song I’d ever heard, so I hit record on the studio system and she played and sang.  What we didn’t realize until after we finished recording Taylor’s song was that the Bill Porter Easter Egg tape had been playing in the background the whole time.  That old recording was now in the background of her new take.  The Porter tape eventually ended—it wasn’t until the old reel-to-reel tape ran out with a startling sputtering noise, we had completely forgotten it was even there.  When Taylor finished her take we played back the impromptu recording.  Then we listened to it again and another time. We both almost cried as we listened to that very first recording of her song ‘Tim McGraw’.  It was just, good.  I mean, it sounded like heaven was opening the gates for our ears, for just a moment, to give us a glimpse.  Then Taylor looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know who this Bill Porter guy is but he's the reason for the teardrops on my guitar, the only thing that keeps me wishing on a star, he's the song in the car I keep singing, don't know why I do.’ That’s how it felt to me too. Taylor just kept saying that over and over again. How it was the song in the car, the one you can’t stop singing and don’t know why.”

Scott stopped for a moment, he was transported back to where it all began, before all of this fighting, “After playing the song for a few friends, they too became… Oddly obsessed with it as well.  And then, we all did.  I think we listened to it—my God, maybe a hundred times in a row?  It completely took me off guard; I’d never seen, or heard, anything like this in all my years in the music industry.  So, we recorded another song, but this time, it didn’t get quite the same reaction.  We recorded a third, it too was good, but still missing something.  Taylor went back and listened to that first take, she listened to it again and again, finally, it clicked what we did different, she was the first to figure it out.  She said, ‘I think it has something to do with that mysterious room noise tape that was playing in the background… The Easter Egg noise.’  She was right, I don’t know how she figured that out, but she was spot on. Whatever it was, it added something special to the mix, it was like something out of Willy Wonka’s factory. Candy for your ears.  We promptly hooked up the borrowed antique reel-to-reel tape machine to a direct input recording device that was connected to the high end pro audio studio equipment, hit record on the digital studio recording system, and pushed play on the small machine, the tape spun up, and the meters went off the charts, just as Taylor’s music soon would.  I mean, the VU meter kept slamming against the peg!  Something was definitely there.  The meters kept peaking, I tried to turn the signal level down, I was thinking it would distort or overload, but it’s hard to engineer a sound you can’t hear.  

Every time I fiddled, the signal changed itself, so I just let Bill Porter take the wheel and drive.  When it finished, we had ourselves the only high-resolution isolated pristine copy of that track. Whatever this Easter Egg gift from Bill Porter was, it was ours now, it was Taylor’s, it was no longer part of that small machine, it was part of Big Machine Records.  We played the song back, and waited for the wonky feeling to kick in, unsure if we would feel it again, but we sure as heck did, the feeling kicked in with the digital master, just the same as the vintage tape recording. Taylor recorded her songs again. She re-recorded the songs that didn’t get quite the response that the first song did.  When we mastered the tracks, we added Porter’s sound to the master track in the background, you couldn't hear it, but it was there. Presto!  They couldn’t get enough of it.  Taylor and I had struck gold.  We felt like the Elvis was back!  Like we were sitting there that night on the Fourth of April at Four AM in the morning, we were back in the 60s, 1960 to be eact, RCA Studio B with Bill Porter himself at the controls and Elvis in the studio.  The man with the golden ear, Bill Porter, was here.”

“Wow.  This is unbelievable.”  Justin said in disbelief.  

“Yeah, I have to agree with Bieber.  That can’t be real.”  Scooter remarked after struggling for words. “That’s a lot to take in.  Basically, you’re telling me that Taylor Swift’s music has a secret undetectable sound added to the mix, like some kind of catnip for your ears, that you found on some obscure old studio tape labeled ‘Easter Egg’ and that’s the reason why all her Swifties are obsessed with her music—and with her?”

“But is it so hard to believe?  Look what happened with Elvis fans… How about Beatlemania?”  Scott offered.

“But how does it even work?” Justin asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine.”  Scott replied.

“It just doesn’t seem plausible.” Justin said, still skeptical. “Like, cool story bro, you know? But…  Sonically laced tunes that turn you into a Taylor Swift addict? Like she’s dealing pop songs to junkies who just can’t get enough and do whatever she wants to get more?  The sugar candy high of riding a Taylor Swift music ride.”

“Let me ask you this, Justin, let’s say it was plausible, let’s say for the sake of argument, that you had the ability to command your fans at your will? They would follow your every word—do anything you asked.  What would you do with that?  Humor me.”

“Well, I mean, my fans already do that.  But, you’re talking if I could steal fans at will, through some kind of mind altering way?  Like they wouldn’t have a choice but to listen to my music? As soon as they heard one of my fresh hot beats?  It would be stuck in their head, on repeat?”

“Exactly.”  Scott confirmed.

“Well” Justin thought.  “If I’ve got three wishes, the first wish would be to get more wishes.  Right?  So, I’d go on some nationally televised program and play my stuff to as many people as I possibly could that would listen to…”  He trailed off. “…listen to It.” He finished saying in a quiet voice.

“Nail.  On. The. Head.” Scott said.

“The American Music Awards!”  Bieber shouted out.

Scott said nothing, his reply was a single nod.

Justin continued his thought, “She wants to play her whole back catalogue, so people will go back and listen to it all again.  And then they’ll hear that Wonka thing and go on a Porter Pyramid trip! Pyramids… She’s like a modern day Pharaoh.  So THAT is why she was playing one of her old songs on the live stream earlier and singing over it!”

“Precisely.”  Scott leaned forward in his seat,  “Her new stuff, Lover, doesn’t have the Easter Egg in it.  She needs as many people as possible to listen to her old stuff in order to keep them under her… control, for lack of a better term.  The more followers she has, the easier it will be to get the old masters from us and obtain the Easter Egg track for use in new material.  It’s a war of numbers.  If everyone is on her side, we won’t have anyone on ours.  Those masters are as good as hers.  She will be Pharaoh, if we can’t stop her.”

“Wow.  This is unbelievable.  And not like that song ‘Unbelievable’ from the 90s, which is actually a pretty cool song. This is just, unbelievable.”

“Ed Sullivan show!”  Scooter interjected.  “The Beatles made their first appearance as a nationally televised event.”

“Indeed.”

“But what’s the connection?  Did The Beatles ever record with Porter?”

“That part is somewhat hazy.  We know that Porter was connected to Elvis and RCA.  But just before Elvis worked with Porter, he was in Germany for 2 years in the army.  Right around the same time as Elvis, The Beatles were playing clubs in Germany too. It’s entirely possible we don’t have things exactly right.  From the research, it seems as though perhaps somehow the sound initially came from some early recording Elvis did and Bill simply reconstructed it.  A cleaner, better, much more potent version—But we just keep coming back to that night, April Fourth, at Four Am, when they recorded in the dark with the studio pitch black.”

“You keep saying WE.  How many people know about this?”

“Well…” He pointed to the Carlyle guy.

“Okay.  Who else?”

“We think Max Martin may have figured out a variation of it.  It’s not nearly as effective as Porter’s though.”

“That would explain Britney Spears.” Scooter thought for a second. “And the Swiftian alliance with Kesha’s Animals and Katy Perry’s KatyCats.”

“That’s what I was thinking too.”  Scott confirmed.

“So that’s why Katy Perry’s version of Dark Horse went to the top of the charts, while the other one remained virtually unknown.”

Scooter nodded again.

“This is real.  I mean, like, REALLY real.”  Scooter said. His face turned pale.  “We’re being manipulated through music!”

Bieber sat up in his seat, “You know it’s only a matter of time until this gets out there.  You know that right?  I mean, Harry Potter was only able to keep his stuff secret for so long before everyone was all, LOOK, he’s a wizard!”

“Really Bieber?”  Scooter said.

“What?  I’m a Harry Potter fan!”  Scott and Scooter tossed Bieber a look. “Okay, from the guy who just said ‘Really real’ just… whatever.  Listen, you two keep discussing what to do about Hermione Granger gone rouge while I check in with the captain and lieutenants of my Beliebers to see where those masters are…”  He pulled out his phone and between tapping buttons.

“So what happened between you two anyway?  I mean, why are you here, on this helicopter with me, while Taylor’s out there assembling an army?  Why are we even having this conversation, why did you even sell Big Machine?  Why not just keep things the way they were, keep turning out Taylor hits, keep the Swiftie train on track.  Take over the world…”

Scott sighed.  He said nothing.   He looked out the window, Big Machine Label Group now a speck in the distance. Lovers, haters, and art all have the ability to betray you.

“That army isn’t for me, Scooter.”

“Then who is it for?”

“You.”  Scott narrowed his eyes.  “It’s your blood she wants.  As long as you’re master of her masters, she won’t stop coming after you, she’ll never stop.”

“Why am I the bad guy here?”  He clinched his fists.  “No, I know what this is, I’m the fall guy for this!  That’s what this is!  This is a setup.”

“No.”  The Carlyle lawyer added flatly.

Scott looked down to the floor.  “You were just more… Able to handle our situation with Taylor.”

“Situation?”  Scooter asked, his voice becoming shaky.  “What situation?  You mean there’s more to this?”

Scott shifted his gaze to the Carlyle lawyer then back to Scooter. “Have you heard the lyrics to her song ‘Look What You Made Me Do?’  ‘I’m sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why?  Oh, because she’s…’”

“Speaking of situations, guys—” Justin interrupted.  “I’ve kind of got a situation here myself.”

“What’s going on?  Are her masters safe?”  Scooter said worriedly shifting nervously in his seat.

“I don’t know—Wait, my chats are jammed, I can’t send a message back!”

The cabin occupants inside the sophisticatedly elegant interior of the flashy corporate helicopter shared simultaneous shivers down their spines.

“I’m being spammed!  It’s all hearts and cat emojies.”

“Swifties.”  Scott surmised.

“Where are the masters?!?!” Scooter howled.

“I don’t know.  It was an ambush!  My Beliebers captain and his two lieutenants had them safely stowed in a military grade stainless steel carrying case.  We were on a secure private group chat just discussing the situation.  They indicated that they were on their way to a new location because the original location was crawling with Swiftie scouts—the next message said they had been sneak attacked!  Without any other option Taylor’s masters were handed off to two undercover Arianators acting as spotters.  The last message said he thinks the Arinators have them.  Then the Swiftie spammers took over the group chat and he went offline.”

Scott spoke smoothly.  “If the Swifties have them, it’s over.  But… If the Arianators managed to take possession we might still have a chance here.”

“Okay, so where do we go from here?”  Scooter sat, palms sweaty.  His heart beating fast—This was not what he signed up for when he agreed to purchase Big machine Label Group.

“Wait.  I think I know. “  Justin said coolly.  “Ariana Grande wouldn’t risk keeping them.  But there is someone else she would trust.  Someone of reason, and sound mind, someone who truly wouldn’t take sides until he had all the facts, and could make a sound moral choice.”

“Who?”  Scooter asked.

“Oak.  Oak Felder.”

“Oak Felder.  Of course!“ Scott opened a small seatbelt cover beside him pulling the seatbelt over him and clicking in.  “Boys… Buckle up!  We’re going to find Felder.  With any luck, Taylor’s masters are safely on their way to Oak’s studio.  Roads?  Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.  Because we’re in a helicopter!”

Everyone shook their heads.

“Great Scott.  That’s great.”  Scooter said. He was not amused.

“Oh come on, that was gold!”

“Let’s just get to Oak Felder, before Taylor’s Swifties do.  Okay?”  Scooter’s stomach was doing back flips.

The helicopter accelerated to full flight speed onwards and upwards, to Oak Felder’s studio—The Spaceship.

@taylorswift @justinbieber

#taylor swift #oak felder #justin bieber #elvis #easteregghunt #easter egg

[rosella1356]

Two 11/11/11 Tags

Thank you to @bookenders and @dreamingofstarslight for tagging me.

1.       What’s the last book you read? What did you think of it?

The last book I read was Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor. I loved that book. It was such an interesting story. Is it right to kill children for their parent’s sins? Should children try to kill you if you’re trying to kill them first? These are the moral challenges that most of the main characters face, and yet there is no good answer. Neither side is wrong in their justification, but that means the bloodshed will continue for even longer.

2.       What’s the one word you always misspell even though you totally know how to spell it?

The word sword. Don’t ask me how, but somehow it always ends up as sworb.

3.       What do your OCs smell like? If you could publish your WIP with scented pages, what would you want it to smell like?

I’ll choose my top three OCs because otherwise this post would be too large for anyone to understand what was happening. Daisy smells like the middle of a thunderstorm, soaked and yet full of potential. Adrian smells like peppermint and pine in sharp contrast with each other. Lulu smells like nothing, if you get close enough to her to actually be able to try and smell a scent, you won’t be able to smell anything. For my WIP, Lost would be the actual old book that’s just opened smell; Hidden Realms would be something sweet maybe cherry pie; Destined for War should smell like smoke, just that would be perfect; and Silence would be something woody, maybe pine like Adrian.

4.       Your OC is given a pair of boots that mute the sound of their footsteps. What kind of shenanigans do they get into with these sweet new kicks?

Oh god. None of my current OCs are good enough people not to abuse this power. Adrian, Daisy, and the entire cast of Lost would use those to conquer the government and kill the queen, no question. Vivian would probably start running in whatever direction the fae weren’t in. Kairavi would start like 18 wars in under 24 hours, please don’t give her more power. She’s already started one war; I don’t need her to get ideas about more. Lulu might be the most controlled of all of them. She’d just prank her brother, granted that might lead to her brother murdering like an entire city.

5.       How did you decide on the setting for your WIP?

What setting? All of my books have large amounts of scene changes. Lost is them trying to save the entire planet, which means they have to travel the whole world. Hidden Realms initially had a setting in what was once the outskirts of the Roman Empire, now Hungary, but then they ticked off the Church, so they fled to the Americas, but then they found out about an entirely new realm with dragons and went off to that realm. Silence is going to be in some woods somewhere, but I haven’t gotten far enough to figure that out. It starts in NYC. Destined for War starts in Pakistan, but ends in the realm of Gods that doesn’t currently have a name.

6.       Your OCs are given a vast array of finger paints. What do they create?

I’ll do my top three again because this is already a super large post. Adrian would likely draw the winter palace and the family he left behind there. There would probably be tear marks on the page, he’ll deny them, but they’re there. Daisy would probably throw the paint on the page and create some abstract mess to call art. Lulu would spend hours making sure she got every detail of Octavian mapped out on canvas, again. She’s done this before. Like every time she has free time. Don’t worry about why she draws him on repeat. (author moves out of view)

7.       How many times do you rewrite a draft? Or, how many drafts of a story do you go through before arriving at the final draft? Which story has/had the most drafts?

Gosh I don’t know. Lost is the only one I’ve finished the first draft for because I just started writing last year, so I’m planning on 7 drafts. I don’t know if I’ll keep that plan.

8.       What’s your favorite line from your least favorite book? Or, what is your least favorite line from your favorite book?

Least favorite line from my favorite book is actually in Harry Potter from Albus Dumbledore when he says “We must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy?”. I don’t disagree with the principle of the quote. In fact I agree that it is a choice most people will have to make. But I can not stress this enough. This burden falls on adults, not children. If you make a child make this choice, I will come find you and beat the absolute shit out of you. Children should not have to fight wars that their parents started before they even reach adulthood. Mini rant over.

9.       What questions do you ask yourself when drafting a WIP?

So I don’t generally start a draft until I know what all the major events are and what order they are occurring in. That means I tend to ask myself: what is the plot? Why do my characters give a shit? What am I doing to these poor characters? Generally, the answer is just pain. I like putting my characters through a whole lot of shit.

10.  A fellow writer once said that “we’ve all trapped Sims in the swimming pool.” What are the “trapping Sims in the pool” moments in your stories?

Oh my god. In Hidden Realms, I killed a character in order to force the issue of the Holy Roman Empire to attack our main characters. Only I realized after I wrote that, that it meant one point of view wasn’t going to cut it when half the plot takes place after death. I had to go change the entire story to have 6 point of views. I’m still screaming at myself.

11.  What’s your favorite bad metaphor?

She had brown eyes like mud. (yes I know this is a simile, but still.)

12.  Do you have any pets in you WIP(s)??

Daisy has a pet raven, and a pet mountain lion. I mean they’re not really pets, so much as companions, but it counts. I think Vivian has a fish in her office, but like it doesn’t have a name and her brother is the one who feeds it, so does it count?

13.  How many story names have you gone through so far?

Lost was always Lost. Hidden Realms didn’t have a title for about a year, then suddenly one of my friends started referring to it as the book series in which all the realms are found, and then Hidden Realms became the title. It’s the title of the series though. The first book is called the “The merging of Realms.” (The readers won’t understand its meaning until the second book, but that’s called foreshadowing.) The Destined series came about because of a moodboard made for the main character where someone summarized her as Destined for War and I went “oh that’s perfect for the whole series.” Silence is a shitty placement title, so I can refer to the book. It definitely won’t be marketed as that. If you have suggestions for it, please tell me.

14.  Are there any important bodies of water in your story??

We cross the ocean in like all of them, so yes. All the oceans. Just all of them. A couple important rivers too.

15.  Describe an oc with ten or less words,,,

Daisy: A wild fae with anger management issues.

Adrian: A prince who really wants family but never succeeds.

Lulu: A vampire with a human fiancé and twin witch children.

16.  What was the inspo behind your story’s name?

Haha. I kind of answered those in question 13 except for Lost. Lost is a book about children choosing a revolution that will almost certainly kill them in order to save a world that was lost centuries if not millenniums before they were born. So they are Lost ones. The title should be Lost.

17.  What’s the most you’ve written in one day?

If you mean new words, I once hand-wrote five chapters in an 8 hour car ride to avoid dealing with grief. If you mean most written period, I typed 31,756 words in three hours from a journal I had hand-written it in.

18.  Are there any couples in your story that you find really cute??

Lulu and Octavian are goals. Daisy and Leahsidhe are my baby lesbians, who definitely don’t get a happy ending. Please don’t ship them. It does not end well. I’m a terrible person.

19.  Do any of your pc’s have allergies? If so, what??

Do any of them have allergies? I have a gut feeling Balthazar has some allergies, but he is not fully developed yet, so I can’t easily tell you what they are. Its some kind of plant. We’re going to find out when they move to the woods.

20.  Is there any lgbt+ rep in your story?

There is a shit ton. I am lgbt+, so are the vast majority of my characters. Adrian is asexual. Daisy is pansexual. Leahsidhe is bisexual. Ruby is lesbian. Suno and Balthazar are gay. Those are the ones who have names. I have ideas for other works that have so many sexualities, its going to be an adventure.

21.  Do any of your oc’s have tattoos?

Rose has an entire sleeve on both arms. They’re for all the 28 of the members of the revolution. When Daisy’s baby is born, she adds one for her too. Its one of the only happy scenes in Lost. (author runs away)

22.  What’s your favourite friend pairing trope?

Friend pairing trope. Being able to communicate without talking. I love that shit.

 My questions for people:

1.       Who is your favorite OC?

2.       How many WIPs do you have?

3.       How often do you write?

4.       Why did you get into writing?

5.       Have you created any moodboards for your work and if so what are they?

6.       Where do you write most?

7.       What’s your favorite part of writing?

8.       What is your favorite quote?

9.       Are there any authors who inspired you to start writing?

10.  If you had to publish one of your WIPs right now with no more editing, what would you choose?

11.  What is your favorite genre?

Tagging people: @marewriteblr @quartzses @elizabethsyson @rainy-rose @awritinglen @scottishhellhound @cometworks @cheshireinunderland @writing-is-a-bitch @writebruh @comfypitbull

#Tag game #Writing #Writeblr #I can't believe I forgot the tags the first time.

[riderofthewind]

So I just finished reading Mortal Engines

And I needed to rant a bit about differences between the book and movie and why they were poor choices. I’m going to try and avoid generic ‘It’s different so it’s bad’ arguments because those suck, good movie adaptations of books that don’t massively diverge from the book itself are rare, it’s an essential part of making something great in most cases but in this case...oh god maybe they should have just done a shot for shot copy of the book.

This is gonna be a long one, but please join me on this nitpicky angry journey (and let me know the shit you liked/hated about the movie.)

OH GOD THIS MOVIE WAS SO TERRIBLE BUT THIS BOOK IS RATHER GOOD.

Warning: This will be nitpicky but I just...need to.

I'm a firm believer that a movie adaptation does not need to be faithful to the book it is based on to be a great movie. I love The Shining (I actually like the movie a lot more than the book but that's a rant for another day) however Mortal Engines manages to fail both at being a good movie and a good adaptation.

THE BEGINNING

The first like 30 minutes of the movie are almost shot for shot from the intro of the book and it's genuinely very good in both instances. London eats a small town, Hester boards, she tries to stab Valentine (in the movie she succeeds but he's fine. It's a change that I don't really understand because it doesn't actually change anything) and is chased off of London by Tom who is booted off by Valentine to cover his tracks. Tom and Hester group up because Hester is injured, they get picked up by another town who pretend to be nice and then are going to be sold as slaves.

I'm not going to go shot for shot through the changes the movie makes from the book because that'd be pointless. But I specifically wanted to recap this intro section because it's so close to the book and because where it diverges is mostly meaningless (and awful product placement.) However the part where it splits from the book is not just signposted, the script writer literally wrote into the script criticism of the book at this point in the movie. In the book, Hester and Tom remove a floor plating from their room and jump out, escaping before being sold as slaves. In the movie, they attempt this but Hester is too injured to make the jump out of the room and instead they are rescued by Anna Fang moments later. This makes sense and is a change that on the face of it I kinda like because yeah, it makes sense. Hester could barely walk at that point how did she make that jump? But the script in the film is so fucking bad that Hester may as well at this point go "I can't make the jump, i'm too injured" then turn to the camera and wink.

After this point the movie diverges in a lot of ways from the book, although it still follows mostly the same plot it just cuts out a bunch of stuff and ruins every single character then turns into Star Wars at the end because reasons.

SO

WHY THE MOVIE SUCKS

Okay, i'm going to get really nitpicky about specific changes that were for the worse that helped ruin this movie but to start with let me just summary and say. The movie sucks primarily because it's written terribly. Almost every character is reduced to shitty one liners after the intro, worst of all being Anna Fang, Valentine is reduced into generic villain, but even the characters who are similar to their book versions are just written so poorly that what worked in the book doesn't work on screen. Also Shrike's name sound so much like "Shrek" when being said out loud that it's hilarious. But overall it does stay surprisingly close to the book in plot up until the end, redacting a lot of stuff but rarely adding additional fluff. The way I'd break it down would be First act: Most similar to the book, overall very good. If the whole movie as this good it'd be a great movie.

Second act: Starts to diverge from the book to shorten it down for the length of a film. The writing is generally very very bad here, primarily because this section focusses on Shrike and Anna Fang. The former of which is reduced to saying "Kill Hester" over and over and the latter of whom is reduced to saying shitty one liners.

Third act: It's Star Wars but bad and has almost nothing to do with the book other than the location.

Also, I'm going to focus on story and characters here but keep in your mind that after the first act the cinematography gets terrible. Like genuinely it feels like a different movie also in terms of how poorly shot and edited the whole movie was after Act 1.

THADDEUS VALENTINE

Portrayed by Hugo Weaving in the film (doing his best Sean Bean impression) and uh yeah, the changes to him are central to the changes to the whole plot and basically what makes the movie so bad.

To begin with, Valentine is somewhat mysterious to start with. We know he's the Mayor's right hand man, he boots Tom off London after he hears Hester claim Valentine killed her parents but otherwise is charismatic and generally comes off as a very affable and likeable person. He is outspoken about the class divides in London having risen up from being a scavenger to the upper echelons of society himself. Both the movie and the book do this, it's great, he's a great character.

Valentine murdered Hester Shaw's parents long before the start of the book to take a piece of a weapon called MEDUSA back to London, which is used to rebuild the weapon which they intend to use to murder lots of people and basically make London an unstoppable monster. The big change the movie makes to Valentine's character is that this is his plan. Valentine does this in secret somehow, murders the mayor, stages a coup and takes London off course towards Asia to start firing off Medusa willy nilly and kill everyone and "save London" because they'll have so much to consume.

In the book this is the Mayor's plan and Valentine is being blackmailed into doing it because he wants his daughter to grow up in high society and have a better life. This is much better for a variety of reasons but the main one being that book doesn't reveal this until much later (in fact Valentine isn't even in most of the book) and it is foreshadowed by an earlier encounter with a bunch of pirates which didn't make it into the movie (which is fine because it's rather superfluous other than this foreshadowing.)

These changes aren't inherently bad but the way they are handled in the movie it basically just results in Valentine being an incredibly charismatic but evil villain the whole way through with absolutely no depth to his character outside of that. In the book what he did to get where he is puts strain on him and his daughter's relationship in a way that builds and results in his eventual suicide by refusing to escape with Hester and Tom, despite Hester's somewhat forgiveness of him seeing how hard he is trying to save his innocent daughter.

LUKE, I AM YOUR FATHER

It's heavily implied in the book that Valentine is Hester's father and not her mother's husband. But this only comes up like once in a conversation between Valentine and his daughter, Hester never learns about it and it's kind of a non-thing. It's only really there to show that Valentine was willing to kill someone who might be his daughter in order to build this life for his definite daughter.

In the movie, this revelation is made during the climactic battle between Hester and Valentine on the back of a ship during a fucking dogfight and oh god everything about it is the worst. He literally picks her up and dangles her over the edge of the ship and almost line for line repeats the Darth Vader father revelation from Star Wars. It's insane and goddamn I hate it.

SPEAKING OF STAR WARS

The movie changes the whole final sequence so that instead of it being a struggle for survival for each of the characters and the big climactic defeat of the villain being caused by the fact he was literally meddling with powers he didn't understand (in this case, old tech than they haphazardly rebuilt and didn't know how to fix when it broke) to being a generic big budget action sequence that copies more and more stuff from Star Wars. There's literally a sequence where a bunch of fighters are taking out guns so that someone can do a trench run. The action cumulates in Tom flying into the heart of London and blowing up the engines. It's just bad and generic and literally just Star Wars. It's boring as hell. As mentioned earlier, it's also just not shot well at all and it's a mess. They do these weird awful zoom ins every time a scene takes place inside MEDUSA and it's hideous and I have no idea why it's the way it is.

Other stuff:

ANNA FANG

I've mentioned a few times in this rant that Anna Fang only speaks in one liners in the movie but I can't get across exactly how shitty it is. She's damn cool in the book and the way they translated that to the movie was basically "she has a snarky one liner for every situation."

She does look cool though.

VALENTINE'S DAUGHTER

Katherine I think is her name? I literally just finished this book an hour ago and I don't remember. One of my complaints about the movie at the time was that she is a nothing character who does basically nothing. In the book she is a nothing character who does basically nothing but she also has a pet wolf. She exists solely to give Valentine a reason for being blackmailed, which in the movie isn't even a thing so she may as well have been cut out of it entirely. She sucks in both though so whatever.

HESTER SHAW

She is constantly described as ugly and deformed after what Valentine did to her. In the movie she has a kinda cute scar but that's it. This sucks but again, whatever. It's a movie, that's how this shit rolls unfortunately. It's hard to market your movie when the protagonist looks like Two Face in TDK.

All in all, I'm glad I went on this journey of reading the book after seeing and hating the movie. It was fun in its own weird way. I definitely enjoyed it more than being excited for an adaptation of a book I liked only for it to suck at least. That movie was bad but it led me to reading a good book so it did something of worth.

#Mortal Engines #spoilers #books #ranting

[jade-brooks-photography]

Studio Workshop

29th November // Week One

What was this workshop?

This workshop was to increase our knowledge on setting up and using the equipment in the studio independently. This was a workshop for only the photographers, we began with using a new camera, the Mamiya RB67 medium format Film camera which only takes 10 shots / images. We were first shown how to take the camera apart and the different parts of the camera. In total this camera is in 4 separate parts; the lens, the box, the back where the film goes in and the divider between the box and the film which cuts out the light making it light proof. Unlike a modern camera, the shutter to the Mamiya does not go off automatically, after taking a photo you close the shutter with a switch, followed by another switch to wind the film to the next shot, a complicated although quick to learn process.

Medium Format Contact Sheet;

We developed the film roles with our fingers crossed as the fill we used was 18 years old. Ive read up before that out of date film can give off really different effects to the images, this gave me a chance to test this theory. As a group of 4, we only had 5 shots each to take as we only had two reals of film for this specific camera, which only had ten shots each. These in the contact sheet below were my outcomes from the film. Im really happy with how they turned out, concidering the film was expired, but some of the other girls in my groups didn't turn out too lucky, as some of the film way damaged, and the prints came out with a light ring around them, which actually gave the image a really unique look to it. 

What ive found from these shots in the studio came out quite similar to Damon Bakers black and white studio shot, they came out looking quite flat, a low contrast between the blacks and whites as there was more grey in most of them and had a sort of grainy look to them. Personally im really impressed in how these images came out, you can clearly see the shadows and highlights which helps the image stand out alittle more. This image once scanned in actually came out blue, im not sure why, but as is fades to the sides it goes to grey, I think this gave the image a strange but effective look, as its only but where the model is, giving it a cyanotype look with the blue.

This image has the same effect as the last with the blue cyanotype look to it, but I got her to pull a different face, and look straight at me, this really shew the shadows and highlights made by the flash and soft box. I really like how her hat also casts a shadow on her head the opposite side to the shadows on her face, this always makes me look at the image more to try and figure it out. You can also see white marks on this photo more than the other which I think gives the image. This image also shows lots of tones but light on texture.

Conclusion:

Overall, I think this experimentation with the expired film was successful. This is because in the workshop itself, it definitely improved my knowledge on using film cameras, but also teaching me new skills in using and older camera model, and using a dim camera in the studio which I've never done before. Also, with the outcomes of these images, they came out clearer than I thought they would, showing more tones, shadows and highlights than I thought would happen. Not only that, but the way the textures of the images come out and the weak contrast is a really good link to Damon Bakers work successfully.  

Digital Contact Sheet;

We then changed up the studio to a white background using hard lighting with a tungsten spot light and a ring light. We wanted to experiment with colour gel filters. This was another technique we hadn't yet used or learnt properly in the studio. This experiment was to respond to the brief in a sense that we were switching from shooting in black and white, to colour and what is a better way to do that than bringing extra colour into the shoots than using sheets of coloured plastic over the lights. We decided to use a white background as it made the colour more vibrant in the background.

This is the coloured contact sheet, we decided to shoot these on a digital camera as we wanted the images to come out much sharper and have brighter colours. One a digital camera its much easier to see where you’re going wrong, for example; if the light reading was wrong on the light meter, or I wanted the colours darker. In this shoot I took the chance to experiment with my camera angles, most of them we quite low angles but keeping level with the model, not only that but I attempted long/full body shots as if for a fashion shoot, but also trying mid shots to attempt to capture the meeting of the coloured light.

Edits;

This photo was one of my favourites, this is because I shot it as a close up so she fills the whole image, and slightly coming out the image too and more to the left side. This gives me a feeling as if shes going to fall back, this is because of the placement of her hand almost touching the floor and her actually looking down at it too. I also feel like this image reminds me of a sport/active wear shoot with the hat covering her face and having a clear view of her shoes. This image is the edit of the original. What I did to this photo was use Adobe Lightroom to change the colour of the lights, instead of keeping the dullish colours in the prints, I decided to raise the contrast of the image which made the black on her clothes and the colours more deeper, I then raised the brightness setting to make the highlights stand out against the blacks. To change the shades of the colours I raised the vibrant setting to make the colours pop.

Experimentation;

I wanted to experiment with this image, so when editing I decided to change the hue settings on the photo, this made the colours actually change making the visual concept of the image changed. Colour in images is usually used to represent a specific mood, For example; Red = anger or Lust, Blue = Sadness, Green = Envy, Purple = Pride, Yellow = Happiness. Changing the colours of the image gave different moods to each shot which I enjoyed working with. Another thing I thought about when laying these images out, was that it reminded me of the Pop Art Movement by Andy Warhol. Making colours pop and stand out in for separate images and turning it into one.

Long Shot;

This is another edited shot off the contact sheet, I really liked editing the reds and blues to be pinks and purples, Whats different about this shot compared to the other is that this is a long/full body shot of the model. This type of shot with the crouching pose really makes the shadows pop out on the floor. I also love hoe the strengthened light on her face makes it look like her skin is half blue and half pink, this makes the image look unusual and different to other shots and very manipulated.

Conclusion; 

Overall, I think this experimental colour shoot was again very successful. There are still lots of room for improvements, to use different colour filters and different combination of colours. Id also like to use lighter clothes - this is because in this shoot I just had black clothes and the colours didn't really show up, so im thinking of developing this shoot by doing another with brighter clothes to see how it works and turns out.

[lechevaliermalfet]

Experiential storytelling is awesome, you guys

I’m currently hip-deep in Mass Effect Andromeda, and enjoying myself immensely.  So let’s talk about something else for a bit.

One of the things I really like in games is what I call experiential storytelling.  I can’t think of a name that’s less of a pretentious mouthful, sorry.  To explain what I mean, let’s talk for a bit about something completely different: Watchmen.  I promise I’m going somewhere with this.  (WARNING: LONG)

Now, there was a reason why neckbearded comic book guys worldwide got grumpy about the Watchmen movie, and it wasn’t because their Lord and Savior Alan Moore has a hate-boner for his works getting adapted.  Not just because of that, anyway.

(To be fair, Alan Moore probably has perfectly valid reasons for not liking his works being adapted.  But, after having seen V for Vendetta prior to even knowing there was a graphic novel it was based on, and having loved every minute of it, I feel like his being irritable over these things is maybe sometimes out of proportion).

The thing that makes Watchmen great isn’t that it’s a wide-awake-and-screaming vivisection of the superhero genre of comics (though it is that, and that’s certainly a part of the whole phenomenon), but because it really is a story that could only be told the way it was told, and with the impact it was told, in comics. I have to imagine that there were legions of film critics who settled into their theater seats in anticipation and, when the ending credits rolled, just sort of went, “That’s… it?  That’s what comics fans have been having weird, sexless orgasms about since the 80s?”  And the answer to that is, well, no.  It’s not. Not quite.

Part of what makes Watchmen great, what really carries it beyond being just a really clever deconstruction of superhero stories in general, is how it’s told.  

Watchmen leans on the strengths of comics as a storytelling medium to tell its story by doing things only comics can really do.  This isn’t really a new phenomenon, of course.  If you talk to film students about this sort of thing, they’ll call it ‘filmic language’, which refers to the sort of functional vocabulary movies have built up – ways of using camera angles, lighting, rapid cuts and long shots, panning and close-ups and focus and God knows what all to place unstated but very present emphasis on whatever’s happening onscreen.  It’s how (for instance) horror movies create tension and surprise – it’s how they scare you even when you know something scary’s coming.

Watchmen uses ‘comics language’ to do pretty much the same things.  Just a single example: It makes (at times) rapid jumps back and forth between two unrelated events to underscore the ways in which they’re thematically related, with passages of dialogue or narration in one scene used to comment on the events of the other.  You can’t do this in a book (at least not to the frequency and extent that Watchmen does it) or in a movie.  In a book, it would create so many asterisk breaks you’d have more white space than text on the page.  In a movie, it would require literally dizzying cuts.  But the sense of timing in comics is different.  Events can happen quickly, which is communicated by the placement and sizing and shape and content of panels.  Yet at the same time, you have all the time in the world to unpack what you’re seeing, because it’s occurring in a self-progressed medium.  Time and timing in comics both expands and contracts at the same time.

There’s a scene in the comic where Doctor Manhattan reflects on how interlinked the events are that got him to where he is.  It’s all out of chronological order, because in his current state of being, he doesn’t really perceive time in the same linear way that we do, and so because the whole scene is from his perspective, it’s also out of order.  Much like a certain other doctor I know of, to Doctor Manhattan, time is a lot of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey… stuff.  But time and timing in comic books are unique. You can speed up and slow down with whiplash-inducing change in a comic, and it can all be perfectly fine if you do it right.  In movies, you’d call it sloppy editing, dock a star from your review, and go on about your day.  In a book, you’d shake your head and wonder whether the editor – if there was one – forgot to take their medication that day.  But thanks to the unique sense of pacing of the medium of comics, this works, and is in fact relatively easy to keep track of.  This isn’t just a neat side-effect of how comics work; it’s a part of comics language.  It’s a storytelling tool.

Watchmen was one of the first comics to lean so hard on the structure of the medium to help it tell its story.  And so of course it was a superhero story.  What better story to tell in such a uniquely comic-book way than the genre comic books are, rightly or wrongly, best known for.  I’m not nearly expert enough to say for sure whether it was the first comic book to do this, but Watchmen was probably the first to do it so often and so self-consciously.

The short of it (since we’ve gone over the long) is that, just like part of what makes a great novel truly great is the way the words seem to ring in the mind and capture images and thoughts and feelings with exactitude and an almost poetic flair, a good part of what makes Watchmen truly great is the way it’s constructed to capitalize on the language of its medium.

I’m a firm believer that video games have the same potential in their own right.  Hence this post.

Now, I’m not in any way trying to indicate that I feel this is the One True Way that games have to tell their stories.  As much as I like to bag on, say, Hideo Kojima for directing his Metal Gear Solid games like he wishes they were movies, I do actually enjoy games that use cut scenes and full-motion-video to do most of the legwork in their storytelling.  Mass Effect does pretty much the same thing, after all.  There are the bits where you’re running for cover and shooting everything that isn’t you, and then there are the deeply affecting story and character parts, and seldom do the two overlap in any really meaningful way.  And the series is probably in the running for “personal favorite new-ish franchise of the last decade” for me.

Also in the running for that consideration would be the loose “series” comprised of Demon’s Souls, the three Dark Souls games, and Bloodborne.  The lattermost especially.

I recently finished Bloodborne, though I can’t really say I’m done with it; @el-draco-bizarro is perpetually amused at how much my relevant Pinterest board has blown the hell up with Bloodborne art and images.  It’s still on my mind in a way that even the Souls games haven’t quite managed.

I’ve read a lot of people comparing the Dark Souls games to the original Legend of Zelda, with their higher focus on combat, the abandoned, hostile-creature-infested world, and the sense of loneliness and isolation. I’m not going to say the comparison’s invalid.  Personally, though, after a lot of thought, I tend to think that the Souls games and Bloodborne are a lot closer to the Metroid series.

Full disclosure: I am a pretty big Metroid fan.  Some gushing may ensue.  My Pinterest board for that has likewise gotten ridiculous.

Honestly, in writing, it’s hard to pin down the difference between the Zelda series and the Metroid series.  The main problem is that the games just feel different in a way that’s not at all easy to pin down.  It used to be easy, kind of.  Zelda games were top-down oriented and emphasized ever-increasing ability to navigate the world (via the use of an expanding array of tools and weapons) and some non-linear exploration, whereas any given Metroid game was a side-scrolling platformer which emphasized ever-increasing ability to navigate the world (via direct upgrades to the character’s weapons and personal abilities) and aggressively non-linear exploration. In the move to 3D, the line separating these franchises got awfully blurry, thematic differences aside.

But Metroid as a series has always thrived on its atmosphere of loneliness and a sense of eerie menace.  Its settings frequently have you traversing the ruins of ancient civilizations without ever really explaining any of them.  They’re just there.  There were people who lived here once; they’re gone now; that’s it.  The settings are part of the window-dressing.  They exist to create atmosphere and a sense of quiet abandonment and loss.  The explanations, when present, are never really comprehensive.

Of course, in reality, Bloodborne and the Souls games are all very much their own thing.  It’s reductive to say “Like Metroid but...”  At the same time, it’s tempting to point back at predecessor games, to say “it’s like X, but with a dash of Y, and a hint of Z, and…”  It forms a useful frame of reference for people who might be unfamiliar, also, and it’s interesting (to me, at least) to dig into a game and try to figure out just exactly where it came from, as an idea.  Nothing exists in a vacuum, after all.  And it’s hard for me personally not to be interested in this sort of thing when I’ve gotten to see so much of the medium of video games develop and evolve throughout my life.

Like with the Metroid series, the storytelling and mechanics and progression are all welded so firmly together in Bloodborne that you can’t really spot the joins any more. They all feed into each other to create a whole and singular experience.  

Bloodborne doesn’t go out of its way to tell you its story.  It is, in fact, very aggressively about letting you come to it.  There are a small handful of brief cut scenes you’ll run across in a single play through, and the rest of it is up to you to piece together from context.

Some of this context comes from atmosphere.  The story of Bloodborne is going on all around you, from the crumbling urban decrepitude of Yharnam where you start the game, to the terrifying, exposed openness of the Nightmare Frontier, to the venomous-reptile-infested swamp at the bottom of the Lost Woods that is rendered with such loving attention to nauseating detail that you can smell it – fucking smell it – despite being displayed in a strictly audiovisual medium.  

These things all tell a story in hints and implications, one of dark, horrifying secrets, and a system that was never very stable in the first place and is now entering the final stages of breakdown before everything flies apart.  It starts with your nameless character seeking a cure (The ‘Pale Blood’, which is never actually explained, but like so much else, there are hints as to what this refers to) for some unnamed disease, and winding up trapped in a falling-apart Victorian-ish city that is wracked with what looks for all the world like a lycanthropy plague.  From there, it eventually takes a hard left into Lovecraft territory.

Some of the storytelling also comes in the form of item descriptions.  I know this sounds weird, so let me explain a bit.

Pretty much any item you find in the game, whether it’s some consumable thing like a firebomb, or a weapon or other piece of equipment, will have a description with some flavor text.  “This sword was originally forged by so-and-so, who got eaten by things best left to the imagination” or “This coat is similar to the ones the first Hunters to protect Yharnam wore, back in whenever, at the direction of so-and-so,” and on it goes.  Just brief little snippets to give you some context, much like the flavor text on cards for Magic: The Gathering.  Except it kind of goes beyond flavor, here, because a lot of this stuff actually helps to hint at what’s going on in the world. And maybe that seems kind of unfair, because after all, you’d have to go looking up the item descriptions first of all, and second, you may very well miss a lot of items (it’s that kind of game). 

Well, there are lots of loading screens.  I mean, the game has to load every time you die and this is basically a Souls game, so even if you’re an actual sorcerer, you’ll be dying.  A lot.  

So, so much dying.

So the loading screens show you the descriptions for random items.  The developers do this in all the Dark Souls games as well, of course.  It’s not unique to Bloodborne, that just happens to be the one I’m most interested in talking about at the moment.  At first, it seems just innocuous.  Like, okay, at least they’re giving you something to read while the game loads. It beats the hell out of staring at a small animated icon in the corner of the screen, which is what most games do. But then you realize that… no. No, this is actually important.  This is something you should be paying attention to.

And I mean, why wouldn’t you?  It’s right there.  This is about as in-your-face as storytelling gets in Bloodborne or any of the Souls games.  (Well, Demon’s Souls has slightly more conventional cut scenes and doesn’t do the item description thing, but every work has a rough draft).

And aside from the environment and the item descriptions and all the million subtle details that you notice in your progress through the game, even the game’s mechanics get in on the storytelling action.

An example: Bloodborne has an expendable resource called Insight.  It’s meant to represent the degree to which the player’s AFGNCAAP recognizes the more illusory aspects of the reality in which he or she finds himself.  It can be gained by using certain items, and can be spent in a certain place to gain access to some rare equipment.  However, you also gain Insight whenever you first encounter any of the boss enemies, and a little more when you defeat one, which follows from the narrative.  It’s a concrete measurement of how much about the setting your character understands, based in part on how far you’ve dug into said setting.

And it gets better!  The higher your Insight, the more you literally see about the world.  The appearance of your enemies will be altered in ways great and small (and almost always for the more disturbing, typically involving eyes where eyes absolutely do not fucking belong).  You begin to see just how much the world is held together by the will of creatures that would earn a grim nod of approval from H.P. Lovecraft.

This is gaming language.  The use of the game’s environment, its mechanics, the very way in which you progress through the game, to tell a story.  Most of these methods are perfectly natural in games, and make them engrossing, enthralling, compelling, immersive, etc.  Whereas they would be clunky and ham-fisted at best in a book, and are (I’m convinced) a large part of the reason why even story-heavy and highly cinematic games like Silent Hill make for disappointing movies (though to be fair, the Silent Hill movie was bad for more reasons than just the difficulty of adapting gaming language well).

The interesting thing is that none of the Souls games have an especially complex story, nor does Bloodborne.  The plots are mysterious and secretive, but not especially complicated.  But what makes them gripping is not just the mystery of them, or even the compelling world they’re set in (though God do those help), but the simple fact that you are a part of the story.  There is something about being more than an uninvolved observer, about being an actor within the world, that bridges a kind of gap, and makes even the relatively uncomplicated mysteries of a game like Dark Souls or, say, Shadow of the Colossus seem profound and gripping.  

That’s gaming language, too.

#Gaming #bloodborne #effortpost #dark souls