My Immortal and Why I Love It

OKAY so I'm sure we all know the ICONIC "worst fanfiction of all time" My Immortal. I know it's bad, and not even in a "so bad it's good" way, it's just bad writing objectively... but I still adore it with all my heart?? Yes it's cringey but behind that cringe is something genuine. You cannot convince me that this fic was written by a troll or that the fanfic was written with the intention to be bad. 

Am I insane? Probably, considering the amount of time I spend thinking about this stupid piece of cursed Harry Potter fanfiction, especially when I don't even like the source material and completely loathe the author of said source material. 

But even so, I think Tara - beloved author of My Immortal - just speaks to me because I see a lot of my younger self within her and within this piece of bad fanfiction. It's just the edginess, the self-indulgence of the self-insert OC, the way things just fucking happen, and the weird crossover with Back to the Future of all things??? Tara didn't care, she just wrote what she fucking wanted, and I respect her for that. 

Another thing I just need to blabber about is how it's admittedly hard for me to listen to videos talking about My Immortal because so many give too much credit to the idea that the fic was one long trollfic, that it was insincere and made with the intention to be bad. I don't agree with that at   ALL because I was also a young teenager who wrote godawful self-indulgent fanfic about my own Mary Sue self-insert OCs, I just never posted them online (thank god). And those fics that I wrote admittedly had a lot similar themes to My Immortal - the detail on what outfits my characters wore, canon characters were written egregiously out-of-character, and sensitive topics like self-harm, suicide, and assault were poorly tacked in. Plus, I know I'm not the only one who wrote fics like that, because I read a LOT of fanfic on FF.net and DeviantArt in the same vein and enjoyed it all; even if, looking back, those fics weren't exactly good.

I know the argument behind it being a trollfic is to joke on pieces of work like that but cranked up to the extreme, but... idk, to me it just feels like way too much work was put into My Immortal for it to be just simple trolling, especially when you consider Raven's side of things. People always forget that Tara had a co-author named Raven who ALSO wrote fics before My Immortal - fics which, shockingly, shared many themes with My Immortal. There's just too much going on there and too much... preparation for it to just be one big joke? 

Also, I just... really, especially appreciate this fic now as I watch the rise in AI being used to write everything nowadays. If My Immortal was posted today, everyone would accuse it of being AI, and that's... just something I think about more than I should. I guess, in an age of AI creeping into the fanfic scene, I just like to think about humans writing their fanfics - good or bad. In my mind, fanfic will always be good and valid if it is written by a human, and written with genuine love and care, and I guess... that's why I love My Immortal. It is poorly written, to the point that people argue about whether it's a troll or not (it's not), but that doesn't matter because it was made by a human with the desire to create and have fun. And there's a little bit of that desire within all of us, I think, even when we "grow out" of the "writing bad fanfic" ages of 10-18. Especially after that, actually.

And I just think that's neat :3