I feel like people are thinking that My Immortal was a genuine example of Rose Cristo’s writing when she was 15 yrs old, but the official description for her memoir that just came out confirms what I have always believed, that my immortal was a joke/trollfic, although the reason why she wrote it is something no one would have ever guessed:
A heartbreaking and wryly hopeful memoir of surviving the NYC foster care system―and how one girl’s “masterpiece of literary disaster” (io9.com) connected her to a community that could help her find her lost brother.
In the early 2000s, Rose Christo was separated from her five-year-old brother and shuttled between foster homes in Brooklyn to the Bronx and back again. Desperate to be reunited with her sibling, she traveled the five boroughs, unable to find any trace of him, as New York state’s child care agencies failed to help her time and again.
Then, with the help of one beloved foster sister, Rose created an infamous piece of Harry Potter fanfiction titled My Immortal, posting it online under the pseudonym XXXbloodyrists666XXX. The “forty-four chapters and 22,000 words of hysterical, typo-laden hyperbole” (BuzzFeed.com) went viral as the most notoriously terrible fanfic ever read by the community. For years, fans, writers, and editors researched, debated, and contested the story’s origin and its mysterious author: was this grammatically-challenged rant actually written by a suicidal Goth teenager named Tara Gilesbe living in Dubai, or was this a hoax perpetrated by a group of professional authors making fun of fanfiction?
The truth is a gripping, compelling, and surprisingly funny story of how a young girl infiltrated and used the fan fiction community to search for her brother by baiting their attention with a deliberately badly written tale, creating a ten-year mystery that garnered pop culture media attention and remained unsolved―until now.
https://www.amazon.com/Under-Same-Stars-Rose-Christo/dp/1250147034
whoops i forgot to finish my thought.
anyway, if her goal in writing this fic was to get the attention of her brother thru the fandom by making it so egregiously, infamously bad that the entire harry potter fandom will have to hear about it, including her brother. then it succeeded. really well. overwhelmingly well. too well. thischarmingmothman’s 14,000 word essay argues that it is an intentionally put together, perfect concoction of madness intended to get people’s attention, and it is!
Honestly, viewed in this light, my immortal actually appears to be testimony to Rose Christo’s genius at 15 years old.
Published
lavenduers 