#(paraphrased from memory; there were too many typos to remember correctly)

[marypsue]

@ps-dane said:

Friend reblogged this, what is My Immortal?

Congratulations, you're one of today's lucky 10,000!

In case you don't click through to that Fanlore article for whatever reason, the short version is: My Immortal was a fic, nominally connected to Harry Potter (one of the biggest internet fandoms in the world at the time) but really almost entirely unrelated to that, which was written and posted to Fanfiction.net in the early aughts. It is famous as possibly the worst fic of all time, managing to combine nearly every common element of early-aughts fic that people tended to complain about. Because of this, there's been speculation ever since it first started posting that it might be a trollfic or parody. The author's never been definitively identified, although at least one person's come forward claiming to be her, and there's never really been solid evidence to prove the fic was either satire or sincere.

It's one of my favourite things the internet has ever produced, and its obsession with describing the main character's clothes, lionisation of all things 'goffick', laughably preposterous sex, incoherent plot, and atrocious spelling and grammar, combined with the author's habit of getting into comment-fights with reviewers...sounded a little too similar to some of the scandals coming out of booktok I keep hearing about secondhand.

'Dark academia villain/heroine romance' series that is the darling of booktok until, very slowly, people start to realise that, despite having its grammar and spelling cleaned up and its plot points massaged into something resembling coherence, it is, in fact, merely a serial-numbers-filed-off version of My Immortal.