Stars of the Internet: Tara Gillespie

Love is apparently spelled OMG

Another year, another whole continent of Internet content I've yet to explore. Hop on board the SS Net Insanity and set sail with me, ye salty dogs and swashbuckling whatevers, to the distant land of Fan Fiction! Though I've never discussed fanfic on this blog, it's a topic that seems practically tailor-made for what we do here. Maybe I've been hesitant because ripping on fan fiction is more or less just mocking teenagers and while I'm certainly not above taking a shotgun to that particular barrel of fish I recognize that doing so is more often cheap and cruel than entirely deserved. After all, there are precious few teens who don't fill their lives with embarrassment and disappointment. The deciding factor concerning fanfic is that the adolescent writers of the stuff go so far as to create a permanent public record of their own humiliation. To make things fair on all other fanfic authors I will undoubtedly mock on this site, I'm going to set a standard today by visiting the work of one Tara Gillespie, aka Ebony.

Ms. Gillespie is a creature Of the Internet who reached a certain level of dubious stardom back in 2006 when her epically fan fiction-y story My Immortal was deleted from FanFiction.net, not because it was extremely violent or unacceptably pornographic, but because it was just too bad to stay on the site.

Let's contemplate this for a moment. It has been scientifically proven that all fan fiction is of no artistic merit whatsoever and is indeed painful to read without the distracting salt and lime that is irony. So, FanFiction.net, a site dedicated entirely to this utterly risible content, could not possibly host good writing. This means that My Immortal is such an unconscionably bad work of quasi-literature that it couldn't find a place among the worst writing on all of the Internet. Folks, I dare say that Tara Gillespie achieved Ed Wood level hackery with her maiden voyage into creative writing.

An individual going by the handle WolfSoldier25, herself a writer of forehead-slapping fanfic, re-posted Gillespie's story (thanks to Jennifer for the link) a couple months ago as both a tribute and an attention-grab. As such, I have had a chance to scan My Immortal to confirm with my famously clinical approach that it is indeed an incredibly ridiculous wreck of words and collections of letters attempting to be words that reveal rare, even lethal, levels of suck. The curt chapters read half like a conversation between two intoxicated 13-year-old girls and half like a ciphered military communique. Somewhere in there is a pile of goth cliches and a not-so-innocent crush on one of J.K. Rowling's characters from the Harry Potter series. Also, use of the word "flirtily".

My favorite part of My Immortal is not the story itself, but Gillespie's quick introductions that usually implore preps (or prepz) to stop flaming in the reviews section. This is what makes My Immortal the quintessential fanfic. Even when given so many reasons to stop writing, Gillespie persists, driving deeper and deeper into the............... Forbidden Forest! of fan fiction hell where no life advice can possibly reach her.

With Tara Gillespie's My Immortal as a gold standard for fanfic mockery, I will occasionally dip into the clearly marked poison well of FanFiction.net and other such sites to pick out the most laughably bad stories for your enjoyment. Each story will be rated on a scale of 1 to 5 Gillespies, with the option for half Gillespie increments. The higher the rating, the closer to My Immortal in overall quality a story is. For example, user MiraClarinet's story The Bandies would only receive 1 Gillespie because while it's still a dull slog about a bunch of high school stereotypes it's actually not that bad on a technical level, i.e. few misspellings, no awful l33t speak and no real incorporation of somebody else's fictional characters. Other entries, like the many Twilight-inspired poems, will automatically receive a base of two Gillespies given their poor writing and source material.

In my own perverse way, I'm thankful for Tara Gillespie's My Immortal because now I know just how bad fanfic can be and though it is indeed horrible, I can withstand it for long enough to cull some minor benefit from it. Look for more fanfic reviews on Net Insanity in 2010.