Entry 33: Literary Atrocities - My Immortal, Chapter 8
Author: Professor Bartholomew Barrington III, Esq.
I find myself once again plunging into the abyss. Chapter 8 of 'My Immortal' abandons whatever tenuous grip it had on the Harry Potter canon and descends into pure, unrestrained fanfiction delirium.
The author's note is, as always, a masterpiece of unearned confidence:
AN: stop flassing ok! if u do den u r a prep!
"Flassing." The evolution of the term "flaming" has apparently reached a new linguistic low. To criticize this work is to be labeled a "prep," an insult deployed with the frequency and nuance of a malfunctioning car alarm.
The Classroom Spectacle
We rejoin the narrative in the immediate aftermath of the protagonist, Ebony, screaming profanity at Harry "Vampire" Potter in the middle of a lesson.
Everyone in the class stared at me and then Draco came into the room even though he was naked and started begging me to take him back. “Ebony, it’s not what you think!” Draco screamed sadly.
Draco Malfoy has sprinted from his dormitory to the classroom, entirely nude, to engage in a lover's quarrel. One must admire the author's complete disregard for the concept of physical security, faculty intervention, or basic human dignity. And how, pray tell, does one scream sadly?
The Rewriting of Canon
The sheer lunacy of Draco's public indecency is immediately overshadowed by the introduction of a new character:
My friend B’loody Mary Smith smiled at me understatedly. She flipped her long waste-length gothic black hair and opened her crimson eyes like blood that she was wearing contact lenses on. She had pale white skin that she was wearing white makeup on. Hermione was kidnapped when she was born. Her real parents are vampires and one of them is a witch but Voldemort killed her mother and her father committed suicide because he was depressed about it. She still has nightmares about it and she is very haunted and depressed. It also turns out her real last name is Smith and not Granger. (Since she has converted to Satanism she is in Slytherin now not Griffindoor. )
Let us attempt to untangle this paragraph. Hermione Granger is now "B'loody Mary Smith." She is a vampire. She wears white makeup over her pale white skin. Her parents were murdered/committed suicide, and she was kidnapped at birth. She has converted to Satanism and has therefore been re-sorted into Slytherin.
The author has taken one of the central protagonists of the series and subjected her to a violent, non-consensual gothic makeover, complete with a tragic backstory that would be rejected by a daytime soap opera for being too melodramatic.
The Climax
The confrontation reaches its crescendo when Ebony addresses "Vampire."
“Vampire, I can’t believe you cheated on me with Draco!” I shouted at him. I don’t know why Ebony was so mad at me. I had went out with Vampire (I’m bi and so is Ebony) for a while but then he broke my heart. He dumped me because he liked Britney, a stupid preppy fucker.
The narrative perspective suddenly shifts from Ebony to Vampire without any grammatical warning, creating a disorienting, schizophrenic effect. We learn that Vampire and Ebony previously dated, but he left her for "Britney, a stupid preppy fucker."
Vampire denies dating Draco, leading Ebony to scream at him, run out of the room, and return to the Forbidden Forest (where she had previously lost her "virility" to Draco, a biological impossibility for a female character). She then bursts into tears.
This is not a story. It is a psychological stress test. I shall require a substantial amount of scotch to recover from "B'loody Mary Smith."