As usual, sorry for the delay, life happened, etc., etc.
This is a bit of an unusual chapter, for two reasons. First, this is the infamous “troll chapter,” allegedly written by another FF.net user who was able to log into Tara’s account and write her own addition to this story. Second, said alleged troll allegedly had access to a drafted version of Tara’s intended chapter 39, which she posted both as an addendum to her own chapter 39 and as its own chapter (chapter 40, of course). To avoid having to repeat the same thing twice, I’ll be omitting Tara’s chapter from this part and covering it in part 40 of this MST instead.
No real warnings. This one is very, very silly.
Recap: Ebony and Satan headed to the movies before the concert, but wound up leaving early after a “prep” yelled at them for making out and Ebony attacked her and sucked her blood. They then went to the concert and performed their set, but after “Lucian” messed up onstage a fight broke out and James attempted to “shoot off his arm.” Ebony intervened, jumped in front of the bullet, and the chapter ended on a cliffhanger.
I Am A Trolling Genious, lolz
Disclaimer: I do not own the HP series and I am not the real XXXbloodyrists666XXX.
So I’ll get this out of the way first — I feel fairly certain that Tara’s account “getting hacked” is all part of the fiction, much like I’m fairly certain Tara and Raven are not separate people and their earlier beef was invented to spice up the story. As I’ve said before, the true identity of this story’s author is unknown, and it’s my opinion that both the “Tara” and “Raven” accounts are run by the same person, who I believe also pretended to hack their own account in order to write this “troll chapter.” I have no concrete evidence, and it’s certainly up for debate, but I believe the writing style is very similar to what we’ve seen already from both “Tara” and “Raven.” If you keep that in mind while reading this chapter, I think you’ll see what I mean.
I think it’s fun to play along with these parts of the metatextual narrative as though they’re genuine, though, and so at points throughout this chapter (and going forward) I’ll be referencing the “trolling genious” who wrote this chapter as though she’s a distinct person, like how I did for Raven.
AN// I am an extremely immature pathetic idiot girl, I know. Out of boredom, I crack this girl's passy for fun (and it took less than 8 minutes to do it too) and will probably get in a shitload of trouble.
Again, I don’t think this is what actually happened, but I will admit the implications of Tara having a password that was extremely easy to just guess are pretty funny. I bet the letters MCR and the numbers 666 were involved.
Which I probably deserve 'cause I'm being a troll right now. Meh.
And I present to you MY crappy part in this story. (And take note I haven't even finished reading this fic yet, but instead skip over to skim chapter 38.) Flame, laugh, do whatever you want “preps."
With the troll’s note over, the chapter begins! No dividers this time, which nearly threw me off. I’m so used to them by now.
I, the American retail wearing british vampire Sue, coughed up blood.
Y’know, it’s easy to forget Ebony is supposed to be British (I guess?), what with her dressing exclusively in clothes from an American fast fashion retailer and the complete lack of anything about her that makes her seem culturally British. I’m not even positive Tara envisioned her as a Brit; maybe we’re supposed to assume she’s an American teenager living in the UK and thus attending school at Hogwarts? We know nothing about her family or what her life is like outside of the school year, so it could be possible. That being said, I do think her dialogue is probably even funnier in a British accent.
Satan kneeled down beside me.
"Noooooooooooooooo! Don't die!"
I gave him a rueful smile. "I'm sorry. It's something I had to do, to fufill my duty as the noble gothic Mary Sue.”
I’m not sure if Mary Sue characters dying noble deaths at the end of a fanfic is a trope that’s persisted much, because I can definitely think of a lot of Mary Sues who end up getting a happy ending rather than dying, but this was absolutely common at one point — in fact, the character from whom we get the name “Mary Sue” died at the end of her story. (Brief fanfic history lesson: the term “Mary Sue” comes from a Star Trek fanfic called “A Trekkie’s Tale,” which was written to parody reader insert characters. Mary Sue is the main character of said fanfic and she’s incredibly talented despite her young age, multiple canon characters declare their love for her, and she winds up saving the day while dying tragically in the process.)
Satan sobbed. "I love you Ebony."
"I love you two. I'll...I'll see you in hell." I mumbled, already finding my surroundings fading to black.
RIP to an icon. (Don’t worry, of course it doesn’t last.)
B'loody Mary Smith suddenly popped into the room for no apparent reason.
This’d be random time traveling, since Ebony was in the past when she died.
She frowned when she realized the room was oddly quiet, but at the sight of Ebony's lifeless body, she screamed. Her face became pale with horror. She screamed for the healers, Dumbledore, Mcgoogle, and every single gothic person she could think of.
Suddenly, a glow started to surround the body of Ebony. Everyone stared in shock. Her body started to lift ever so slowly and then, to everyone's shock, it started to incinerate.
When everyone realized what was happening, they rushed over to try to rescue the body, but it was too late, the Sue became nothing more then a pile of ashes.
This is a fun little sequence (reminds one of defeating a video game enemy) but I’d also like to point out that you can tell the prose is very similar to what we saw in the early chapters that were (allegedly) beta read by Raven. Short paragraphs, the same descriptive words getting reused multiple times, simple sentence structures, a bit of comma misuse — sure, a lot of amateur writers do these things, but taken all together it’s easy to see how this could in fact be the same person. (I should note that Tara’s “unedited” prose is the same, it just has a lot more typos / word misuse.)
A loud resounding of everyone bellowing "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...!!" filled the room.
This, too, looks like the work of the same writer. We all know Tara is fond of having character scream things in all-caps. (JK Rowling is too, actually, and this is where I’d normally make a joke about how “actually, JKR wrote this,” but she’s a shit person and I don’t want to give her credit. Besides, there’s no way she’d ever give us three bisexual main characters.)
A flash of white light from the ashes then started to bounce around the room. Everyone cowered in fear and were temporarily blinded. When it was all over, things changed.
All the silly goth clothes dropped from everyone's bodies (AN//I will refuse to explain how the hell that happened.) and, in their place, clothes the characters would normally wear in canon appeared on their bodies.
The author’s note in the middle of a sentence is, again, a very Tara thing to do. Nowadays I think it’s near-universally considered bad fanfic writing etiquette to put your author’s notes anywhere other than at the beginning or end of a chapter, but even when it used to be fairly common to see author’s notes somewhere in the body of the fic itself, most authors would at least end the paragraph first.
When everyone got over the shock of becoming free of the gofick power, everybody cheered. Everyone started singing 'Ding dong the sue is dead...' Well, that is, until all the HP characters realized the true implications of becoming more canon like again.
All the characters who were supposed to be dead fell to the floor, their bodies cold and lifeless. Harry and Voldemort started dueling. On the left side of the two, the battle of the Light Side and the Dark Side were reaching a climax.
I think I said this earlier in the MST, but Mary Sue characters such as Ebony tend to come off essentially like they’re reality-warpers who bend the existing canon around them to make themselves make sense as protagonists. Rather than integrating Ebony into the existing plot of Harry Potter, Tara just had her take over as the central character in the entire narrative, replacing Harry as the chosen one who must defeat Voldemort; even that conflict isn’t about the same thing anymore, Voldemort isn’t an evil wizard bigot who wants to live forever but is instead (I guess) just an “evil preppy guy” who hates goth teens and wants to kill them, and the method used to try and defeat him is totally different. Tara/Ebony sees the world as goths vs. preps, so that becomes the central issue here, with all characters picking sides and the whole thing bearing only a vague resemblance to the original good vs. evil conflict. The world is different, everyone’s backstory has been altered, all in the service of making Ebony the most important person in the story. Having her death trigger a return to normalcy is pretty funny and works very well.
And, because the replacement author also likes to screw around with canon, Draco and Hermione fled the scene and got married.
Oh, okay, so you’re also insane. I see. Thank you.
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Meanwhile...
Down in hell, Ebony shed a single tear because of her current situation. A situation that would live on for all eternity. Or at least until the end of fanfiction time.
She got sent to hell? What’d she even do that was that bad? I guess she did attack a stranger in a movie theater for being a prep, and she stabbed “Snaketail” to death (this one seemed fair to me), and she may have warped all of reality to her will or whatever, but, like… damn, women really can’t do anything without being criticized…
Though maybe this is also a misunderstanding of how Satanism works, or she refused to go to heaven on principle because it’s not gottik enough.
She lost it all, but she knew she had to remain strong. Nothing would ever break her down.
Anyway, here comes the breakdown!
She looked down over her pale body, and frowned. 'Where are my emo clothes?' She asked herself in confusion.
And then it occured to her...
For her shirt, she was wearing a bright pink polo with a little seagull on the (right or left? I can't remember) side. Below that, she was wearing a denim miniskirt with the "destroyed" look on it. Paired underneath that skirt were leggings with a little moose at the bottom. And then Ebony realized, on her shoulder, she was carrying a pretty bag with an eagle on it that said Live Your Life written all over the bag.
If you were a preteen or teenager in the mid-00s, I’m sure you can picture this vividly and appreciate how funny this is. My mental image of the bag is particularly strong.
Ebony supressed the urge to scream. Here she was decked out in clothes prep to the extreme wearing stuff from Abercrombie and Fitch, American Eagle, AND Hollister.
Panicked, Ebony hastily tried to take off the Hollister polo, but underneath it, there was another Hollister polo underneath. Ebony frowned, and looked under her shirt. All she saw was a bra underneath (dare I point out it's from the Aerie line available at American Eagle?). Ebony tried to remove the shirt again. But to her frustration, there was yet again another polo to replace it.
As silly/petty as this punishment is, I can’t imagine anything that would bother Ebony more than being stuck wearing preppy clothes for all eternity. This fucking rules. I mean, RIP, but it’s so funny.
"THIS IS UNLOGICAL AND DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE!!" Ebony bellowed out to the air. She failed to see the irony in her statement, how hypocrytical her words were, seeing as she was practically calling the kettle black here.
Ebony slit her writs and mumbled to herself, "Omigod."
/End Crap Fic.
Perfect way to end the troll chapter. Fantastic stuff. Thank you again.
AN// Oh yeah, if you wanna see the original content this chick had planned for this chapter, I accessed it through the document manager thingy, which I copied and pasted, so you can read it here:
What follows is the text for Tara’s original chapter 39. As I said before, I’m saving that for the next post.
I’ll leave you with the “trolling genious”’s sign-off:
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Sincerely,
An-Anon-Author-Who-Will-Silently-Not-Reveal-Her-Identity-Because-She's-A-Coward :P
A.K.A. Just a troll with rocks for brains.
Next up, we’ll be taking a look at the “real” chapter 39, or, as I like to call it, chapter 40…