A lot of people think My Immortal is an elaborately constructed satire. Because to fans of fan-fiction (fan-fiction fans?) the story seems specifically designed to piss them off: There's a "Mary Sue" protagonist ("Ebony Darkness Dementia Raven Way" is the protagonist's name), a weirdly antagonistic relationship with the reader (the author is constantly telling readers to stop if they don't like the same bands that she does), and a bunch of nonsense fucking scenes (at one point, the sex gets so hot that Ebony and Draco start "frenching passively" and fall asleep). One professor at Princeton University (a pretty reputable place, I've heard) who teaches a class on fan-fiction (never mind; I must've been mistaken) is convinced it's a clever and intricate satire, involving dozens of social media accounts across multiple websites. Which is why she assigns it as required reading.

The Reaction

In 1982, Professor Scott E. Rice at San Jose State University created the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, and it is my favorite thing in the world that I can't drink or blow up. Every year, writers from all across America write and submit the opening lines to terrible novels that don't actually exist, and every year the judges pick winners, and they are all fucking gold. Here's 2015's winner, written by Dr. Joel Phillips, who was proud enough of his education to include his PhD on his Terrible Writing Contest submission, totally oblivious to how I would eventually make fun of him for it right now:

Seeing how the victim's body, or what remained of it, was wedged between the grill of the Peterbilt 389 and the bumper of the 2008 Cadillac Escalade EXT, officer "Dirk" Dirksen wondered why reporters always used the phrase "sandwiched" to describe such a scene since there was nothing appetizing about it, but still, he thought, they might have a point because some of this would probably end up on the front of his shirt.

And here's last year's winner, Elizabeth Dorfman:

When the dead moose floated into view the famished crew cheered -- this had to mean land! -- but Captain Walgrove, flinty-eyed and clear headed thanks to the starvation cleanse in progress, gave fateful orders to remain on the original course and await the appearance of a second and confirming moose.

You can read all the runners-up here; they're all hilarious. Come on -- it's not like you were going to get your work done anyway.

The Reaction

... the documentary about the cast, fittingly titled Best Worst Movie, made two decades later by the kid who starred in the movie, Michael Stephenson. Over the course of the film, he tracks down almost the entire cast and crew and brings them along to conventions, and we get to see what it's like to have worked hard on a movie that people celebrate as a failure. One of the actors ends up relishing his newfound limelight because of how badly he misses an entertainment career that never got off the ground. The director, on the other hand, is furious that no one understands how great his movie is. The editor takes credit for inspiring Harry Potter. Don Packard, who played "The Shopkeeper," walks on stage to Troll 2 fans' applause and later says, "I never was thrilled with being who I was until that moment." Everyone's applauding him ironically, in celebration of how shitty his movie is -- but he doesn't know he's being laughed at, and, in the end, it's a valuable experience for him. He's also quite mentally ill.

Artists rarely accomplish what they intend to accomplish, so is there anything wrong with making a movie that people love for its badness? On the other hand, how mean-spirited is it to come together and celebrate someone else's failure? Is it better or worse than just letting something maintain its dignity by disappearing into obscurity? I dunno, but the point is, Best Worst Movie is as great as Troll 2 is bad, and Troll 2 is really, really bad.

Oh, and remember what I said about not having any more entries about horrific writing? I lied.

That's the hero, remember. Heroically leaving his pregnant wife at home so he can drunkenly suck chunks of quiche out of a flight attendant's molars.

The Reaction

Fred Clark has been blogging about these stories since 2003 and recently released the first big chunk of those blogs as an ebook. You'd probably assume that someone who would spend 12 years revisiting and criticizing a piece of pop-Christian writing would be your standard angry Internet atheist, but Clark is actually a devout Christian -- he just happens to be one of the millions of American Christians that isn't a complete fucking asshole about it. Turns out that Left Behind is most offensive to people who believe what the Bible actually says, and watching this guy tear this story apart is a majestic experience. You don't need to have ever read a Left Behind or care at all about what they have to say to find this valuable; Clark's writing explores how organized religions can become corrupt or perverted. He's also pretty damn funny.

If you're thinking I'm reading too much into all this, that this theme isn't really as present in the text as I'm making it out to be, consider the opening lines:

"Rayford Steele's mind was on a woman he had never touched. With his fully loaded 747 on autopilot ..."

That's more than just subtext.

The Shaggs are a bunch of children that were forced to play and record music by their deranged, abusive father. They released one album, called Philosophy Of The World, that was immediately forgotten.

The Reaction

Forgotten, but not permanently. Years later, the lead singer of the blues band NRBQ stumbled across that album in a used record store and loved it so much that he convinced his label to buy the rights and release it, and it exploded -- or at least it got a hell of a lot more attention than you'd think. Frank Zappa said they were "better than The Beatles"; Kurt Cobain called them "the real thing." Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys is a fan, and Lester Bangs of Rolling Stone gave them a favorable review. There are tons of YouTube videos where semi-famous musicians offer explanations about why The Shaggs are brilliant while wobbling back and forth between pretentiously stupid ("It's totally real, and you would know in the first second that it's real if you're a musician") to sorta profound ("I think music teachers understand better than others because this sounds like when your student first has a breakthrough and discovers something that had eluded them previously").

So ... what the hell is everyone talking about? Well, I have a theory, and it's a weird one, so bear with me: Cobain, Zappa, and Biafra are all icons of genres of music that defied "the system" and were eventually absorbed by it, because any type of anti-establishment music that touches a nerve enough to become important will eventually be consumed by the machine it raged against, because the machine is bigger, has all the money, and doesn't need to eat. But The Shaggs are inoculated against the machine by their shittiness. It's the only thing that can't be packaged-up, slapped on a lunch box, and sold.

Speaking of which, there's a stage musical based on the story, and Tom Cruise owns the rights to the feature film, so we can expect the next version to involve a lot of inexplicable running, an airplane sequence, and a video game tie-in. So, never mind: The machine wins after all.