The Homework Never Ends Marking off my legacy of worldly deeds

A Five-Year Memory

In the summer of 2005, I was seventeen. It seems strange that I've even been alive that long, let alone using the internet.

Long before I had finished The Golden Sands, I got my first writing practice in fanfiction. To this day, I respect fanfiction for the opportunity for amateur writers to use pre-made characters and settings to construct original (well . . .) plots. Combine this with my love (at the time) of young adult anime and it seemed like the perfect hobby for me.

In 2003, when I first started using the internet, I made an account on Fanfiction.net (completely preserved for posterity, thankfully) under my dad's name and email address. Later, when he allowed me more freedom, I changed the email and username to my own. From then until 2006, I posted stories and reviews. I was never exactly a fan of the community and didn't even have any online friends to link to my stories (at least until late in the game), but I owe a lot of my drafting ability to that period.

Fast forward to 2010. An hour ago, I was lying in bed with my mate and relaxing. I was thinking about succubi and incubi, especially about how the latter were blamed in the middle ages for pregnancies in young 'maidens'. Anyone who's read the Si trilogy or The Singing Game knows how I am about rape and pregnancy.

My mind made the bizarre leap to a fanfiction I read during that halcyon period. Without much trouble, I found its grave; the author has long since taken down all of the chapters. At one point I had an entire copy as a Word document, complete with my own MST-style jokes that I thought were rather hilarious and might still be. Hmm. I wonder if I still have that somewhere. It's probably on a floppy disk in my brother's room at the old homestead. Maybe I should ask Mom to look for it.

To sum, the fanfiction was about Hiei. 'Awesome!', a teenaged me and a modern me would both say. We both love Hiei.

It was about Hiei being pregnant.

By Kurama.

And Kurama is dead and Hiei is depressed about it, so he's writing the titular journal.

And then Hiei gets kidnapped by some kind of dark organization.

And I'm pretty sure they rape him repeatedly.

Yeah.

I once found a fanfiction in which Dib gets Invader Zim pregnant (under the influence of pink nerve gas, of course) and then trapping him inside his own lair until he gave birth.

I think back on that fondly compared to the bitterness I feel for The Journal of Hiei.

At the time, I knew there was bad fanfiction. Hell, most of what I wrote was pretty bad (as I'm sure those of you who clicked the link to my profile above will have guessed).

This is the fanfiction that ruined fanfiction for me.

I wrote an MST3K-style comedy bit around it (and am still thinking furiously about where it might be found). I posted long reviews picking apart what could be fixed.

The author, one SingMyLullabySweet666, replied by posting a review on one of my fanfics. Like her own stories, the review was mostly incoherent. As you can see, a stranger posted a follow-up on my behalf.

Funny thing is, she later recanted and even emailed me a few times to extend the olive branch. We never exactly hit it off (I have a hard time keeping female friends), but she somewhat redeemed herself and, last I saw, matured quite a bit.

But here is where I come to what bothered my mind tonight as I lay in bed relaxing:

• The writer was terrible and definitely teenaged.
• In her story, she takes a franchise beloved by many and rapes it up the ass.
• Her story revolved around some form of sexual deviance (in this case, male pregnancy).
• She had a very wide following (I was literally the first reviewer to point out that she was terrible).
• She reacted badly to criticism; in her slapdash review, she even called me a 'prep'.
• Her name has '666' in it.

Oh.

My.

God.

In John Dies at the End, Officer Morgan Freeman postulates that everyone has a ghost story. Everyone's seen Big Foot or a ghost or an alien. Everyone has seen something strange and out-of-this-world.

I met Tara Gilesbie.

I didn't realize it until five years later, but I met her.

I am utterly convinced that 'Renee' is the same person who wrote My Immortal.

I have her email address around here somewhere. If I can't find it, I'll use the contact link on Fanfiction.net.

I have to find out the truth.